Kids in the 1820's

I am teaching a class on folklore this semester and have completely fallen in love with the stories of the Brothers Grimm.  Not only that, but my students have, too.  I was skeptical when I saw that my roster consisted of five guys and one girl, but I should not have been.   Seventeen-year-old guys love violence and gore, and the Brothers Grimm deliver both with a surprising and twisted sense of humor.  Stories like "The Robber Bridegroom" and "Fitcher's Bird" rival any current horror movie for shock factor.  Here's an example from the latter, translated by Maria Tatar in her delightfully titled book, The Grimm Reader:

"Imagine what she saw when she entered!  In the middle of the room there was a big basin full of blood, and in it there were chopped up pieces of dead bodies.  Next to the basin was a block of wood with a gleaming ax on it."

This is a children's story?!  I think one of my students put it best: "Kids in the 1820's were B.A."

I knew that Jacob and Wilhem had magically imbedded themselves somewhere deep in the Disney-dilluted collective cultural consciousness, and I had a hunch that by reading the raw original stories we could light up some long-dormant regions of our temporal lobes.  I'm delighted that it's working.  So far, we've worked on tracing motifs through the stories: the wicked stepmother, human-to-animal transformations, hidden identities, etc.  We've compared the Grimms' "Briar Rose" to Disney's Sleeping Beauty.  It's been fun, and I hope the good energy continues.

After The Grimm Reader, we'll be reading Yeats' Celtic Twilight, Favorite Folk Tales from Around the World (edited by Jane Yolen), and Legends and Tales of the American West (by Richard Erdoes).  Right now, though, I feel like I could linger with the Brothers Grimm all semester.  So, what do I love about them?  It's not the violence, although I can't imagine the stories without it.  It has something to do with the joy of knowing that when a certain element is at play, you know what's going to happen, but not how.  If there's a wolf, you know somebody's getting eaten, but how is the wolf going to trick them?  If there are any number of brothers and one younger sister, you know they're going to get turned into birds, or maybe a deer, and the sister is going to have to save them, but how?  At the end will the wicked stepmother be boiled in a barrel with poisonous snakes, or drug through the streets in a barrel studded with nails on the inside?

And there are always those out-of-nowhere, never-saw-it-coming moments that you can't help but laugh at, like when the young man enters hell and finds the devil's grandmother sitting in an easy chair.  It is in such moments that you can feel the oral tradition bleeding through the page.  You can imagine yourself in cottage in the black forest listening to some old woman spin the tale.  So, props to Tatar for a wonderful translation.

I'm looking forward to seeing where this semester goes.