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I think “intended for children” is the source of quite a lot of modern mental illness.
Your brain and body are quite plastic in different ways when you are young and become much more rigid as you grow out of childhood. Children are preparing for the world when they’re young and living in an artificial world much different than the one they will face as an adult.
Those feedback loops that were programmed when young in an artificial setting then just don’t deal well with the real world presented long after their ability to adapt has diminished.
Telling fictional stories that don’t pull punches which reflect the difficulties of the world might well be an evolutionary trait which helped prepare children for a dangerous world without exposing them to much of the actual danger.
I think a lot of fairy tales reflect the difficulties of the world, just in a way that is not devastating for children. There is usually always a struggle, sometimes followed with a reward and a moral lesson. Having said that, in life there isn't always a reward but the overall concept is healthy. Such that all aspects of life have challenges and if you follow your values and morals you will come out the other side.
Better life lessons learnt than many other stories on TV.
Besides, there comes a time in most kids lives there they move from fairy tales to adult movies, during the time their brains are still very plastic.
I imagine that 1000 years ago parents too had to explain to their kids not to talk to strangers. Human society hasn't changed all that much on the basics.
> I imagine that 1000 years ago parents too had to explain to their kids not to talk to strangers.
Not at all. The modal kid never encountered a stranger. If you did meet one, not talking to him was an instinct followed by children and adults alike.
Conceptually your theory makes sense if the premise of "feedback loops" of situational awareness and effectively dealing with psychological & social & physical environment and conditions are in fact mapped out and conditioned by hearing and mental imagery alone.
I would challenge that premise and I'm sure someone out there has already ran the experiment to see which parts of the brain light up when listening to a story about X vs actually acting a part in a real world X scenario.
It is a rather big assumption that fairytales were useful or even were intended as such.
"Elves are wonderful. They provoke wonder.
Elves are marvellous. They cause marvels.
Elves are fantastic. They create fantasies.
Elves are glamorous. They project glamour.
Elves are enchanting. They weave enchantment.
Elves are terrific. They beget terror.
The thing about words is that meanings can twist just like a snake, and if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning.
No one ever said elves are nice.
Elves are bad."
(Quote from Terry Pratchett's "Lords and Ladies")
Awesome quote. It incites awe.
> "if you want to find snakes look for them behind words that have changed their meaning. No one ever said elves are nice. Elves are bad."
Wait, so he's saying that words can change meaning but mythical creatures cannot change character? It would seem to me that those are two sides of the same phenomenon.
I think the commentary is that people who twist the meanings of words in order to charm and beguile are "bad". Like most of Pratchett's work, the subtext is pretty heavy.
It's a quote from one of his ficticious Discworld novels that introduces elves in his specific universe.
elves ("daemons") cannot be trusted beyond their own goals- humanizing them can be a costly mistake
Bad, at least in British slang of a moderately recent era, can mean cool.
I would argue that they were, and in any sense, saying stories were or were not intended for children is a modern anachronism.
In preliterate times, in which many of these stories originate, these stories were passed orally, likely around a fire or during/after a meal, where the elders told these stories to the youngers. There was likely not much segregation by age, which meant that children would be among the audience, and very likely, may have even been the target of the storyteller (if you ever watch grandparents with grandkids, even when the parents are in the room, much of the conversation may be addressed to the grandkids).
In addition, "childhood" as we have now is relatively recent. Likely as soon as they could walk, children were being involved in the adult activities of farming/gathering/hunting/fighting etc. Girls were often married shortly after puberty (so early teens). Young men were often inducted into the tribe of men early and trained as warriors (see Sparta for an extreme example, or the Jewish Bar Mitzvah where a boy is seen as an adult member of the community at age 13).
In addition, I don't think there was the concept of shielding children from the unpleasantness of life. Death was all around them. Many of them had lost mothers in childbirth. Many if not most had at least lost 1 sibling in infancy. Thus the violence and horror in the old fairy tales which we consider "adult" today, was likely not all that different from everyday life and thus not considered unsuitable for children.
As an example, think of the Roman practice of crucifixion. You could be a kid headed to market, and come upon a bunch of naked men, who were screaming in agony as they were being nailed to crosses by soldiers. Even in the modern age, hangings at Old Bailey in London were public affairs.
Thus, just because a story contains themese and/or scenes that we would consider not suitable for children today, does not mean that children were not an important part of the audience when the story was actually a folk tale being told in communities.
You said exactly what I wanted to say but far more eloquent and thorough.
I totally agree. I see so many of these articles judging the past according to modern values. It’s absolute anachronistic nonsense if you ask me. I have no idea why people keep writing articles like this, except perhaps as some kind of signaling.
Totally agree. The phrase "Spare the rod, spoil the child" is GONE.
I can think of a couple of reasons the author of this article might say "Giambattista Basile ... was certainly not writing for children."
One is that Basile's use of language is just visibly more complex than Perrault--Mother Goose--who presented similar stories in simpler forms only decades later: e.g. Cinderella ("The Cinderella Cat"), The Fairies ("The Two Little Pizzas"), Puss in Boots ("Cagliuso"), and Sleeping Beauty ("Sun, Moon, and Talia"). In other words, if you compare the two, you find that some fairy tales really were written for children back then too, just not by Basile.
The other reason is maybe to warn that Basile's unexpurgated stories, e.g. in Nancy Canepa's translation, may be a surprise to 21st C. adults who've only read Perrault, Grimm, Andersen, etc., because they are not only dark or whatever--they are Rabelaisian, scatological, etc., offering some fun 17th C. cultural surprises even for adults. I don't know enough about 17th. C. Naples to have an opinion on whether Basile would have been OK with using the same language around young children--like, maybe or maybe not. I'd just note Perrault didn't, d'Aulnoy didn't, L'Héritier didn't, and so on only like 60 years later.
> saying stories were or were not intended for children is a modern anachronism
Well, modern is relative but quick reading of wikipedia points out that people have been writing stories specifically for children since late 17th century, and definitely solidified as a category in the early 19th centuryt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Children%27s_literature#Early-...
Picking a slightly more scholarly source we find this statement
> Already during the 1690s, Fénelon, the important theologian and Archbishop of Cambrai who had been in charge of the Dauphin’s education, had written several didactic fairy tales as an experiment to make the Dauphin’s lessons more enjoyable. However, they were not considered proper and useful enough for the grooming of children from the upper classes to be published. They were first printed after Fénelon’s death in 1730. From that point on it became more acceptable to write and publish fairy tales for children, just as long as they indoctrinated children according to gender-specific roles and class codes in the civilizing process. The most notable example here, aside from Fénelon’s tales, is the voluminous work of Madame Leprince de Beaumont, who published Magasin des Enfants (1756), which included “Beauty and the Beast,” “Prince Chéri,” and other overtly moralistic tales for children.
(When Dreams Came True: Classical Fairy Tales and Their Tradition 2nd ed., p16-17)
As an example, think of the Roman practice of crucifixion. You could be a kid headed to market, and come upon a bunch of naked men, who were screaming in agony as they were being nailed to crosses by soldiers. Even in the modern age, hangings at Old Bailey in London were public affairs.
My grandmother told a story of a hanging she went to when she was 4 years old. That's here in the U.S. in the early 1920's. She says the whole town was there, children and all. That's totally possible seeing how today the town has a population of 6,200 - back then it was probably 2,000 or less. It's ironic that the gross coddling of children began with the Baby Boomer generation - the generation my grandmother helped raise. I guess between seeing public hangings and enduring both the Great Depression and WWII they wanted to make life easier for their kids.
On a side note that's totally unrelated, just because your town is 6000 now doesnt mean it wasnt larger in the distant past. There is one of these little crapsack towns built along the highway by where I used to live. Really annoyed me because of the low speed limit for the 1000 or so people that live there. Looked it up one day and it turns out that in the 1910s-1920s it had a population of around 15,000 based on a large coal mine that existed at that time. Once the mine closed it shrank, and you would never know it was so large.
Tolkien had strong opinions on it. He regretted the attempts in the Hobbit to talk down to children and condemned all such approaches, including versions of old tales that removed the unseemly parts. There is an entire section on the topic in his essay, On Fairy Stories.
Let us not divide the human race into Eloi and Morlocks: pretty children - 'elves' as the eighteenth century often idiotically called them - with their fairytales (carefully pruned), and dark Morlocks tending their machines. If fairy-story as a kind is worth reading at all it is worthy to be written for and read by adults.
Also, he says the following. Remember that Tolkien served in WWI, losing most of his friends and his unit, and he says that during the war is when he became deeply interested, as an adult, in 'fairy stories':
If adults are to read fairy-stories as a natural branch of literature ... what are the values and functions of this kind? ... First of all: if written with art, the prime value of fairy-stories will simply be that value which, as literature, they share with other literary forms. But fairy-stories offer also, in a peculiar degree or mode, these things: Fantasy, Recovery, Escape, Consolation, all things of which children have, as a rule, less need than older people.
>> Fifty years ago, the cheapest way to keep your child quiet was to sit down and dredge up your memory of Rapunzel, Snow White or (in my grandmother’s case) the fairy tale-like plot of The Sound of Music.
Well, I got The Return of The Jedi. Only my mother didn't remember Luke Skywalker's name so I knew him as "the handsome prince" until I watched the movie X)
Yeah, I think he's wrong by 25 years or so. The cheapest way 50 years ago was still TV.
Cheapest? Help me out here. When and how was a TV cheaper than telling stories?
Also, kids 50 years ago already had ATARI consoles.
50 years ago Return of the Jedi was still 11 years in the future? [0] Star wars was still 5 years away, Blade Runner 10. Colour TV on all networks was 7 years away [1] But hey, a house cost $28K, a car cost $4K, a quarter pounder of beef cost 16c [2] the convention that made Star Trek popular happened[3] (in two days). There was also terrorism, Watergate, the space shuttle programme, and the days of the week match this year (until that pesky leap day)
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Return_of_the_Jedi [1]: https://www.thoughtco.com/color-television-history-4070934 [2]: http://www.mytwodollars.com/2009/10/22/the-cost-of-living-in... [3]: https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek_convention
>> 50 years ago Return of the Jedi was still 11 years in the future?
Woa, I didn't say that happened 50 years ago! I mean, you'd expect my mother to tell me the tales she remembered from her childhood, no? So you can imagine that at least a couple of decades had passed between the time The Return of the Jedi first appeared on screen and the time I heard the tale of the Handsome Prince with the laser sword and the evil knight in the black mask.
But, I'm not willing to say anything more precise about my age. Sorry :)
Maybe your mother saw Reign of Fire, it makes the exact same claim, Star Wars will be the new folklore in the post apocalypse.
Interesting. I've watched the movie but I didn't remember the Star Wars reference.
Heh, 50 years seems like a long time ago, until I recite my own age. Honestly that's probably more of 70+ years now.
My mother wasn't the type to watch Star Wars movies so it's plausible she learned of them from her own mother...
Your mother is awesome.
So I read to my baby girl since she's 1yo, every day. Today she's 5 and ½ yo. She speaks like an adult, choosing words carefully and accordingly. She's starting to read by herself (we do not teach her purposely), she's able to write anything she wants (her own handwriting). Reading for my child is also a good time for me. I have an opportunity to read amazing Astrid Lindgren stories, I didn't know before. I believe that reading gives her a very important tool for being someone like an engineer, it's imagination.
What other favorites do you have?
The OG Winnie The Pooh stories ar ridiculous and hilarious and my kids loved them. The language in those stories had us all in hysterics at times.
I think we just didn't pull our punches, even if the story was for children, and sometimes that's a great disservice. Take the end of Little Red Riding Hood as recorded by Perrault (SPOILERS):
> "Grand-mamma, what great teeth you have got!"
> "That is to eat thee up."
> And, saying these words, this wicked Wolf fell upon poor Little Red Riding-Hood, and ate her all up.
THE END
The tension builds and then the bottom drops out because the protagonist is dead. The ending is jarring. The wolf is so dangerous that he doesn't just kill Red, he kills the whole story.
Yea - well, the little brat should have just listened to her mother rather than picking flowers and dawdling.
Life was much more dangerous back then. Telling small children they could be eaten by a sneaky wolf might save them from actually being eaten by one.
Likewise, Japanese kids were taught that kappa lurked in bodies of water and under bridges, and would snatch and drown them if they got too close -- so they didn't, and avoided drowning.
And now we live in a world where this anti-wolf propaganda costs lives through degraded ecosystems and deer overpopulation causing more car accidents.
See also the Three Little Pigs, wherein we note that a pig will eat anything, including a wolf that is still digesting the pig's brothers.
Now we need to adapt and tell fairy tales about big bad cars that gonna kill you once you step into their territory.
Nor is Carnival Row, incidentally.
Carnival could have been a great show considering the ridiculously well-made set and fairly large budget (for an 8 episodes TV show). It is a pity that the storyline and plot was so dry and unexciting.