Speaker 1: School of Humans.
Speaker 2: This episode discusses sensitive topics. Please listen with care.
Speaker 3: So in twenty seventeen, this person who styles herself a
Speaker 3: folklorist was writing these blog posts about the Romantic era,
Speaker 3: the nationalism movement folklora Danny, which is like, okay, on
Speaker 3: the surface, that all sounds like stuff that folklorists talk about, fine, whatever,
Speaker 3: But she was writing these posts in an effort to
Speaker 3: justify racism and stuff that we would view as very
Speaker 3: right wing takes on nationalism.
Speaker 1: And then in her blog post she.
Speaker 3: Cited me, and I was like, WHOA, don't drag me
Speaker 3: into this.
Speaker 2: I'm Miranda Hawkins. Welcome to the Deep Dark Woods. I
Speaker 2: initially started this podcast because I love how dark and
Speaker 2: twisted the brothers Grim stories are, and for many of us,
Speaker 2: we consider these to be the original tales. But the
Speaker 2: more I've learned, the more I've realized there's a seed
Speaker 2: underbelly to these stories that's been harmful in the real world.
Speaker 2: The Grim Tales, for example, were co opted by the
Speaker 2: Nazi Party to support Germany's national identity and to be
Speaker 2: used as propaganda for fascism, white supremacy, racism, anti semitism,
Speaker 2: and homophobia among other things. Doctor Gina Jorgensen is a folklorist,
Speaker 2: gender studies scholar, lecturer at Butler University and author of
Speaker 2: Folklore One on one, fairy Tales one on one, and
Speaker 2: Sex Education one o one. She is here with me
Speaker 2: today to talk about the darker side of fairy tales
Speaker 2: and folklore. When it comes to the Grim Brothers collecting
Speaker 2: these tales, you know, they talk about preserving for culture.
Speaker 2: Can we kind of get into like, what is a
Speaker 2: subtext of that, because that, you know, is a little
Speaker 2: it is a little tricky.
Speaker 1: Yes, it's very tricky.
Speaker 3: So in the early eighteen hundreds when Yakub and Wilhelm
Speaker 3: Grimm were being scholars in Germany, Germany wasn't Germany yet,
Speaker 3: So it was it was Prescia, it was Hanover, It
Speaker 3: was all these little principalities and baronies and duchies and
Speaker 3: stuff like that. Moreover, Napoleon was rolling through and wrecking
Speaker 3: things and taking things over. So there was this very
Speaker 3: beleaguered sense of like, we are one people, we share
Speaker 3: a language for the most part, we share cultural heritage.
Speaker 3: We should really kick out our oppressors and become a
Speaker 3: country for reals. And this was known as romantic nationalism
Speaker 3: at the time, and the Grim Brothers were participating in
Speaker 3: this strand of it that said, if we can prove
Speaker 3: that we have a shared historical heritage, we can prove
Speaker 3: that we should be a country. And they were coming
Speaker 3: at this from two angles, first language and linguistics, and
Speaker 3: second folklore and fairy tales. So they were active as linguists,
Speaker 3: and so they were also One of their friends, Clemens Fontana,
Speaker 3: was collecting folk songs and top and he was like, hey, guys.
Speaker 1: Come do this cool thing with me.
Speaker 3: So as they were documenting folk tales and fairy tales
Speaker 3: of the German people, they thought they were really contributing
Speaker 3: to this thing that was both artistic and political at
Speaker 3: the same time. And where it gets really tricky is
Speaker 3: that they weren't doing what they said they were doing.
Speaker 3: They made it sound like they were going out among
Speaker 3: the folk peasants and the agricultural workers and the people
Speaker 3: who are closest to the heart of the land, and
Speaker 3: in reality, they were interviewing a lot of middle class
Speaker 3: people who were of French descent. So they were getting
Speaker 3: fairy tales from people who were very literate and very
Speaker 3: educated and very urban. And they had some more like
Speaker 3: role like peasant class tellers as well. So this was
Speaker 3: an issue because when they first published the first two
Speaker 3: volumes of their fairy tales, a lot of their stories
Speaker 3: actually had French origins. So we can document that there
Speaker 3: are earlier versions of say Bluebeard and Cinderella and Little
Speaker 3: redding Hood that came maybe directly, maybe not, from the
Speaker 3: French traditions of Charles Perraut, who was writing in the
Speaker 3: sixteen nineties. And this leads to the really thorny issue
Speaker 3: of who owns folklore because you know, when folklore travels,
Speaker 3: as it does word of mouth, it travels with people
Speaker 3: who are migrant workers, who are traders, who are explorers
Speaker 3: and so on. If it has the tiniest kernel of
Speaker 3: relevance to people, it'll take root and change to kind
Speaker 3: of adapt to local norms, local language, local whatever. So
Speaker 3: the fact that French fairy tales came up to Germany
Speaker 3: and people were like, oh, yeah, we like these, we're
Speaker 3: gonna keep telling them, they became German tales for sure.
Speaker 3: They weren't maybe originally German tales, but maybe they weren't
Speaker 3: originally French tales either. You know, this question of origins
Speaker 3: is really complicated because if we're talking about documenting something
Speaker 3: that starts as oral tradition, unless you have a time machine,
Speaker 3: we have no idea when the first or original version
Speaker 3: was composed or told until somebody happens to write it down,
Speaker 3: which probably happens much later in its chain of transmission.
Speaker 1: So like, I kind of I get.
Speaker 3: Where the Grims were coming from and being like this
Speaker 3: is super German. Heck yeah, but it's hard to make
Speaker 3: that claim for anybody.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and what about the people who are like this
Speaker 2: sln itself to like Nazis, right, the whole idea of
Speaker 2: preserving the culture.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So the link with Nazis came later, and it
Speaker 3: was probably not something the grim Brothers intended their version
Speaker 3: of nationalism. I mean, it was influenced by politics of
Speaker 3: the day and those weren't necessarily nice. But what happened
Speaker 3: in later years in Germany was in the preceding era
Speaker 3: to World War Two, the Vimar Republic fairy tales were
Speaker 3: being used in a lot of different ways by artists,
Speaker 3: by writers. There were a lot of people who were
Speaker 3: interested in both preserving the Grimms fairy tales on the
Speaker 3: one hand, and writing new inventive versions exploring like capitalism,
Speaker 3: socialism and other things. On the other hand, so the
Speaker 3: Vimar Republic was a pretty like vibrant time for fairy tales.
Speaker 1: And then when the Nazis took.
Speaker 3: Over, there was a sort of shift where they saw
Speaker 3: the Grims tales as sort of these authentic stories that
Speaker 3: reveal some sort of ancient Teutonic like Viking Aryan ancestor
Speaker 3: times and links. And so they started to treat the
Speaker 3: Grim's tales as almost like a sacred text, where it
Speaker 3: was discouraged to change them and play with them and
Speaker 3: retell them. And so there were still authors who were
Speaker 3: retelling fairy tales and doing interesting things, but it had
Speaker 3: to be more according to the party line. The tales
Speaker 3: that were being told and that were being reworked picture
Speaker 3: books for children and things like that, the Nazi Party
Speaker 3: wanted them to correspond to the values they were trying
Speaker 3: to promote. So there was a lot of propaganda in
Speaker 3: these tales about loyalty, purity, mothers being self sacrificing, men
Speaker 3: being brave, and things like that. So that was a
Speaker 3: theme that became really prominent in those tales. And there
Speaker 3: were some people actually in the Nazi Party who wrote
Speaker 3: fairy tales. I didn't know that that was a thank you,
Speaker 3: Jack Scipes for pointing this out moment. This guy, Hans
Speaker 3: Friedrich Blank, he was writing tales. They were all about
Speaker 3: this really positive side of marriage and fertility. In Zipes's words,
Speaker 3: he wrote tales for kids, he wrote tales for adults,
Speaker 3: and he had these magical characters like Mother Hall who
Speaker 3: would like affirm the importance of gerosexual marriage and women.
Speaker 1: Staying at home and things like that.
Speaker 3: And Blank was actually a high Nazi official of culture,
Speaker 3: so he was working for the Nazi party and writing
Speaker 3: these tales that were in line with the values they
Speaker 3: were trying to promote, because most fascist regimes are extremely
Speaker 3: heteronormative and have an emphasis on the right people having
Speaker 3: the right kind of babies, so they were trying to
Speaker 3: use fairy tales in that regard.
Speaker 2: I also didn't know that there was there were people
Speaker 2: writing new stories at that time. So, just to kind
Speaker 2: of a guess circle back on a couple things, It's
Speaker 2: not so much that the Grim Brothers were Nazis themselves
Speaker 2: or had that idea. It's that people have taken their
Speaker 2: stuff and used that as like a textbook moving forward.
Speaker 3: Yes, exactly. I would not characterize the grim brothers as
Speaker 3: Nazis or fascists. I think they were basically nerds who
Speaker 3: loved the idea of what the country could become. They
Speaker 3: were linguists, their historians, They did some legal scholarship, They
Speaker 3: did what philology, which would now have become folklore, anthropology, philosophy,
Speaker 3: and a million other little disciplines. So they wanted to
Speaker 3: do their nerdy thing and affirm that the German people
Speaker 3: deserve to have their own country. So yeah, I wouldn't
Speaker 3: characterize them as being in line with fascism like at all.
Speaker 2: That being said, the brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm did
Speaker 2: publish some tales that, when you look back at them now,
Speaker 2: are extremely problematic. One example is a story of the
Speaker 2: Jew and the Thornbush. Doctor Gina Jorgensen will tell us
Speaker 2: about that one after the break. So the brothers grim
Speaker 2: tales were dedicated to preserving German culture and promoting a
Speaker 2: German national identity. Generations later, their tales were co opted
Speaker 2: by the Nazis. We've already seen plenty of gruesome stories
Speaker 2: and motifs, but some of the lesser known tails are
Speaker 2: even more problematic, like this one tale that folklore's doctor
Speaker 2: Gina Jorgensen told me about called the Jew and the
Speaker 2: thorn Bush.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so the Jew and the thorn Bush. It's one
Speaker 3: of their tails where there's this young guy and he's
Speaker 3: a servant and his master lets him go and totally
Speaker 3: underpays him, like three pennies or something like that. But
Speaker 3: this guy is very let's say, naive, and he's like,
Speaker 3: oh cool, I'm rich. So he's gone along and he
Speaker 3: meets this little old man who asks for money, and
Speaker 3: the guy's like, oh yeah, here's all my money. And
Speaker 3: the guy's like, all right, so you're very pure of parts.
Speaker 3: You can have three wishes. So the young man wishes
Speaker 3: for a gun that can hit everything that he aims at,
Speaker 3: a fiddle that will make everyone dance when he plays it,
Speaker 3: and he also wishes for.
Speaker 1: People to always do what he requests.
Speaker 3: And I feel like that's the trump card that kind
Speaker 3: of makes the other two wishes like not matter but whatever.
Speaker 3: So he keeps traveling along and he sees a Jewish
Speaker 3: guy in the road and he's admiring a bird and
Speaker 3: the Jews Guy's like, man, I wish I had that bird.
Speaker 3: So the guy shoots it, which I feel like that
Speaker 3: is also counter productive.
Speaker 1: And then the young man tells the.
Speaker 3: Jew go into the bushes and get it, and there's
Speaker 3: all these thorns, so the guy trying to like navigate
Speaker 3: the thorns, and then the young man starts playing his
Speaker 3: fiddle and the Jewish guy can't help but dance until
Speaker 3: his clothes are being shredded around him. He's being all
Speaker 3: torn up, and this young man just has a hearty
Speaker 3: laugh and he says like, Okay, I'll stop playing if
Speaker 3: you like give me all your money or something or
Speaker 3: like a lot of gold. So they do that, and
Speaker 3: the gat goes on his way. The Jewish guy goes
Speaker 3: and finds like a constable or judge or whatever and
Speaker 3: is like this man stole from me, blah blah blah.
Speaker 3: And they get the young guy and they're like, okay, yeah,
Speaker 3: this sounds realistic, so we will hang you now. And
Speaker 3: the guy says just one last request, and they have
Speaker 3: to grant his request.
Speaker 1: He has to play his fiddle.
Speaker 3: The jewsh Guy's like, no, no, anything but that, and
Speaker 3: so the guy plays his fiddle and nobody can stop dancing,
Speaker 3: and so again they kind of beg him to stop
Speaker 3: playing his fiddle so that they they're like.
Speaker 1: Screaming and they're pleading with him to stop.
Speaker 3: And so he says, give me my life, let me
Speaker 3: keep those hundred gold coins so they.
Speaker 1: Got from the Jewish guy.
Speaker 3: And also he tells the Jewish guy to confess to
Speaker 3: being a swindler and a thief essentially, and the Jewish
Speaker 3: kind of confesses that he stole all this money, and
Speaker 3: so the Jewish guy takes the young man's place on
Speaker 3: the gallows.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's just a straight up fucked up tail.
Speaker 1: It really is.
Speaker 3: And I read this stuff and I was like, I'm Jewish,
Speaker 3: and I'm like, oh, that's not that's not good representation all.
Speaker 2: No, not at all. Just curious where do you think
Speaker 2: this tale came from? Because it just seems so different.
Speaker 2: It's not even something I had heard of before.
Speaker 3: So, this tale in the Grims that is known as
Speaker 3: the Jew and the Thornbush, it has an international tail type.
Speaker 3: It is that well known. It is tail type five
Speaker 3: ninety two titled the Dance among Thorns, And so it
Speaker 3: has all of these really common motifs in it, the
Speaker 3: granting the wishes. You get this fiddle that compels people
Speaker 3: to dance, and in different versions, it's not always a
Speaker 3: Jewish person who is forced to dance. Sometimes it's a monk,
Speaker 3: it could be somebody else. This tale type is known
Speaker 3: since the fifteenth century in Europe, and it's told.
Speaker 1: All over the place.
Speaker 3: So we have versions in Danish, in Finnish, German, obviously,
Speaker 3: we have Swiss versions, we have Romanian versions, there's Chinese versions,
Speaker 3: Syrian versions. So this is a widely known tale and
Speaker 3: it doesn't always target Jewish people as the antagonist. It
Speaker 3: can be kind of you know, insert your scapegoat here,
Speaker 3: but it is really well known. So this isn't something
Speaker 3: that the Grims necessarily invented or promoted. I can't speak
Speaker 3: to why they made the choices they made, but it
Speaker 3: was probably just documenting here's a thing, and it would
Speaker 3: have sort of fit with some of the anti Semitic
Speaker 3: sentiments of the time, because you know, nineteenth century in
Speaker 3: Germany not a great time to be a Jewish person,
Speaker 3: and so yeah, it was probably just more a reflection
Speaker 3: of the general culture than of the Grim Brothers anti
Speaker 3: Semitism specifically. But again that's it's hard to speculate because
Speaker 3: I'm not inside their brains. In most modern editions of
Speaker 3: the Grim's fairy tales, unless they are prepared by and
Speaker 3: for scholars, this tale is left out.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so it definitely sounds like this tale. While again
Speaker 2: because of that time and that's what they made the decision,
Speaker 2: we can't really talk about it, but it definitely sounds
Speaker 2: like this tale. It just kind of depends on what
Speaker 2: culture or where your were, dependent on who it was
Speaker 2: aimed at. I want to circle back around to somethings
Speaker 2: that we're talking about earlier, specifically with the underlying messages
Speaker 2: in these fairy tales. So we have like clear things
Speaker 2: like the one that we just talked about, but then
Speaker 2: we have that underlying message of like Cinderella or like
Speaker 2: you know, shaping, like the loyalty, the heterosexual marriage. Like
Speaker 2: these are like the things. But like what about other stories,
Speaker 2: like you know, Little Red writing Hood and things like that,
Speaker 2: Like what are some of the messages and these these
Speaker 2: other main stories.
Speaker 1: That's an interesting one.
Speaker 3: There are definitely some writers in Germany in say the
Speaker 3: nineteen twenties and post World War One defeat who interpreted
Speaker 3: Little Red Writing Hood as this sort of metaphor for.
Speaker 1: The Germanic people.
Speaker 3: This is again drawing on the work of Jack Sypes,
Speaker 3: who pointed out that this one guy linked the wolf
Speaker 3: to the early Roman Empire, little red cap to like
Speaker 3: the idea of germanness, the hunter to the idea of
Speaker 3: the great German protector or the feur, and this idea
Speaker 3: that literal writing hood's subjugation was linked to how the
Speaker 3: German people were being put down and subjugated.
Speaker 1: Post World War One. They didn't really say it was the.
Speaker 3: Jews, but I feel like they were maybe implying, you know,
Speaker 3: we should have a convenian scapegoat here. So it was
Speaker 3: just a sort of are racist and nationalistic interpretation, But yeah,
Speaker 3: some German writers definitely tried to link a little red
Speaker 3: writing hood to like and we too have been victimized.
Speaker 2: And then what about specifically, I guess the idea of
Speaker 2: like how women are supposed to be, like the idea
Speaker 2: of like loyalty and how we're supposed to act or
Speaker 2: how they expected like women to act and things of
Speaker 2: that sort.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so the Grimms did put that seed in there,
Speaker 3: And again there's some debate as to whether they were
Speaker 3: actively sexist or just sort of following the norms of
Speaker 3: their times without questioning We do know because we have
Speaker 3: different editions of the Grimm's Fairy Tales, including an eighteen
Speaker 3: ten manuscript that wasn't really ever published, but it was
Speaker 3: recovered later on. Because they changed their tales from the
Speaker 3: first edition in eighteen twelve and eighteen fifteen. They went
Speaker 3: through seven major revisions up through eighteen fifty seven, and
Speaker 3: so we know that they had an active hand, especially Humgrim.
Speaker 3: He was very actively editing some of the tales because
Speaker 3: their first edition was like, here's some scholarship fellow nerds,
Speaker 3: and it was full of annotations and all of this
Speaker 3: stuff that would probably not interest the general reader. And
Speaker 3: then as their books started taking off, they're like, oh oh,
Speaker 3: people are reading these, Oh oh, people are reading these
Speaker 3: to their kids. And they realized that they had some
Speaker 3: images in there that they didn't want kids to be reading.
Speaker 3: And sort of the bizarre thing is that we think
Speaker 3: of children's literature in the twenty first century in America
Speaker 3: very differently than people were thinking of children's literature in
Speaker 3: the mid eighteen hundreds in Europe. So, first off, the
Speaker 3: idea of childhood had shifted and was sort of a
Speaker 3: recent European concept. I gather that in the middle Ages,
Speaker 3: children were kind of like little minimes, like tiny adults
Speaker 3: who just died a lot, and they were dressed as
Speaker 3: adults and treated as adults, and there wasn't really this
Speaker 3: separate life stage of childhood in the way that we
Speaker 3: would think about it day. So when the Grims entered
Speaker 3: the stage, there was this idea that was tied to
Speaker 3: romanticism of the innocence of the child and how this
Speaker 3: is idealized, and how we should all aspire to such
Speaker 3: naivete and all this stuff that was also linked to nature.
Speaker 3: And so children's literature was sort of a new genre
Speaker 3: at the time, and the way it was often thought
Speaker 3: of was sex.
Speaker 1: Was not okay, and I feel like that is a.
Speaker 3: Similar current as you've seen a lot of children's literature today.
Speaker 3: But violence was okay because it was acceptable to scare
Speaker 3: the crap out of kids to make them behave.
Speaker 1: So there were.
Speaker 3: Children's books at the time like Slovenly Peter is a
Speaker 3: translation of a German title, where like if kids wouldn't
Speaker 3: stop sucking in their thumbs, someone would come along and
Speaker 3: cut them off, Or if you wouldn't stop playing by
Speaker 3: the fire, someone push you into the fire, and that
Speaker 3: was acceptable, that.
Speaker 1: Was fine, that's really intense.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So the Grims were in this sort of tradition,
Speaker 3: this new tradition of children that are s at the time,
Speaker 3: where they're like, okay, so we're going to revise some
Speaker 3: of our tales. There are references to pregnancy that they
Speaker 3: took out. There are references to sexuality that they took out,
Speaker 3: but they left in violence, and they left in scatological references,
Speaker 3: and later British translators into English would like take a lot.
Speaker 1: Of those out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it was just sort of this like different take
Speaker 3: on it. But one of the things they did as
Speaker 3: they revise their tales with the sort of new audience
Speaker 3: of children in mind, is they really highlighted gender roles
Speaker 3: for girls and women that were more subservient, more domesticated,
Speaker 3: things like that. So if you look at early versions
Speaker 3: of snow White, when she is either chased away or
Speaker 3: runs away from the evil queen and she finds the dwarves,
Speaker 3: they're like, oh, yeah, you can chill here, And then
Speaker 3: in later versions of the same tale they're like, oh,
Speaker 3: you can stay here if you make the beds and
Speaker 3: cook for us and sweet. It's like a list of
Speaker 3: what a girl should do at home explicitly laid out
Speaker 3: in this fairy tale, which is kind of wild. So again,
Speaker 3: the grims were sort of seeding those more conservative, proper
Speaker 3: gender roles. So I can see where later people would
Speaker 3: pick up on that and be able to amplify it
Speaker 3: because it was already there.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 2: So yeah, so it's like teaching or brainwashing. However you'd
Speaker 2: like to say, like from a very early stage of
Speaker 2: like this is how you should be, that subservient thing,
Speaker 2: and then also to like your big thing is to
Speaker 2: get married, that's your happily ever after, which I'm definitely
Speaker 2: seeing a shift, and especially in a lot of the
Speaker 2: Cinderellas I've been watching lately, a lot of the adaptations
Speaker 2: and watching and reading and all that sort of thing.
Speaker 2: So I'm kind of also curious again still talking about
Speaker 2: like women and gender roles and everything. You know, we
Speaker 2: still read these tales. But do you think like women
Speaker 2: these days have the same takeaway today like that they
Speaker 2: did then, or do you think that that is changing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's a really interesting question. So we know that
Speaker 3: in the past, especially in the eighteen hundreds in Europe,
Speaker 3: tales were often told among groups of women, who were
Speaker 3: doing the domestic task that almost literally every woman had
Speaker 3: to do because we didn't have anywhere to buy clothes yet,
Speaker 3: so women would regularly spend time spinning and weaving and
Speaker 3: sewing and repairing clothing and so on. This was a
Speaker 3: major activity that women at most social economic statuses like
Speaker 3: had to do on the regular So part of how
Speaker 3: they made the work bearable is by telling stories.
Speaker 1: And we think that.
Speaker 3: There are some little like seeds of subversiveness in some
Speaker 3: of these tales, like there's a little known rumpel Stiltskin
Speaker 3: relative where you know, this girl has promised to a
Speaker 3: king if she can spin all the straw and goal
Speaker 3: or just spin all the straw in general, blah blah blah,
Speaker 3: and she obviously has no magic, and she's like, a crap,
Speaker 3: what I'm gonna do? And these three old women show up,
Speaker 3: and they are hideously ugly old women, and they say,
Speaker 3: we'll help you, but you have to invite us to
Speaker 3: your wedding and treat us like family, and the girl's
Speaker 3: like sold. So they complete this insane task for her
Speaker 3: and disappear, and she's married to this king, and the
Speaker 3: king obviously thinks that he's going to get really really
Speaker 3: rich by having a wife who can either spin so
Speaker 3: much stuff in general or spin stuff into gold. And
Speaker 3: these three women show up at the wedding and she's
Speaker 3: like empty, so and so come sit with us.
Speaker 1: And the king is like, oh okay.
Speaker 3: And the king is like leaning over because he can't
Speaker 3: stop looking at these ugly women, and he's like, so
Speaker 3: I have to ask, and he goes through each of
Speaker 3: their features, like one has a really big lip, one
Speaker 3: has a really big thumb, one has a really big foot,
Speaker 3: and each one answers, Oh, it's from licking the flax,
Speaker 3: or oh it's from treading on the wheel, and the
Speaker 3: king is horrified. He says, my beautiful young wife shall
Speaker 3: never spin again. And so that is for this young
Speaker 3: peasant girl who just like married up, definitely a happy ending,
Speaker 3: and it promises and escape from the tedious work that
Speaker 3: the people telling the tale would have still had to
Speaker 3: be doing day in and day out. So there are
Speaker 3: these like little glimpses of the tales not being as
Speaker 3: conservative or like foreclosing possibilities as they're often assumed to be.
Speaker 3: So like, that's one puzzle piece from the past. And
Speaker 3: again we don't have a time machine, so we can't
Speaker 3: ask people what did you think of these stories? But
Speaker 3: that's one clue that these stories even existed, and that
Speaker 3: we can look at the parallels between the content of
Speaker 3: the tales and the context of the teller's lives. Nowadays,
Speaker 3: it is a major debate in feminist fairy tale studies
Speaker 3: what kids actually think of gender roles and fairy tales,
Speaker 3: because in the nineteen seventies we had this whole debate happening,
Speaker 3: and a lot of feminists were like, these stories are
Speaker 3: straight up bad for kids. They've got passive princesses, they've
Speaker 3: got lots of domestic labor for women, you have to
Speaker 3: be pretty to be rewarded, blah blah blah, and other
Speaker 3: feminists were like, yeah, but that's the narrow slice of
Speaker 3: what's become canonical. There are so many interesting tales from
Speaker 3: oral tradition around the world where girls are going on
Speaker 3: quests and girls are killing dragons and girls are doing
Speaker 3: like a million frickin things. So yeah, if you have
Speaker 3: a narrow view, fairy tales can be kind of like
Speaker 3: conservative traditional gender roles, and maybe that's not good for kids,
Speaker 3: But broaden your horizon. There's so much more out there.
Speaker 3: And then the next stage of that debate, which folklorist
Speaker 3: and author case Stone played a large role in, was
Speaker 3: being like, Okay, but really, what do kids actually think?
Speaker 3: And she interviewed kids, what do you think?
Speaker 1: What do you remember? What do you notice?
Speaker 3: So kids are not these little passive lumps of brain
Speaker 3: meat to be imprinted on, Like, kids have their own
Speaker 3: ideas and their own ways of receiving fairy tales and
Speaker 3: thinking about them and processing them. So I think it
Speaker 3: is a really important corrective, which the parallel in literary
Speaker 3: studies is called reader response theory or reception theory, to
Speaker 3: remember that whatever it's in the text, that's not the
Speaker 3: only puzzle piece here, Like the text is going to
Speaker 3: be received and interpreted by a human with an active
Speaker 3: brain who might take away different things from it than
Speaker 3: the next human over.
Speaker 2: Will be right back after the break. I originally reached
Speaker 2: out to doctor Jorgenson because someone told me about how
Speaker 2: doctor Jorgenson's work had been appropriated by alt right people online.
Speaker 2: So she told me what happened.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I've kept a blog. I've blogged at a couple
Speaker 3: different places for over a decade. Now, I personally feel
Speaker 3: that academics should be doing outreach. We shouldn't keep all
Speaker 3: of our knowledge locked up in the ivory tower. So
Speaker 3: that is just part of my personal mission, is why
Speaker 3: I write books for the general public and not necessarily
Speaker 3: stuff that's like locked behind paywalls all the time, although
Speaker 3: I write that too.
Speaker 1: So this thing happened.
Speaker 3: So in twenty seventeen, this person who styles herself a
Speaker 3: folklorist was writing these blogs about the Romantic era, the
Speaker 3: nationalism movement, folklore identity, which is like, okay, on the surface,
Speaker 3: that all sounds like stuff that folklore is talk about,
Speaker 3: find whatever. But she was writing these posts in an
Speaker 3: effort to justify racism and stuff that we would view
Speaker 3: as very right wing takes on nationalism. And so she
Speaker 3: cited my mentor Alan Dundas to I guess, sort of
Speaker 3: justify that folklore is about cultural heritage and blah blah blah.
Speaker 1: And then in her blog post.
Speaker 3: She cited me, and I was like, WHOA, don't drag
Speaker 3: me into this, but I guess that's what happens when
Speaker 3: you put your words out on the internet.
Speaker 1: Who knows how they get used.
Speaker 3: So she had this whole like anti whatever, like rant,
Speaker 3: like it's a word salad. It doesn't even make a
Speaker 3: whole lot of sense. And so I did not like
Speaker 3: being tagged into this discussion. So I wrote a blog
Speaker 3: posts I was blogging for Patheos at the time, called
Speaker 3: dear white Supremacists, why.
Speaker 1: Would you cite me?
Speaker 3: And I took issue with her use of my mentor's work.
Speaker 1: I took issue with her use of my work.
Speaker 3: I was really confused as to why she was citing
Speaker 3: a queer Jewish academic in her very like anti all
Speaker 3: those things work. I just feel like it is completely
Speaker 3: misrepresenting the contemporary field of folkloristics to support white nationalism,
Speaker 3: white supremacy, to say, oh, as poor white white Europeans,
Speaker 3: we are sober leaguered, poor us blah blah blah. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's a very weird move that she was making. And
Speaker 3: so I made my own blog post, and I don't
Speaker 3: think anything really came of it. I was worried because
Speaker 3: her work was being picked up by like Altright and
Speaker 3: neo Nazi leaning outlets, and that was a little worse
Speaker 3: and I was.
Speaker 1: Like, I hope I don't get doxed. And nothing really
Speaker 1: came of.
Speaker 3: It, so thankfully that just kind of faded into Internet obscurity,
Speaker 3: but it was. It was weird, and it is something
Speaker 3: that folklorists do encounter sometimes in that, you know, we
Speaker 3: aren't interested in questions of heritage and mythology and identity,
Speaker 3: all these really interesting topics. But so are white nationalists
Speaker 3: and so are fascists, because they need to create this
Speaker 3: illusion of a racially pure origin story that ties together
Speaker 3: communities and excludes other communities.
Speaker 1: Which is completely false.
Speaker 3: Like communities have always been diverse, both in terms of
Speaker 3: like ethnicity and culture and language, like there's no such
Speaker 3: thing as racially pure or culturally pure or whatever. But
Speaker 3: these people need these stories to prop up their beliefs
Speaker 3: and to justify increasingly violent actions.
Speaker 1: So folklost. Whenever we encountered this.
Speaker 3: We're like, oh, this is gross. This is not actually
Speaker 3: accurate either, and it's something that you see. So I
Speaker 3: have friends in neopagan circles. I have friends who do
Speaker 3: historical reenactments and so on, and they also have to
Speaker 3: watch out for the people. It's like, you're really into
Speaker 3: Viking stuff. Are you really actually just nerdy about it?
Speaker 3: Or are you a white supremacist?
Speaker 1: Oh? Gross.
Speaker 3: So it's an interesting, weird dilemma. But most folkloreers I
Speaker 3: know are like, oh, stop, don't use our materials to
Speaker 3: justify your disgusting bigotry.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I've talked to a couple people who who have
Speaker 2: said that folklores are a little bit worried now sometimes
Speaker 2: like speaking up or whatever, because they're afraid of how
Speaker 2: what they say or what they write is going to
Speaker 2: be interpreted or used. So I totally understand that. I
Speaker 2: think definitely that was very bold of you to write that.
Speaker 2: In response, I'm glad you're okay and everything turned out
Speaker 2: for the most part okay, because that does seem like
Speaker 2: a very scary situation at least I know I would
Speaker 2: have been a little like nervous. But I have one
Speaker 2: last question for you. What is your take on these
Speaker 2: modern adaptations of the more popular grim stories today? And
Speaker 2: do you think that even though we're still telling these stories,
Speaker 2: we're starting to tell them in a way that's pulling
Speaker 2: away from the anti Semitic.
Speaker 1: And racist fruits. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So, I think the fact that we still have so
Speaker 3: many fairy tale a retelling is going in so many
Speaker 3: directions is a testament to how fairy tales are these
Speaker 3: shape shifters that as long as we can make them relevant.
Speaker 3: They will basically live forever, and I find that really fascinating.
Speaker 3: Some authors are using fairy tales to sort of talk
Speaker 3: back to anti Semitism. So one really popular example is
Speaker 3: the novel Briar Rose by Jane Nolin, which intertwines the
Speaker 3: Grimm's version of Briar Rose or Sleeping Beauty with a
Speaker 3: family Holocaust narrative. The other really shiny example is my
Speaker 3: colleague Veronica Shanis, who's an academic but also an author.
Speaker 3: She wrote a novella that is basically the protagonist is
Speaker 3: the daughter of the Jew who died dancing in the
Speaker 3: Thorns and she wants revenge. The title of this is
Speaker 3: Among the Thorns and it's super cool. So yeah, So
Speaker 3: there are authors who are explicitly talking back to anti
Speaker 3: Semitism and the uses of the fairy tale and Nazi
Speaker 3: Germany and things like that. I also see a lot
Speaker 3: more general feminist and querytellings of fairy tales. I personally
Speaker 3: I really enjoy those. I enjoy doing scholarship on them,
Speaker 3: and it is something that again like there is potential
Speaker 3: for harm in these stories and sort of my favorite
Speaker 3: case study and it pissed me off, so much that
Speaker 3: I wrote an academic article about it. But I'm really
Speaker 3: interested in gender and sexual minorities and how those of
Speaker 3: us in the LGBTQ plus umbrella are represented in tales.
Speaker 3: So when our writing tales, when we're just the subjects
Speaker 3: of them, all these things, and so I apologize this
Speaker 3: has spoilers for Helen Oyam's book Boy Snow. It's basically
Speaker 3: a snow white retelling set in mid century East Coast,
Speaker 3: and it has this reveal at the end that like
Speaker 3: I didn't see coming, and I'm like, what the hell
Speaker 3: where the main character's abusive father that she's run away with,
Speaker 3: and like she's kind of a snow white figure. But
Speaker 3: then she has a step kid, so like she's kind
Speaker 3: of the snow white stepmother figure. Is kind of an
Speaker 3: interesting story on that regard.
Speaker 1: The main character's.
Speaker 3: Parental figure turns out to be a trans man, and
Speaker 3: so this person actually assigned female at birth was actually
Speaker 3: kind of like a progressive young person in college, was raped,
Speaker 3: gave birth to the protagonist, and then was so traumatized
Speaker 3: by this that like they looked in the mirror the're like, Okay,
Speaker 3: I'm a dude now, And this comes in like the
Speaker 3: last five or ten pages of the book. It is
Speaker 3: this big reveal and then like the main character is like, oh,
Speaker 3: it turns out my mother was there all along under
Speaker 3: a spell, which is another fairy tale motif, which I
Speaker 3: guess is technically interesting, but it's this horrific story making
Speaker 3: out trans identity to be the result of trauma, which
Speaker 3: is not true.
Speaker 1: That is not a thing. And I was like, what
Speaker 1: the shit did I just read?
Speaker 3: So I had to write an article about this and
Speaker 3: like talk about the interconnections between trans identity and trauma
Speaker 3: and untrue stereotypes and things like that. And I sort
Speaker 3: of contrasted that text with a novella by Gabriel the
Speaker 3: Dream called a Pair of Raven Wings, which is available
Speaker 3: now on Amazon, And in that story, there is a
Speaker 3: transgender character and a retold fairy tale, and they're not
Speaker 3: trans because of trauma, because that's usually not a thing. Rather,
Speaker 3: they're traumatized by the transphobia of the people around them,
Speaker 3: and that's an important reframe. I think that is far
Speaker 3: more accurate, And so I'm just really interested, like, you know,
Speaker 3: how do fairy tale authors or these authors of modern
Speaker 3: fairy tale retellings are we doing damage by not knowing
Speaker 3: what the hell we're talking about, and by using someone
Speaker 3: else's marginalized identity as a plot point, like maybe don't
Speaker 3: do that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, No, definitely, especially the book that you're just talking
Speaker 2: about about, like the trauma causing like the transnists. That's
Speaker 2: not how that works at all, whatsoever. So that is
Speaker 2: definitely something that people need to be conscious of when
Speaker 2: creating new content, whatever that content may be, whether you're
Speaker 2: writing or making a movie, or you know, whatever it
Speaker 2: is that you're doing. On that note, thank you so
Speaker 2: much for joining me. I really super appreciate it.
Speaker 3: Awesome, thank you for having me. I enjoyed this conversation.
Speaker 3: I enjoyed going back and brushing up on some of
Speaker 3: my research on these things, and it was a pleasure
Speaker 3: talking with you.
Speaker 2: That was Folklorist doctor Gina Jorgensen. Don't forget to check
Speaker 2: out her books Folklore one on one, fairy Tales one
Speaker 2: on one, and Sex Education one on one. Next time
Speaker 2: on the Deep Dark Woods, A Beautiful Princess sleeps for
Speaker 2: one hundred years. The Deep Dark Woods is a production
Speaker 2: of School of Humans and iHeart Podcasts. It was created, written,
Speaker 2: and hosted by me Miranda Hawkins. This episode was produced
Speaker 2: by mikelle j Une with senior producer Gabby Watts. Executive
Speaker 2: producers are Virginia Prescott, Brandon Barr, Elsie Crowley, and Maya Howard.
Speaker 2: Theme song was composed by Jesse Niswanger, who also sound
Speaker 2: designed and mixed this episode. If you enjoyed the show,
Speaker 2: please leave a review and you can follow along with
Speaker 2: the show on Instagram at School of Humans.