You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [54]
The biggest thing we cut out of the Grimms’ version, and the bloodiest, is the stepmom’s unusual eating habits. Namely, when she asks her guy to bring back the heart of Snow White, she isn’t just after proof that the girl is dead. She wants to eat it. Depending on the version of the story, the stepmother asks for Snow’s liver, lungs, intestines, or pretty much every other major internal organ, up to and including a bottle of Snow’s blood stoppered with her toe.
3. RUMPELSTILTSKIN: DISMEMBERMENT, DEAD TODDLERS
The version you know
The king sentences a beautiful woman to be executed in three days unless she can follow through on her father’s claim that she can spin straw into gold (the legal system back then took a much harsher stance on ridiculous bullshit). Luckily, a gnome shows up and offers to spin gold in exchange for her firstborn child. She accepts, the gnome spins her gold, and the king is so impressed that he decides to marry her.
The king and his new queen have a son, and the little gnome shows up demanding the boy unless the queen can guess his name in three days. She tries everything but comes up short, until a passing woodsman overhears the gnome bragging about how he’s so clever that no one will guess his name is Rumpelstiltskin. The woodsman immediately tells the queen, who springs it on Rumpelstiltskin, who’s so pissed off that he throws a tantrum and runs away, presumably to ply his poorly thought-out scam in another town.
What got changed
In the Grimm brothers’ version, the little man is so pissed off that he stamps the floor in his little hissy fit and gets stuck. And then he pulls so hard to free himself that he tears himself in half. Now, if our names were Rumpelstiltskin and some pretty girl told the whole damn room, we’d be pissed too, but we don’t think we’d get dismemberment-angry.
In the early folktales on which the Grimm version was based, Rumpelstiltskin launches himself at the girl in a rage and gets stuck, um, in her lady parts. Like a gynecological “Humpty Dumpty,” the palace guards have to come and pull him out, which must have made for some awkward looks afterward.
Also, in a depressingly large number of the early versions the child is killed anyway, either by Rumpelstiltskin himself or the guards. They weren’t big on happy endings in the Dark Ages.
2. SLEEPING BEAUTY: COMA SEX
The version you know
“Sleeping Beauty” is the story of a young princess who is cursed by an evil witch so that she will prick her finger on a spindle and die on her fifteenth birthday. Fortunately, a nonevil old lady finds out and tempers the curse—the princess won’t die, she’ll just fall asleep for a hundred years.
Of course the king orders all spindles burned, plunging the kingdom into a fashion nightmare, but with the inevitability of fairy-tale logic bearing down on her, the princess manages to find the one working spindle in the kingdom and pricks her finger on her fifteenth birthday. She falls asleep for a hundred years, until a dashing young prince comes along in timely fashion and kisses her, breaking the spell.
What got changed
Seventeenth-century Italian poet and collector of fairy tales Giambattista Basile wrote an early version in which the princess instead gets a piece of flax caught under her fingernail, which puts her to sleep. This might seem like a small difference but stick around.
Basile’s version then has the prince who finds the sleeping princess think she’s so damn beautiful that he just goes ahead and has his way with her right then and there, while she’s still comatose.
If that’s not disturbing enough, the Rohypnol-style coupling leads to a pregnancy, and the princess gives birth to twins, all while asleep. One of the babies, seeking Momma’s milk, sucks on her finger and dislodges the flax, waking her, at which point we imagine she had a few questions.