Frenchman Charles Perrault was one of the earliest collectors of fairy tales predating the German Brothers Grimm by over a century and these were well before the Danish Hans Christian Anderson and it is in this collection that we find some of the earliest published versions of such classics as Cinderella, The Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood and Puss in Boots. Not that anyone brought up on the sanitised modern versions would recognise much of what they believe is in the story. A prime example of this is Little Red Riding Hood, which is much shorter than the tale I first read as a child, basically the wolf meets the young girl on her way to Grandmother’s house, establishes where she is going and gets there first. The wolf immediately eats the grandmother when he gets in the house and gets into the bed waiting for Little Red Riding Hood, when she arrives he tells her to undress and get into the bed at which point he eats her and the story ends just five pages after it starts with a moral that ‘plausible wolves are the most dangerous kind’ a clear warning to young ladies to beware of some men.
The most striking example of dangerous men preying on females is a story which I have never thought of as a fairy tale but it is included here and that is Bluebeard. I first came across this horror story in the opera by Hungarian composer Bela Bartok which is largely faithful to the Perrault version at least initially. A young woman visited one of the many fine homes of a wealthy man along with her family and they were all royally entertained for several days, so much so that she agreed to marriage. About a month after the wedding he has to go away on business but suggests she invites her family and friends round and gives her the keys to the house and the strong boxes, she can go and do anything but tells her never to enter the room at the end of a corridor. However she cannot resist and when she goes in finds dried blood on the floor and the bodies of his previous brides hanging on the walls, in her horror she drops the key which becomes coated with blood. Bluebeard unexpectedly returns that evening and finds blood on the key so knows she has been in the forbidden room and therefore determines that she has to die like the others. Fortunately for the young bride her brothers arrive and kill Bluebeard before he can kill her. Again there are morals to be learnt from the story at its conclusion the second of which says that the story is from long ago and nothing like this happens anymore indeed nowadays it is the wife to be afraid of not the husband.
Geoffrey Brereton as well as translating this book wrote a very interesting introduction going back to the even earlier Italian collections of fairy tales although they weren’t called that back then and taking the reader through the development of the stories such as Cinderella which in the Grimm version has the ugly sisters mutilating their feet to try to get the slipper on and having their eyes pecked out when they try to go to the castle after the wedding whilst Perrault has Cinderella forgive her sisters and invite them to live in the castle. Brereton was a freelance translator and writer specialising in French and to a lesser amount Spanish literature as such he was ideal for this 1957 translation and his erudition regarding the history of fairy tales is shown in his excellent introduction, which alone would make reading this book worthwhile. The book has reproductions of woodcuts from the first English edition of Perrault’s Fairy Tales dated 1719 before each story as in the example below for Little Red Riding Hood.
Ramblings on my bookshelves 