Thursday Thirteen

We are all familiar with fairy tales - but mostly the Disney versions. The actual fairy tales are generally much darker than what we have seen portrayed on the screen.

Here is a list of 13 fairy tales. Do you know any of them?

1. "Puss in Boots" (1697). This Italian fairy tale, later spread throughout the rest of Europe, is about an anthropomorphic cat who uses trickery and deceit to gain power, wealth, and the hand of a princess in marriage for his penniless and low-born master. 

2. "Chicken Little", aka "Henny Penny." Dates back 25 centuries or more. A European folk tale with a moral in the form of a cumulative tale about a chicken who believes that the world is coming to an end. The phrase "The sky is falling!" features prominently in the story and has passed into the English language as a common idiom indicating a hysterical or mistaken belief that disaster is imminent.

3. "Aladdin." Date unknown. This Middle Eastern folk tale is associated with The Book of One Thousand and One Nights (The Arabian Nights), despite not being part of the original text.

4. "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" (1837). This British fairy tale has three versions. The original version of the tale tells of a not-so-polite old woman who enters the forest home of three bachelor bears while they are away. She sits in their chairs, eats some of their soup, sits down on one of their chairs and breaks it, and sleeps in one of their beds. When the bears return and discover her, she wakes up, jumps out of the window, and is never seen again. The second version replaced the old woman with a little girl named Goldilocks, and the third and by far best-known version replaced the original bear trio with Papa Bear, Mama Bear, and Baby Bear.

5. "Jack and the Beanstalk" aka "The Story of Jack Spriggins and the Enchanted Bean" (1734). Jack, a poor country boy, trades the family cow for a handful of magic beans, which grow into a massive, towering beanstalk reaching up into the clouds. Jack climbs the beanstalk and finds himself in the castle of an unfriendly giant. The giant senses Jack's presence and cries,

Fee-fi-fo-fum!

I smell the blood of an Englishman.

Be he alive, or be he dead,

I'll grind his bones to make my bread.

Outwitting the giant, Jack is able to retrieve many goods once stolen from his family, including a bag of gold, an enchanted goose that lays golden eggs and a magic golden harp that plays and sings by itself. Jack then escapes by chopping down the beanstalk. The giant, who is pursuing him, falls to his death, and Jack and his family prosper.

6. "The Monkey's Paw" (1902). In the horror story, three wishes are granted to the owner of The Monkey's Paw, but the wishes come with an enormous price for interfering with fate.

7. "The Three Little Pigs" (pre-1840). This fable is about three pigs who build three houses of different materials. A Big Bad Wolf blows down the first two pigs' houses, made of straw and sticks respectively, but is unable to destroy the third pig's house, made of bricks.

8. "Tom Thumb" (1621). This was the first fairy tale printed in English. Tom is no bigger than his father's thumb, and his adventures include being swallowed by a cow, tangling with giants, and becoming a favorite of King Arthur.

9.  "Cinderella" or "The Little Glass Slipper", is a folk tale known throughout the world and one of the oldest of such stories. The protagonist is a young woman living in forsaken circumstances that are suddenly changed to remarkable fortune, with her ascension to the throne via marriage. The story of Rhodopis, recounted by the Greek geographer Strabo sometime between around 7 BC and AD 23, about a Greek slave girl who marries the king of Egypt, is usually considered to be the earliest known variant of the Cinderella story.

10. "Sleeping Beauty" (between 1330 and 1344). This classic fairy tale is about a princess who is cursed to sleep for a hundred years by an evil fairy, to be awakened by a handsome prince at the end of them. The good fairy, realizing that the princess would be frightened if alone when she awakens, uses her wand to put every living person and animal in the palace asleep, to awaken when the princess does.

11. "The Elves and The Shoemaker" (1812). This fairy tale is about a poor shoemaker who receives much-needed help from three young helpful elves.

12. "The Fisherman and His Wife" (1812). In this tale, a poor fisherman lives with his wife in a hovel by the sea. One day the fisherman catches a fish, which claims to be a one that can grant wishes and begs to be set free. The fisherman kindly releases it. When his wife hears the story, she says he ought to have had the fish grant him a wish. She insists that he go back and ask the flounder to grant her wish for a nice house.

The fisherman reluctantly returns to the shore but is uneasy when he finds that the sea seems to become turbid, as it was so clear before. He makes up a rhyme to summon the flounder, and it grants the wife's wish. The fisherman is pleased with his new wealth, but the wife is not and demands more, and demands that her husband go back and wish that he be made a king. Reluctantly, he does and gets his wish. But again and again, his wife sends him back to ask for more and more. The fisherman knows this is wrong but there is no reasoning with his wife. He says they should not annoy the flounder, and be content with what they have been given, but his wife is not content. Each time, the flounder grants the wishes with the words: "just go home again, she has it already" or similar, but each time the sea grows rougher and rougher.

Eventually, the wife wishes to command the sun, moon, and heavens, and she sends her husband to the flounder with the wish "I want to become equal to God". Instead of granting this, the flounder just tells the fisherman to go home, stating that "she is sitting in her old hovel again". And with that, the sea becomes calm once more, and the fisherman and his wife are once more living in nothing but their old, dirty hovel. 

(This is one of my favorites.)

13."The Frog Prince" 1842.  In this tale, a spoiled princess reluctantly befriends the Frog Prince, whom she met after dropping a golden ball into a pond under a linden tree, and he retrieves it for her in exchange for her friendship. The Frog Prince, who is under a wicked fairy's spell, magically transforms back into a handsome prince. In the original Grimm version of the story, the frog's spell was broken when the princess threw the frog against the wall, at which he transformed back into a prince, while in modern versions the transformation is triggered by the princess kissing the frog. In other early versions, it was sufficient for the frog to spend the night on the princess' pillow.

Do you have a favorite fairy tale? There are many, many more.

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Thursday Thirteen is played by lots of people; there is a list here if you want to read other Thursday Thirteens and/or play along. I've been playing for a while, and this is my 753rd time to do a list of 13 on a Thursday. Or so sayth the Blogger counter, anyway.