Fairy tales of the past were often full of macabre and gruesome twists and endings. Disney and other film production companies have sanitized these stories for a modern audience that is deemed unable to cope with something other than a happy ending. This list looks at some of the common endings we are familiar with and explains the original gruesome origins.
The Pied Piper - Robert Browning
In the tale of the Pied Piper, we have a village overrun with rats. A man arrives dressed in clothes of pied (a patchwork of colors) and offers to rid the town of the vermin. The villagers agree to pay a vast sum of money if the piper can do it - and he does. He plays music on his pipe which draws all the rats out of the town. When he returns for payment - the villagers won’t cough up so the Pied Piper decides to rid the town of children too! In most modern variants, the piper draws the children to a cave out of the town and when the townsfolk finally agree to pay up, he sends them back. In the darker original, the piper leads the children to a river where they all drown (except a lame boy who couldn’t keep up). Some modern scholars say that there are connotations of pedophilia in this fairy tale. The Pied Piper of Hamelin
Little Red Riding Hood - Brothers Grimm
The version of this tale that most of us are familiar with ends with Riding Hood being saved by the woodsman who kills the wicked wolf. But in fact, the original French version (by Charles Perrault) of the tale was not quite so nice. In this version, the little girl is a well-bred young lady who is given false instructions by the wolf when she asks the way to her grandmothers. Foolishly riding hood takes the advice of the wolf and ends up being eaten. And here the story ends. There is no woodsman - no grandmother - just a fat wolf and a dead Red Riding Hood. The moral to this story is to not take advice from strangers. Little Red Riding Hood
The Little Mermaid - Hans Christian Andersen
The 1989 version of The Little Mermaid might be better known as “The Big Whopper!” In the Disney version, the film ends with Ariel the mermaid being changed into a human so she can marry Eric. They marry in a wonderful wedding attended by humans and merpeople. But, in the very first version by Hans Christian Andersen, the mermaid sees the Prince marry a princess and she despairs. She is offered a knife with which to stab the prince to death, but rather than do that she jumps into the sea and dies by turning to froth. Hans Christian Andersen modified the ending slightly to make it more pleasant. In his new ending, instead of dying when turned to froth, she becomes a “daughter of the air” waiting to go to heaven - so, frankly, she is still dead for all intents and purposes. The Little Mermaid
Snow White - Brothers Grimm
In the tale of snow white that we are all familiar with, the Queen asks a huntsman to kill her and bring her heart back as proof. Instead, the huntsman can’t bring himself to do it and returns with the heart of a boar. Now, fortunately, Disney hasn’t done too much damage to this tale, but they did leave out one important original element: in the original tale, the Queen actually asks for Snow White’s liver and lungs - which are to be served for dinner that night! Also in the original, Snow White wakes up when she is jostled by the prince’s horse as he carries her back to his castle - not from a magical kiss. What the prince wanted to do with a dead girl’s body I will leave to your imagination. Oh - in the Grimm version, the tale ends with the Queen being forced to dance to death in red hot iron shoes! Snow White
Sleeping Beauty - Brothers Grimm
In the original Sleeping Beauty, the lovely princess is put to sleep when she pricks her finger on a spindle. She sleeps for one hundred years when a prince finally arrives, kisses her, and awakens her. They fall in love, marry, and (surprise surprise) live happily ever after. But alas, the original tale is not so sweet (in fact, you have to read this to believe it.) In the original, the young woman is put to sleep because of a prophesy, rather than a curse. And it isn’t the kiss of a prince which wakes her up: the king seeing her asleep, and rather fancying having a bit, rapes her. After nine months she gives birth to two children (while she is still asleep). One of the children sucks her finger which removes the piece of flax which was keeping her asleep. She wakes up to find herself raped and the mother of two kids. Sleeping Beauty
Rumpelstiltskin - Brothers Grimm
This fairy tale is a little different from the others because rather than sanitizing the original, it was modified by the original author to make it more gruesome. In the original tale, Rumpelstiltskin spins straw into gold for a young girl who faces death unless she can perform the feat. In return, he asks for her firstborn child. She agrees - but when the day comes to hand over the kid, she can’t do it. Rumpelstiltskin tells her that he will let her off the bargain if she can guess his name. She overhears him singing his name by a fire and so she guesses it correctly. Rumpelstiltskin, furious, runs away, never to be seen again. But in the updated version, things are a little messier. Rumpelstiltskin is so angry that he drives his right foot deep into the ground. He then grabs his left leg and rips himself in half. Needless to say this kills him. - Rumpelstiltskin
Goldilocks and the Three Bears - Robert Southey
In this heartwarming tale, we hear of pretty little Goldilocks who finds the house of the three bears. She sneaks inside and eats their food, sits in their chairs, and finally falls asleep on the bed of the littlest bear. When the bears return home they find her asleep - she awakens and escapes out the window in terror. The original tale (which actually only dates to 1837) has two possible variations. In the first, the bears find Goldilocks, rip her apart, and eat her. In the second, Goldilocks is actually an old hag who (like the sanitized version) jumps out of a window when the bears wake her up. The story ends by telling us that she either broke her neck in the fall or was arrested for vagrancy and sent to the “House of Correction”. Goldilocks and the Three Bears
Hansel and Gretel - Brothers Grimm
In the widely known version of Hansel and Gretel, we hear of two little children who become lost in the forest, eventually finding their way to a gingerbread house that belongs to a wicked witch. The children end up enslaved for a time as the witch prepares them for eating. They figure their way out, throw the witch in a fire, and escape. In an earlier French version of this tale (called The Lost Children), instead of a witch, we have a devil. Now the wicked old devil is tricked by the children (in much the same way as Hansel and Gretel) but he works it out and puts together a sawhorse to put one of the children on to bleed (that isn’t an error - he really does). The children pretend not to know how to get on the sawhorse so the devil’s wife demonstrates. While she is lying down the kids slash her throat and escape. Hansel and Gretel
The Girl Without Hands - Brothers Grimm
Frankly, the revised version of this fairy tale is not a great deal better than the original, but there are sufficient differences to include it here. In the new version, a poor man is offered wealth by the devil if he gives him whatever is standing behind his mill. The poor man thinks it is an apple tree and agrees - but it is actually his daughter. The devil tries to take the daughter but can’t - because she is pure, so he threatens to take the father unless the daughter allows her father to chop off her hands. She agrees and the father does the deed. Now - that is not particularly nice, but it is slightly worse in some of the earlier variants in which the young girl chops off her own arms to make herself ugly to her brother who is trying to rape her. In another variant, the father chops off the daughter’s hands because she refuses to let him have sex with her. Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales
Cinderella - Charles Perrault / Brothers Grimm
In the modern Cinderella fairy tale, we have the beautiful Cinderella swept off her feet by the prince and her wicked step sisters marrying two lords - with everyone living happily ever after. The fairy tale has its origins way back in the 1st century BC when Strabo’s heroine was actually called Rhodopis, not Cinderella. The story was very similar to the modern one except for the glass slippers and pumpkin coach. But, lurking behind the pretty tale is a more sinister variation by the Grimm brothers: in this version, the nasty step-sisters cut off parts of their own feet to fit them into the glass slipper - hoping to fool the prince. The prince is alerted to the trickery by two pigeons who peck out the step-sister’s eyes. They end up spending the rest of their lives as blind beggars while Cinderella gets to lounge about in luxury at the prince’s castle. The Complete Fairy Tales (Oxford World's Classics)
NOTE: A brief bit about the Brothers Grimm - Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859), were German academics, linguists, cultural researchers, and authors who together collected and published folklore. If you've ever read "Grimm's Fairy Tales" and felt they were a little dark for kids, you have German culture during the early 1800s to thank. After the book was published it attracted criticism for its sexual content, so the brothers edited these themes out of subsequent editions. But because the violence of the stories wasn't frowned upon in the same way, it was retained and in some cases even increased.
The brothers' academic careers were upset in 1837, though, by some political upheaval. When King Ernest Augustus I demanded oaths of allegiance from university professors and other civil servants, Jacob and Wilhelm refused. They were fired from their posts, along with five other professors, and three of the group, including Jacob, were deported. He moved back to Germany and was joined by Wilhelm, but found themselves impoverished, and had to rely on the financial support of friends.
In 1840 their fortunes changed when both Jacob and Wilhelm received job offers from the University of Berlin. There, they continued their research; and further polished their folk tale collection, now in its third edition. The two brothers continued working together for the rest of their lives. When Wilhelm died in 1859, the Grimms' collection of folk tales had reached its 7th edition and had grown to 200 tales.
In the film, The Brothers Grimm
The Grimm's collection of folklore had already been popular during their lifetimes, but it went on to become one of the most celebrated works of German literature and the basis for countless books and movies during the next two centuries. On the list of the best-selling authors of all time, some figures place the Grimms in third place...preceded only by Shakespeare and the Bible. Lon
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