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Author
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Comment
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lagsabit
Unregistered User
(11/5/02 1:56:08 pm)
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Hansel and Gretel
Does anyone know if Hansel and Gretel is based on a real event?
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Helen
Registered User
(11/5/02 9:08:47 pm)
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Specifically?
Wel, a good number of critics have posited that the tale likely stemmed from historical instances of abandonment caused by famine (you might consult Zipes, Dundes, Bettelheim, and Darnton), but I don't believe that anyone has traced it to a single specific situation. Are you referring to the generalities of the tale, or do you have some specific characteristic (the witch's cannibalism, etc.) in mind?
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janeyolen
Unregistered User
(11/6/02 4:14:33 am)
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newspaper
I am vaguely remembering that about twenty years ago there was a newspaper article positing a specific case in Germany in the late middle ages where a baker had cannibalized children and was burned at the stake or burned in his/her own oven as punishment.
But I can give no specifics.
And I may be making this all up. I do that, you know.
Jane
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catja1
Registered User
(11/7/02 4:23:58 pm)
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Hansel and Gretel
The "children-in-peril" trope seems to be a universal one for storytellers, film directors, and demagogues. Jack Zipes talks a bit about specific historical phenomena that may have contributed to the shape the Grimms' tale took (widespread famine, child abandonment, etc.) He and Maria Tatar are probably the best sources for historical information. Bettelheim is absolutely useless for anything beyond questionable Freudian dogma, so triple-check anything he says on the topic with someone who actually knows what they're talking about.
On the broader subject of monsters and menaces, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's "Monster Culture (Seven Theses)" (in _Monster Theory_) provides an interesting, albeit Lacanian, discussion of why society needs monsters, and how these figures of evil (witches, ogres, cannibals) are created in culture and invested with power.
Somewhat related, I always found it fascinating that Gilles de Rais, the medieval serial murderer, has become entangled with the "Bluebeard" story -- he was a child-killer, not a wife-killer.
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