The illustrations to The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, 1922, by Harry Clarke. Two colour plates for this one! If you’re wondering about the Sauce Robert, here you go.
Affinity
Art, Fun, & Nonsense.
The illustrations to The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault, 1922, by Harry Clarke. Two colour plates for this one! If you’re wondering about the Sauce Robert, here you go.
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Ah, Sleeping Beauty! The one with the horrifying, usually-deleted ending. I’ve always thought that the last (purportedly evil) fairy, was quite justified in her anger.
And thank you, I was actually wondering about the Sauce Robert. :) Sounds delicious!
rq:
I agree.
“Deleted ending” “last fairy”?
I never knew this version of the story so I had to look up the summary on wikipedia.
In refreshing my memory of the original of this and other fairy tales, I’m feeling sorry for kids today.
When I was a wee thing, I read the Grimm and Andersen fairy tales in all their brutal, cruel, blood-soaked horror. Over and over and over. And enjoyed all of them.
Kids today get Disney et al.
It’s not fair.
I suppose I should add, “and I turned out fine!”
Charly, you can read the story here.
Chigau, I did the same. It’s hard to come by the originals these days. The only one that really bothered me was Andersen’s mermaid.
Sleeping Beauty has probably been subjected to more cleansing than many others; it’s been purified into Disney treacle. I gave Jim C. Hines a lot of credit for his sleeping beauty, Talia, in the Princess series. That was not a sweetness and light story.
Sheri S. Tepper also did a version in Beauty, but it’s been a long time since I read that one so can’t comment too much on it except that I liked it back in high school, when I read it, and it seemed to have a great voice to it. Not sweetness and light, either.
Caine
Same with me for the Mermaid. It is really an unpleasant story.
Per the Pfft article, the “300 years of good deeds” thing needs a modern updating.
“good deeds” my ectoplasmic ass, who needs a cosmic kicking?
needs to be made into a Japanese horror film.
Caine, yikes! I don’t remember reading this version before.
Robin McKinley’s Spindle’s End is another good retelling of Sleeping Beauty, with some interesting twists.
Anne:
It’s the one I read as a sprog. And it does have a happy ending, more or less.
I was going to make a Sauce Robert for tonight’s dinner, but somehow Robert found a way out of the basement.
Unfortunately I do not have the strenght right now to delve into a longer text. For completeness sake I just want to say that there is more to fairytales than Andersen and Grimms. As I never fail to remind you :) am Czech, and I grew up on different sets of fairy tales -- those collected by Božena Němcová and Karel Jaromír Erben. Some of those are brutal and gory too, and there are some parallels to Franco/Germano/Anglophone versions with different variations for some stories. Some of the old fairy tales books in my library have also beautiful ilustrations (but generally not as saucy as these, although I remember some nude ladies). But I do not have unedited Grimms or Anderson fairy tales in any book as far as I can remember, although of course I know the gist of most of them because they are everywhere and there are some heavily edited versions somewhere among my books.
Hm.
It has been veeeery long since I read any fairy tales. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
These particular tales were written by Perrault, who was French, in the late 1600s. His tales have often been used as the basis for other versions of many well known tales.
No one was trying to say it’s all Grimm & Andersen; it’s about the sanitized version of fairy tales which has been the standard for much too long. Everything now must be all sweetness and light, bad things must not happen, blah, blah, blah. The one salient point is that many of us grew up with the non-sanitized tales, and were not the worse off for it.
If I came through as being snotty and patronizing, I apologize, that was not my intent.
I agree that many modern versions of fairy tales are so sanitized, that they are sometimes completely different from the original.
I must say though, that I did not enjoy some of the more brutal fairy tales as a child. Mostly I loved illustrations of dragons. Dragons are awesome. I spent half of my childhood drawing dragons.
No, you did not, Charly! Right there with you on the dragons. That’s one thing which did upset me as a sprog, that dragons were almost always represented as evil creatures which needed to be killed. I always rooted for the dragons.
y’know
none of Them™ have disnefied Hansel and Gretel into a cartoon.
Is it because if the removed all of the disturbing material, there would be nothing left?
Yeah… some of those tales were pretty disturbing such as Donkeyskin by Perrault.
In a humorous aside: I used to teach spinning. We used fairly modern spinning wheels: bobbin/flyer types. Inevitably someone would ask me how the hell Sleeping Beauty could possibly prick her finger on it… LOL… because it would be quite a challenge. And the answer of course was that the wheels we were using were not what they were talking about.
Chigau:
Grateful for small favours. Looney Tunes did Hansel and Gretel, and did not portray the sproggen in a good light, but of course, the witch ended up in the oven.
Kestrel:
Donkeyskin will be the last tale.
There was also the opera
the 14 angels could be fully armed…