Forget the “happily ever after” nonsense! Today, you will meet the true face of fairy tales. Prepare yourself. Because the original versions of those wonderful tales, which we all know very well and which Disney has ‘softened’ to end with a happy ending, actually contain details disturbing enough to chill your blood.

So, Why This Brutality?

Before horrifying you, let us explain. The real reason for this brutality is simple. Many of the stories we know as fairy tales were not originally written for children. People told stories to each other as much as they did to their children. Moreover, it’s worth remembering that the idea of preserving a child’s innocence from all the bad things in life – death, pain, betrayal – is a relatively modern concept. Life was tough in rural Europe, where these stories emerged. It was quite common for your village to be raided and burned or to die from a small cut. Therefore, telling children fairy tales with bad endings was a perfectly reasonable approach for the time.

Anthropologist Jamie Tehrani at Durham University in the UK says; “We have this huge gap in our knowledge about the history and prehistory of storytelling, even though we know this genre is an incredibly ancient one” (1). Then let’s take a look at the most ancient versions of the fairy tales we know.

Sleeping Beauty 

In the original tale, the beautiful princess falls asleep not because of a curse, but because of a prophecy. The king watches the beautiful girl in her sleep and dreams of owning her. So he often goes to visit the young girl. These visits bear fruit. Aurora gives birth to two children during the years she is asleep. While one of the children was sucking his mother’s finger, he accidentally removed the piece of linen that was keeping him asleep from his finger. When Aurora wakes up, she finds herself the mother of two raped children.

Disney’s version of Tangled takes Rapunzel’s revenge by making her a strong, independent spirit, diverging from the traditional portrayal of a passive damsel in distress. Also, unlike the straightforward evil characters often found in older fairy tales, “Tangled” presents a villain with nuanced motivations, making the story more complex and engaging for a modern audience.

Little Red Riding Hood

At the end of the story, the brave hunter saved the poor little Red Riding Hood by breaking open the wolf’s belly, and we all breathed a sigh of relief. Now take that breath back. Because in the original story written by the French writer Charles Perrault, there is neither a hunter nor a grandmother! The wolf eats Little Red Riding Hood with pleasure and the tale ends. End! What a great way to teach a child not to talk to strangers!

Hansel and Gretel

After the shock of being abandoned in the forest by their own father, Hansel and Gretel get lost in the forest. Finally, he finds the candy house of an evil witch. Here they are trapped by the witch and taken prisoner. When the witch is about to eat them, they find a way to throw her into the oven and the story ends. Even this version does not seem to be suitable for today’s children. But wait, there’s more!

The older French version, called The Lost Children, has the devil instead of the witch. Satan builds a sawhorse to slaughter the children. But the kids trick him by pretending they don’t know how to get up to the counter. When the devil goes up to the counter to show them, the boys slit his throat and run away.

Pied Piper of Hamelin

A village is infested with mice. One day, a man playing the pipe said that he could clean the village of mice with his music. The villagers state that they will give him a large amount of money if he succeeds in this; They don’t really believe it. Still, a deal is made. The man impresses all the mice by playing his pipe and drags them out of the village. But the villagers refuse to give the man his money. Thereupon (in the modern version), the pipe player drags all the children in the village with his magical music, imprisons them in a cave, and releases them when the villagers give him his money. In the original story, the piper drags all the children into a river and drowns them all. Only a lame child escapes because he cannot keep up with the others. Some literary figures stated that there were pedophilia implications in this tale.

The Little Mermaid

The original story, written by Christian Andersen, begins as we know it. The mermaid falls in love with the prince and loses her voice when she turns into a human. But in the modern version important details are omitted. Even though every step Ariel takes is painful, like walking on swords, she dances with the prince. But the prince loves him just like a brother from the moment he met him. Since the mermaid cannot speak, she cannot express her feelings to the prince. As if this tragedy was not enough, the prince falls in love with and marries another princess. Yes, her prince is not fooled by Ursula. The prince never loved Ariel. Therefore, there will be no happy ending as we know it.

Unable to bear this terrible life, Ariel turns to Ursula to save her. The wizard gives him a dagger and tells him to kill the prince. The mermaid can’t do that either. Instead, he commits suicide by throwing himself into the sea and disappears by turning into foam. Then Andersen, thankfully, writes a softer version. In this version, the mermaid turns into the daughter of the wind and goes to heaven. Oh, what a revision! Unhappy endings and death haunt the mermaid in both cases.

Snow White

The Evil Queen does not want Snow White’s heart but wants both her liver and lungs to be removed and brought to her for dinner. She probably invited Hannibal Lecter to dinner! And there is no such thing as waking up with the prince’s magic kiss. Such things don’t happen in real life. Instead, in a very realistic way, he wakes up in the abandonment of the prince’s horse. Of course, we do not know why the prince took a princess, whom he thought was dead, on his horse… At the end of the story written by the Brothers Grimm, the Evil Queen is sentenced to wear hot iron shoes and dance until she dies.

The Grimm brothers originally wrote this story as a pornographic tale for a wealthy client. How the princess’s dark desires turn into snow white is a topic for another article. Interested readers can read about it here.

Cruel Versions of Snow White

This fairy tale tale has several different endings. In one, the prince falls in love at first sight with the princess sleeping in a glass coffin and wants to take her to his palace. Of course, the dwarfs do not allow this. However, the prince says he cannot bear to spend his days without seeing her and convinces the seven. Why is he so eager to take a dead princess to his home? Let’s neither ask nor tell. As the soldiers carry the coffin home, they drop it. The coffin shatters, and a piece of the poisonous apple stuck in her throat shoots out. Yes, there is no magical kiss.

In another version, the soldiers manage to carry the coffin to the palace without dropping it. But this time, the prince constantly changes the location of the coffin. No matter which room he goes to, he wants the dead princess with him. One of the servants, tired from moving the coffin and must have gone mad, opens the coffin and slaps the princess! This slap dislodges the poisonous apple from her mouth, and the princess wakes up. The detail of the servant taking out his anger on the dead is quite humorous, and in this version, too, there is no kiss. Yet, what remains constant in every version is the stepmother’s dance with death. Indeed, in one of the various versions of the tale, the wicked queen is not Snow White’s stepmother, but bizarrely her own mother!

Cinderella

The origin of this tale goes back to the 1st century before Christ. In this very old version, our heroine’s name is Rhodopis, not Cinderella. The original story is similar to the modern version, except for details such as the pumpkin car. However, in the Brothers Grimm’s version, Cinderella is not pure and compassionate enough to forgive her evil stepsisters. In the original story full of blood and drama, the stepsisters cut off their toes to make their feet smaller like Cinderella and fit into shoes.

While there is blood everywhere in the house, Cinderella’s pigeons inform the prince of this trick. Cinderella tells the doves to gouge out the stepsisters’ eyes. Probably accompanied by a nice song. While she lives a luxurious life in the prince’s castle, the stepsisters spend the rest of their lives languishing as blind beggars. Here is your happy ending!