Sleeping Beauty

The Disney version of Sleeping Beauty is about a princess who is cursed by a witch, pricks her finger, and falls into a deep, seemingly endless sleep.  Eventually, a prince finds her and wakes her up with a kiss.  Of course, they live happily ever after.

An original Italian version provides Sleeping Beauty with a more gruesome plot, making it more entertaining and horrifying.

While Sleeping Beauty was asleep, a King finds her and rapes her.  Because of this, she gives birth to twins while she is still in a deep, endless sleep.  The fairies that watch over Sleeping Beauty help the children suckle.  One child attempts to fed from Sleeping Beauty’s finger.  This removes the poisoned splinter from her finger which finally woke her up.  The King finally returns and becomes even more in love with Sleeping Beauty now that she is awake.


However, the King is already married to the Queen.  The King’s wife finds out and is enraged.  She creates a plan that involves cooking the twins and feeding them to her husband.  The cook, however, only pretends to cook the children.  The Queen tells her husband that he ate his own children.  The King flips out (rightfully so) and buries his wife alive.  With his wife dead, the King is single again and decides to marry Sleeping Beauty. 

It sounds just like the random, twisted plots from Soap Opera on television!

Hansel and Gretel

The sweet version of Hansel and Gretel is already a bit violent with the ending.

It tells about two children, Hansel and Gretel, who go wandering into the forest and get lost.  They come across a gingerbread house and decide to enter.  The witch who lives there kidnaps them and fattens them up to eventually eat them.  When she is about to cook them, Hansel and Gretel escape by pushing the witch into the fire.

Even though the story is violent enough for children, the French version, “The Lost Children”, takes it a little step further.

The witch is actually the devil’s wife.  The devil’s wife puts together a sawhorse to put one of the children on.  She wants the children to bleed slowly.  The children pretend not to know how to get on, and so the devil’s wife demonstrates.  As she is lying down, the children slice her throat and are able to escape.

Surprisingly, the endings do not have that much of a difference.  Either way, the witch/devil’s wife is brutally murdered.  It only depends on the reader’s preference to the villain being burned alive or getting their throat sliced.

Moral of the story: Never take candy (or any kind of food) from strangers... especially one that lives in a gingerbread house that is deep in the woods.

The Pied Piper

The story most of us know about the Pied Piper is that there was a town that was being infested with mice.  No one knew how to get rid of this swarm.  Finally, a hero emerged.  This hero was a man who played some type of wind instrument, most likely a flute, to lure the mice out of the village.  He was successful and the village was saved.

In the original version, this story was theorized to have actually occurred in Hamelin, Germany.  This version does not have a happy ending.

The town was able to rid themselves of the mice by hiring the Pied Piper, but when it was time for them to pay him for the wonderful job he did, they refused.  The Pied Piper was enraged by this and so he came up with a revenge plot.  He uses his magical instrument to make every single child in the town follow him.  The parents and elders just stare at him, thinking their children will stop eventually.  The Pied Piper lured the children into the cave, the cave door shut, and the children were never to be found again.  Only one lame boy survived because he could not keep up with all the other children.

Some versions have the children being drowned by the Pied Piper, while others have them safely returned when the elders finally pay up.  The version that ends with the children being stuck in a cave is worse than any other.  It causes your mind to wander about what could have actually happened to those poor children who were captured by an angry man.

This fairytale teaches you that promises, especially ones about money, should never be broken.