u/Wonderful_Support814

I was going down a folklore rabbit hole recently and realized just how common this specific element was. I knew the original Grimm stories were way darker than the Disney movies, but I didn't expect the villains to be so hardcore.

Like, in the original Snow White, the Queen doesn't just want her dead—she explicitly asks the huntsman for her lungs and liver so she can boil them with salt and eat them. And in older versions of Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf actually tricks the girl into eating her grandmother's flesh.

I was watching a video that breaks down these uncensored pre-Disney versions, and it just caught me off guard how often this happened in old stories. It’s wild to think these were standard bedtime stories back in the day.

Has anyone else gone down this weird folklore rabbit hole?

"The queen and her glass" by Robert Anning Bell

I was going down a folklore rabbit hole this week and it kind of blew my mind that in the original 1812 Grimm's fairy tales, the villains in Snow White and Hansel & Gretel were actually their biological mothers. The whole "evil stepmother" thing was an edit made later to protect the sanctity of motherhood.

It completely changes the psychological horror of the stories when you realize the person trying to kill them is their actual parent.

I stumbled across a video by a new channel called The Dark Archivist talking about this exact change, and it got me super interested in the unedited history of these stories.

Does anyone here have recommendations for other channels, podcasts, or even books that dive deep into the real, dark folklore behind fairy tales? I really want to explore more of this uncensored stuff!

I always knew the original fairy tales were dark, but the casual cannibalism is wild to me.

Disney really did us a disservice with the Evil Stepmother trope...