Fairy Tales

The pages were normal paper but the pictures were on shiny paper. I'd flick through to find the shiny pages and look at the pictures for hours. So much magic in a golden pear.

You sound like you dont read them anymore. or flick through to the shiny pages anymore

i love myths, legends, fairytales

i recommend this

http://www.amazon.com/Italian-Folktales-Italo-Calvino/dp/0156454890

That looks great moses. I love these tales. I'dlike to know where each story originates from. I love the language!

Apperently Cinderalla is originally from China.

They're always so dark these tales

"fairy tales" in their original form rule. But the sanitised crap in Disney books is just awful and gives kids an unrealistic expectation of the real world.

Yeah yeah everyone hates Disney but even some of those early cartoon fairy tale features are pretty scary. Much more violence in the traditional books though. I always like a good woodsman who knows how to use an axe. A lot of the tales seem to be warnings against curiosity in children.

I was just thinking about that recent movie The Bros Grimm and what a shame it is that it's meant to be really shit. Anyone seen it? Is it actually ok? : o

The Seven Chinese Brothers struck a chord with me when I was a kid. Does anyone have a copy I could borrow? I'd like to read it again.

i like fairy tales and folk stories. some of the illustrators have been excellent too, over the years.
check this out by ivan bilibin of the russian witch baba yaga:

That's awesome, MM.

The Bros. Grimm movie does kind of suck. It's not horrible but it's pretty average. There's an annoying 'love interest' in it, too, played by this chick who obviously got the role because Keira Knightly wasn't interested.

charles de lint is a great modern fairy tale teller

i have a large collection of his novels if you'd like to borrow them, peony

I'd love to have a read rach.
Hey M.M those drawings are beautiful! Anything illustrated by Michael Foremen is also good.

I want to visit the black forest and see real castles. Once upon a time.....

I love Baba Yaga, and Hans Christian Anderson is also great.

I'd go Authur Rackingham 1

Michael Haugue for illustrations

Hey !

Arthur Rackham I mean.....

rackham is great, juice! those alice in wonderland illustrations were magnificent.

another great illustrator is warwick goble:

and of course, there's brian froud:

"and the secret of fire was lost upon the battlefield to be found by not gods, not giants, but men. Just men."

the princess and the pea and rumpelstiltzkin. imagine how quickly the miller's daughter could have found out his name if she'd googled a few choice words.

i'm reading italio calvino's italian folktales at the moment too. there was one about a man who would give his daughter's hand in marriage to the first man who could give her her fill of figs. figs!

figs are a very sensual fruit. so sensual in fact, that the french will only eat them with knives and forks, as devouring a fruit with one's hands is considered vulgar. because figs are like vadges.

Does the Decameron count as fairy tales? I can read them over and over again.. the perfect mix of fantasy, tragedy, comedy and sex. I wonder if they were all having orgies in the villa after storytime was over for the day?

I am right into my Enid Blyton Fairaway Tree series again... I am about to start The Enchanted Wood.

oops spelling - Faraway Tree!

someone was telling me to read the decameron. is it like an italian 'canterbury tales'?

I've never read the Canterbury Tales... the basic premise of the Decameron is that a group of young men and women have fled the city because of the plague, and they're holed up in a villa in the countryside. To pass the time each one tells a story each day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Decameron

looks good. i like reading about the plague.

I'm going to share a little somthing I just pondered.
You know how back in ye old'e times, chicks were always getting kidnaped and put in towers and shit, so that a Knight would have to come and save them.
You know, like a princess in a tower, that a evil man has locked away?
That kind of deal,
Anywho, I was just thinking, that they always make out as thought the chick in the tower is fine when the prince arives, and that her only problem was being locked in the room, Well I've decided that all I've learnt from Fairy Tales is a load of shit.
Those tower chicks would have basicaly been Gimps for these evil tyrants.
Basicaly, I do think the fairy tales have enough rape in them.

hmmmm, quite often it's chicks putting other chicks in towers or open coffins or putting spells on spinning wheels. beware the evil step mother i say. dudes in fairy tales are usually busy filling their pockets.

i was thinking about this recently, in terms of romance.

the only fairy tale relationships i can think of involve the girl getting out said tower/coffin/etc then living happily ever after with her knight in shining armour. are they really all like this?

love is somehow sweeter when it triumphs over adversity. who'd waste their time reading about a couple who met under the swinging udder of the cow they were milking and went on to lives together without serious incident.

for some reason what you just said september made me think of tess of the d'urbervilles. definitely not a fairy tale, that one.

good old misery guts hardy.

therea couple of other really popular scenarios

girl runs away with guy (from evil stepmother?)

girl needs to save her brothers/family

dont forget the king killing his wicked wife by rolling her down a hill in a barrel full of nails. always my favourite part.

what?! where is the barrel of nails story from?? wow.. thats, er, extreme.

i get the reason for overcoming the adversities, but i'm more wondering if there are any fairy tales that dont end ''happily ever after'', which is also supposed to be a compulasory part of the formula....

oops that was supposed to be italic not *bold*

haha... or bold italic as the case may be

Are any of the famous fairy tales based on true storys / accounts ?

i think the message in most fairy tales is being really good looking is pretty handy when you're in a fix.

i dont think they did always end up happily ever after katiepotatie - hansel and gretel where meant to be eaten by the witch, red riding hood got eaten too, and sleeping beauty died an old hag in her tower.

wasn't the whole point of fairy tales to scare the shit out of naughty kids to make them behave?

Exactly, not that people base their lives around these tales, but it gives the impression that if you are pretty and in trouble, you'll be saved in no time, and come out of it with out a scratch.
Not the case in real life.

where = were

A fairy tale or fairy story is a fictional story that usually features folkloric characters (such as fairies, goblins, elves, trolls, witches, giants, and talking animals) and enchantments, often involving a far-fetched sequence of events. In modern-day parlance, the term is also used to describe to something blessed with unusual happiness, as in ''fairy tale ending'' (a happy ending)[1] or ''fairy tale romance'', though there are notable examples and genres of fairy tales that do not end happily. Colloquially, a ''fairy tale'' or ''fairy story'' can also mean any far-fetched story.

nooo! i thought sleeping beauty got rescued!

oh well. the point ive arrived at i think is pretty much in keeping with you guys - in particular in regards to romantic love - is that fairy tales would have believe you fall in love and get over some hurdle and everything is perfect. in life = not so. this is for an essay i have to write, and just thought i'd check if were any exceptions to the rule before i write 2500 words on it and find out i was wrong as i havent read that many....

My favourites were King Midas, Blue Beard, The Pied Piper of Hamlyn, and a bunch of Hans Christian Anderson that I no longer remember the titles of, but there was one that stood out - a peasant boy who was on a boat in an underwater cave that was chock full of jewels.

AND - if you can tell me what this is, I'll be very excited. A man sticking money to a tree - when someone walks passed and doesn't ask what he's doing, the man shakes the tree so some money falls down - he says ''you're the first person who hasn't asked why I'm doing this''. Then at the end, there's a girl (or was it a bee?!) who has such a keen sense of smell that she picked the only real flower in a room full of fakes. I think there was some kind of moral to this story, and if so, it was lost on me.

haha alter i checked wiki on the weekend :p

Can you mention that the princess never gets sexualy abused in fairy tales, when in reality, she most probably would.

thing is junkiephil is that it is simply suggested that she is being abused so as not to scare the children, read between the lines

um katie - there are so many different versions of fairy tales. i'm pretty sure that i read one where sleeping beauty isn't rescued, but if you wanted to say that in an essay, you'd have to say who wrote that version down. fairy tales were originally campfire tales, or bedside tales, and weren't put in to written form for ages apparently. (damn wikipedia is good!)

Yeah, I guess.
I'm just not satisfied with the way the pictures depict the princess at the end.
She always looks like she's been at beauty camp.
Not booty camp for evil tyrants.

my childhood was a lie! i thought it was commonly accepted that she lived :( haha

maybe you should read books that don't have pictures in them?

hey! better late than never...

that was a x-post katie! i didn't mean you! reading the wiki is making me want to get back into reading mythology and stuff again. it's so interesting!

did you think about mythology at all for your essay? there's probably quite a few myths that are also fables / fairy tales. like the one about Achilles....

anyone know the story of volund?

It's pretty funny how all the old mythologies spread like herpes and no-one knows who started it. Volund is supposed to relate all the way back to Odin but his story resembles daedelus and icarus' flight past minos which is greek rather than norse.

I love the way the sense of justice in the much older tales is so utterly foreign. Look up lammikin. He was a tradie that didn't get paid so he slaughtered his clients wife and child and left him alive. Yeh that'll teach him!

yeah that's the kind of fairy tale i was thinking of andy. the ones where you get taught a lesson

what?! where is the barrel of nails story from?? wow.. thats, er, extreme.

the barrell of nails is in probably 5 or 6 stories from brothers grimm and maybe a couple from calvino's italian folktales. different bits of stories constantly intermingle so its like a familiar motif.

theyre often quite violent though. in the brothers grimm version of cinderella, two ravens pluck out the eyes of the evil stepsisters.

i have been thinking about myths etc too, same but different i guess.
im looking at romeo & juliet, orpheus & eurydice etc as tragedies at the other end of the scale, where they all die, instead of ''living happily ever after'' they have a love which shines brightly, but not for long.

i saw a picture of a barrel of nails the other day.

hmmm. a tv guide perhaps?

sounds cool! can i read it when you're finished?