Is Folk Literature Too Violent?

Education - Reading

Violence in Folk Literature

The primary question of the paper is: is there too much violence within the texts or narratives of folk literature? Before the answer is provided, another question appears after this one -- they are too violent compared to what? The question, is there too much violence in folk literature, such as in the Brothers Grimm tales, implies a comparison, but the comparison is incomplete. Are the fairy tales by the Brother Grimm violent? That is affirmative. There is often explicit violence and cruelty in these tales that are supposedly for children, but if readers of the 21st century want to evaluate or qualify the level of violence present, readers and education professionals need to provide standards and criteria by which to gauge the levels of violence. The Brothers Grimm were born into 18th century Germany. Are we comparing the violence and cultural standards presence in 18th century Germany with 21st century Germany? Are we comparing the tales by the violence and cultural standards of America in the 20th century? Before we can answer this question, or at least in order to better understand and contextualize the answer, we should decide to what culture in what time period we are qualifying our standards of violence to which the violence in the stories is compared.

Perhaps before we consider how much violence is present in the Brothers Grimm tales, we might ask why there is so much violence in the tales, especially when modern conceptions of what is appropriate for children dictate that there is minimal or exaggerated violence present in content for children. Before either of the brothers reached puberty, their father died. In 18th & 19th century Germany, without a man in the family, the family suffered from poverty and other related afflictions, which affected them over the course of their lives. The tragic event did spurn their interest in folklore, German studies, and writing, though. The Brothers Grimm experienced and saw a great deal of violence as children and they spent their lives writing stories so as to duplicate these experiences for other children. It is clear they have shared their experience of fright as a child with millions of children around the world for more than a century.

Let the paper, for the sake of argument, compare the violence in 21st century American culture with the violence present in the folk literature of the Brothers Grimm. Consider the stories of "Hansel & Gretel" and "Rumpelstilkskin." Hansel and Gretel have a woodcutter for a father, working class, and as such he has anxiety over having enough work to feed his family. The children are poor and malnourished. They are probably weak and underweight. They are children that essentially are lured by a strange woman deep into the forest where she offers them food in the shape of giant edible residence. The children realize the whole ordeal is in fact a trap by a witch who regularly lures children into traps so that she can cannibalize them or otherwise use their bodies as part of her witchery. To save their own lives, the children commit murder. In cartoons meant for children in the U.S., children are not committing murder. They do however commit violence against others, objects, and sometimes themselves. In American there are frequent media representations of children lured into trap by adults they believed they could trust. Thus in some ways, the caliber of violence differs from current standards and in some ways the violence is comparable.