You're Dead to Me - Fairy Tales

Episode Date: August 27, 2021

Greg Jenner and his guests uncover the gruesome truths behind some of our most-loved fairy tales that have kept children and adults enchanted for centuries. In comedy corner, we have the wickedly funny “evil queen of comedy” Sally Phillips, who we all know as a comedian, sketch-writer and for her appearances in shows like Miranda, Green Wing, Veep and many more. In history corner is the world-renowned expert on children’s literature, folklore and German literature, Prof Maria Tatar.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. and apples as we travel back to learn all about the history of European fairy tales. And word of warning, this is a little darker than the average Disney movie. And joining me as we journey into the deep dark woods are two very special guests. In History Corner, she is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Harvard University. She's written an astonishing number of books on fairy tales, including a new one out this year called The Heroine with 1001 Faces. And she is a world-renowned expert on German romanticism, folklore and children's literature. It's Professor Maria Tatar. Hello, Maria. How are you? I'm great, alive and well, professorial and pedantic and delighted to be here. That's the best way to be. And in Comedy Corner, she is an iconic queen of comedy.

Definitely not an evil queen. Little bit. A little bit evil. Definitely not an evil queen. Little bit. A little bit evil. Darker than I seem. Okay, she's a slightly evil queen and an award-winning actor, writer, sketch comedian and presenter. You'll know her from so much stuff. I can't even begin to list it, but some of my faves include Smack the Pony, Miranda, Green Wing, Taskmaster, I'm Alan Partridge, Veep and the Bridget Jones franchise.

It's only blooming Sally Phillips. Hello, Sally welcome to the show. Hello Greg, I am very happy to be here with you talking about fairy tales. We are delighted to have you here. Anyone who's seen you on Taskmaster knows you have an extraordinary brain in a slightly left field way. Yeah, maverick brain. I've got a fairy tale brain. I think I feel much more comfortable in Wunderland than I do in reality, I think. So I'm really looking forward to it. Not a lie. Actually looking forward to it. OK, so what about history then, Sally?

Is history your bag? Did you enjoy it at school? Really enjoyed history. Yeah, well, I really enjoyed girl-friendly history. Not much interest in Disraeli and wars. Fear not, no Disraeli today. It's all fairy tales all the time. So do you have a favourite fairy tale from perhaps your childhood, perhaps when maybe you read one to your children? Well, you know what? My favourite fairy story is a Nootka fairy story. It goes a little bit like this. upon a time there was a woman who had a clitoris

as big as a seal and that's it end of story and i used to look because i had a book of nutka fairy tales and legends and that was in there i used to marvel at that you know the brevity and the fact that that was kind of a whole story. Like what were the narrative blocks in that? It's like when you've got a clitoris as big as a seal, you just don't need to bother with beginnings, middles and ends and obstacles. It's just conjures so much. Maria, do you have a favourite? That's like asking me which child is my favourite. I love them all. If push comes to shove, I will choose Hansel and Gretel because it is a story about sibling solidarity. And my sister read it to me when

we were young. And I loved the way that these two make their way out into the world and manage to survive. Now, the downside to the story is, of course, they've killed a witch and they've robbed her, but no one's perfect. Sure. You know, I once blew myself up with a rickety gas oven. I was living in a brothel in Rome. I was actually living in a bar. I was living above a brothel in Rome

and I had a sort of rubbish gas oven. I was trying to make bread for the first time and it wasn't cooking. And I went stupidly, went in with a lighter and the gas had built up and it blew me across the room. And I had been growing my armpit hair and it blew my armpit hair off. But when I told my mother,

I'd blown myself up with a gas oven. She went, did you learn nothing from Hansel and Gretel? Don't put your head into an oven. So what do you know? We begin the podcast with the so what do you know? This is where I have a guess at what listeners at home might know about today's subject. And of course, we all know fairy tales. We know beautiful princesses and wishing wells and glass slippers and talking animals and witches and stepmothers and the deep dark woods and happy endings and casual violence. You might know that once upon a time your favourite stories

were a bit different to what Disney told you. And maybe you're thinking of the gruesome tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, or perhaps the more enchanted tales of Hans Christian Andersen, filled to the brim with his lush, dreamy imagery. And there's no shortage of these nostalgic yarns in our contemporary pop culture. So you can find fairy dust sprinkled everywhere in storybooks and on the silver screen and on the stage and in video games and in pop music and ballet and opera. But where do these stories come from? And why are they so tantalising? And why are they so ripe for repeated reinvention? So let's find out. Right, Sally, you are a writer, you are a funny person, you have a very fertile imagination. So by the end of this podcast, we thought it'd be quite fun

maybe to ask you to conjure up your own little fairy tale. Once you've heard from the wisdom of Maria, once you've heard all the rules and tropes, your story will probably start with Once Upon a Time, but that is not a universal opening. Around the world, other cultures have different ways of beginning their fairy tales. Let's start with a mini quiz for you, Sally. Which of these four openings is from a BBC TV drama, and which of these is a European cultural folk tradition? In the old times, when wishing still worked. The second one is, worked. The second one is there was and there was not. The third is in a land of myth, in a time of magic. And the fourth is behind seven lands and seven seas there was. I think the third one stinks of BBC Cardiff. Am I right? In a land of myth, in a time of magic, you're absolutely right.

It's Merlin, BBC. The other three are from European folk tradition. So in the old times when wishing still worked is German. And that's, I think, from the Grimm's. That's wonderful, isn't it? Yes. There was and there was not a Czech Republic. And behind seven lands and seven seas, there was Estonia.

So you can start your story with Once Upon a Time if you wish, Sally, but you can come up with your own if you want. I don't know if you want to conjure up something different and more Sally Phillips-esque. In the thinkling of a chun. That's brilliant. And what is a chun? An egg, a mighty egg or a massive apple. Apples are good. Apples are very fairytale. A mighty apple. a massive apple. Apples are good. Apples are very fairytale. A mighty apple. A mighty apple.

That's even better. Maria, once upon a time is a phrase we use a lot. There are TV shows called that and we tell our children once upon a time. It's a very odd phrase. What does a time mean? Is it a particular moment in history or is it a sort of parallel universe? Remember long ago in a galaxy far, far away? Sure. Yeah. George Lucas. And, you know, he actually wanted to write a fairy tale and ended up creating a new mythology.

So once upon a time, this is elsewhere, another time, another place, not the here and now. And what I love about the once upon a time is it's a signal. Listen up. I'm going to take you to the safe space of elsewhere. And remember, most fairy tales, not all of them, but most end with happily ever after. So you have this wonderful framing device, the reassuring finale, living happily ever after. And also there will be justice. Virtue will be rewarded, the meek shall inherit the earth, and the wicked are going to get their just desserts, as they often do in quite terrible, scary ways. And what is a fairy tale? I know there's a sort of five-point checklist that I think Maria Warner has put forward. Who coined fairy tale? Where does that come from? And what is it? And that's a word that a little piece of news, a bit of gossip, a story, which I think captures the genre in much better ways, in more powerful ways. So you read the Grimm's and you realize, actually, there are very few fairies.

There are some in the French corpus and also in Irish folklore, but travel around the world and you find that actually fairies rarely make an appearance. As for a definition, I think the important thing about fairy tales is they have magic. And what does magic do but create the possibility for metamorphosis, transformation, change? And that's where the great element of hope comes. Things can change. They came out of an oral storytelling culture and often they were quite baggy. They were shaggy dog stories. They came out of an oral storytelling culture, and often they were quite baggy, they were shaggy dog stories, they went on and on. But the Grimms had the genius, and Charles Perrault as well, in France to create what Marina Warner refers to as the compact form of the fairy tale. And she tells us also about the stock characters, the mimetic quality.

And also she points to what is really important, the depthlessness of the fairy tales. She borrows that term from a Swiss folklorist named Max Lutti. And what he means by that is that there's no interiority. We don't find out how the characters are feeling. Think of the novel. Henry James goes on for pages about the state of consciousness of a character. But fairy tales are all action. If somebody's sad, we don't hear about it. We just see them sit down and cry. You mentioned Madame d'Aulnoy, who's French. She

gives us the name fairy tale. She's writing in the 1690s. Charles Perrault is writing in the 1690s. This is the time of Louis XIV, the time of Voltaire, it's quite modern in some ways. But looking back to a sort of mythical medieval past. We do have this oral storytelling culture, adult oral storytelling culture. And then gradually, as the fairy tales made it into print culture, they became more child friendly. But you have instances like Apuleius wrote down a version of Cupid and Psyche, a version of Beauty and the Beast in the second century AD. You have the Panchatantra in India. So as soon as cultures developed writing systems and were able to put

things in writing, and then of course in print, these fairy tales came to be codified. Sally, I know you have fans in Finland because you played the prime minister of Finland in Veep. So you might help me with my pronunciation here. But there's a very famous Finnish folklorist a hundred years ago called, I think, Ante Arne. And he came up with an exhaustive catalogue of stories in Europe.

And since then, two more scholars have been added to this and it's's called the Arne Thompson-Utter Index. They say that there are so many different stories around the world. Do you want to guess how many story types there are? Well, they say there's only seven stories, don't they? If they're structuralists, they probably, I mean, they'll have done that thing where they've tried to categorise them so many there'll be thousands and thousands. You're absolutely right. Two and a half thousand stories. I don't know how useful that kind of study actually is. It doesn't really tell you anything, does it, really?

I suppose it's about fitting them into a box, I suppose, Maria. I mean, I suppose Beauty and the Beast apparently is story type 425C, which is very radical. Very good, very good. Actually, there are all sorts of problems with the tail type index, and I won't bore you with that. But it's very handy because I can look up 425C in the Arne Thompson-Utter tail type. It's now international. And you realize, oh my God, Beauty and the Beast, everyone thought that was a European tail. And it's not. It's told all over the world so suddenly you discover that everywhere we tell if it's a little frightening the same old stories i think in part because these tales are really all

about dysfunctional families and you can find them on every continent hyper dysfunctional yeah i was going to say really dysfunctional in some instances. Some of the murders that go on in some of these stories. Snow White and her brother Egg White. Modern scholars often use the word wonder stories instead of wonder tales, which I think is quite charming. But one of the great writers, you've already mentioned him, Maria, is Charles Perrault, who is a Frenchman in the 17th century. And he lays down these stories, but he doesn't want to take credit. He's embarrassed. So he gives credit to his son, which I think is a bit cheeky. Listen, I completely get that because I reckon that I could, and I may be being arrogant here,

but I reckon I could chuck out a comedy chick lit airport novel in about an hour. I'd just be embarrassed to put my name on the cover if i could pass it off as one of my children one of your kids i would it's a sort of secret pleasure isn't it an enjoyable pleasure i can see how he didn't want to be associated with childish things he wrote it was mother goose wasn't it yeah yeah tales of mother Mother Goose or Tales from Times Past. And, you know, you said it's a little cheeky to do that. I think it was sort of tongue-in-cheek because the son was 11 years old.

Right. But it's interesting. I mean, he attributes tales also to Mother Goose. These are old wives' tales. They're told by women in sewing circles. They're told to lighten repetitive labors in a way. So, you know, I think of the way the Grimm's call their collection, Kindle and Housemashing, children's stories and household tales. And moving the stories into a domestic space, even though many of them are quite wild, not fit for children or anything like that, but it's now become feminized. And I won't say infantile. I think Tolkien puts it this way, that it's moved like old furniture into the nursery. But as you said, Greg, they're everywhere.

They're everywhere. Once you start looking, you scratch surfaces, you realize, oh my God, we're constantly recycling these stories, making them more sophisticated, giving them the interiority that we don't have in the oral tradition, changing villains to heroes, doing all kinds of outrageous things. I think what's interesting now is my kids know Shrek better than they know the original stories. I've got three boys who won't sit still. The only story they listened to over and over again was Three Little Pigs. They're all very greedy and they all wanted to get away from home fast. And Shrek has obviously reversed everyone. Yeah. It's beauty and the beast, but now the beast is embraced. So it tells us something about our attitude toward what we used to think of as monstrosity. Now you want to become the green monster, or you want to become the frog rather than the prince. You want to go back in the pond

and live happily ever after. So we've mentioned already Charles Perrault. The other great writer of fairy tales is Hans Christian Andersen. He's writing in the mid-1800s. He's a fascinating character, Maria, because in a lot of ways, his writings have been interpreted as autobiographical. The ugly duckling is him a bit. And there's a sort of interpretation that says that he was a repressed, perhaps bisexual man or gay man who was rejected by someone he loved. And that influences The Little Mermaid. Well, I think you're exactly right. He was the original ugly duckling. He rose from poverty and rags to literary fame and riches. He really was a self-made poet. And, you know, imagine he left the provinces, this little town called Anze, at age 12, to go to Copenhagen to make his name as a singer, which he did. But then at age 12, his voice changed. So he had to find something new. He went to school. He was tall and gawky. He first wrote for the theater and was booed and hissed, and his plays were panned. And he turned to stories and wrote tales told for the young.

So we have stories like The Emperor's New Clothes, The Ugly Duckling, The Little Match Girl, The Little Mermaid. And these are tales about suffering. Think of the little match girl out there on the streets. She's found frozen on New Year's Day. She has perished. But at the same time, you remember, she lights these matches and has these beautiful visions of meals, of a Christmas tree, and then finally of her grandmother.

So there's a beauty in that world. But I always worried about those stories because there was so much suffering. And my students always came back to me and said, no, no, they're so beautiful. And I would say, I know, but there's so much pain. The little mermaid loses her voice. She has to walk and it feels as if her feet are like knife blades or something like that. Yeah, it's pretty horrible. So she loses her tail and that feels like a sword splitting her in two to give her legs. And then when she walks, her feet feel like they are standing on the sharp ends of daggers.

Every single time she takes a step, every time she dances, she's basically screaming in agony inside. So pretty nasty. But there is always this redemptive power of beauty in the stories. Anderson is listening to fairy tales as a child. He's absorbing them. And then he writes things down that are his own invention in his own words. But, you know, the stories have a strange status because The Little Mermaid is constantly being rewritten, just as if it were an item of folklore. Didn't it pre-exist him?

Oh, always. There were so many stories about merfolk. Actually, quite a lot of these writers don't get credit from history. Madame d'Aulnoy doesn't get credit, but she's important. get credit from history. Madame d'Ornoli doesn't get credit, but she's important. There's also, there was Marie-Jeanne L'Haitier, Henri-Julie de Mouha, Charlotte Rose de la Force and Marguerite de Lubert. There are women writers who give us stories, but it's ultimately, it's Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Perrault and the Grimms who we remember. In the 1800s, there was a Sicilian doctor called Giuseppe Pitre who used to go around he had a carriage with a writing desk on the back and he used to take that round to see his patients and collect stories from each of his patients as he went to see them and he said he got most of them from

an old crone who he remarks on as being really not attractive at all but being a grandmother and a mother and having an incredible talent for telling stories just really holding the crowd like an early son of an early Joan Rivers if you like it's an interesting story though isn't it because it's men collecting women's stories and then taking credit it's classic sort of men in meetings saying the same thing but louder and everyone going good point jeff well done jeff i love the um feeling of as a perimenopausal woman love the feeling of folk tales as being the preserve of old crones you know when we're we're thrown out we're forced to live outside the tents around a little fire. People still come to us to tell them our tales of the things we've frankly lied, made up, invented. But we can still get a bit of attention.

Well, you're neither old or a crone. No, but I mean, why is that bad? That shouldn't be bad. I mean, there was a time, there was and was not a time where it was not bad to be a crone where crones had wisdom and value and knew things in a different way of knowing and could pass important lessons on about how not to blow yourself up with a gas oven exactly that and so yeah hooray for the crone is what i said it's a really good point and there's that i mean that apuleia story the roman story you mentioned maria which you was told 1,800 years ago.

He was told it by a, putting here in speech marks, a drunken, demented old woman. Aye, aye for the drunken, demented old woman. Basically. Exactly, exactly. It's the early stand-up comics. I put it to you. It's the early stand-up comics. These stories really connect us with ancestral wisdom. Toni Morrison says, listen to the ancestor. And also, think about women didn't have access to weapons, often not to writing instruments.

But what did they have? They had words and stories to pass on wisdom, to give advice to the young. It's taking women's domestic world and their psyche to the outside world. I feel like the secondary world of fairy tales is, I feel like it's our domain. You talk in medals and certificates and A-levels and paychecks and maths and utilitarianism. And somehow there's another world that mothers and families inhabit where the maths doesn't add up in the same way.

I feel like this is the territory that fairy tales are of. And we're maybe not even that interested in writing it down because what we're interested in is telling it. So my boys always wanted three little pigs told by me over and over again with different voices and different jokes but the same sort of core the same huff and i'll puff and i'll blow your house down really it was about the bedtime story as opposed to the book yeah it's the it's performance isn't it that's my theory that's a good theory like that i've just thought up for the purposes of this podcast. I thank you, taking a small bow, dropping mic and having a swig of tea.

I suppose we have to get onto the Grimms, Maria, because they're so iconic. Their name is synonymous with fairy tales. They're not composing stories, are they? They're collecting stories. I mean, they're academics, aren't they? We should stress that. These are men of letters. They are brilliant linguists.

But do they travel Germany? Do they solicit stories from people? Do they steal stories? What are they doing? Well, they were omnivores. They got stories wherever they could find them. And this was in the beginnings of the Napoleonic Wars. They were philologists. They were legal scholars. They were well educated. They worked as librarians. Did they? Working as a librarian meant that they could do their own research. So they wrote to their friends and asked them to send stories. They also went to the woman who sold them vegetables. They went to the tailor, the tinker. And now many of their informants, as folklorists call them, many of their sources were middle-class, educated people. And

you can imagine, I mean, here are these two famous brothers, slightly aristocratic. If you are selling vegetables to them, do you really want to tell them about Hans Dom, who makes women pregnant by looking at them? No, you don't, because these are silly stories. They're juveniles. So you change the story for the brothers. Now, they didn't just listen these are silly stories. They're juveniles. So you change the story for the brothers. Now, they didn't just listen to the stories, but they also raided literary collections. And then what did they do? They had many different versions of a story, and then they constructed their own version. And they were geniuses at that. Wilhelm Grimm, in particular, understood the power of the compact fairy tale. And all of this in the service of preserving German culture.

And also, to their great surprise, when they published the first volume of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, it sold really well. And why? Because parents were using it for exactly the purpose that the Grimms wanted. It was an etzion's book, a manual of manners. They were reading the stories to their children, and they demanded that the stories have a little bit less sex in them, possibly more violence, because you want to discipline the child. Terrify the children. Over the years, through seven different editions, the Grimms were cutting, editing, fixing this and that, making the language less vulgar.

So by the seventh edition, we have a corpus of 210 stories that are really selling extraordinarily well for the time. You say that it's time in Napoleon. Is that relevant? Well, they're living in a town in which it's decreed that French will be the official language. Right. And where you're occupied. So they're the resistance, basically. They're resisting with stories. I mean, again, exactly what the women we talked about did. The stories became weapons, forms of resistance,

forms of instruction. How do you survive when you're going to be married to a beast? And they get one of their stories in a slightly sneaky way. They approach an old lady in a hospital in Marburg who refuses to give the story to them. And so they get someone else to go undercover and elicit the story from her and then report back. So it's a bit cheeky. They're like early Sun journalists. I like to think of it as the first fairy tale think tank because they really wanted to find

everything. And, you know, it's kind of like crowdsourcing today. You come up with incredible riches when you tap into the voices of those who are not usually heard. And the story that they steal, they're not stealing, but they got it slightly underhandedly, is called Arschenputtel. And that is a very famous story when translated to English. Sally, do you want to guess what Arschenputtel might be? I know, it's Cinderella. It is Cinderella. The word Arschen means ashes, doesn't it? And I suppose cinder is the same thing. So cinders, we have the Perrault version, which I think became the Disney movie. And then we have the Grimm version. It's a lot more violent.

Well, to get to the feel good, happy ending, you have to have a whole bunch of feel bad moments. One of which is the stepsisters cut off their toes and their heels in an effort to make the slipper, the Grimms call it a slipper fit. The prince goes, he thinks, oh, yeah, the shoe fit. But his horse, I think it's the horse that tells him, hey, you know, there's blood dripping from the shoe. And then when Cinderella Ashinpoto finally gets married, she's going into the church and doves, you know, how they're usually birds of peace, doves peck out the right eyes of the stepsisters. And as they exit the church, the doves peck out the left eyes of the sisters. So there's your happily ever after.

No surprise that Disney went with the pet hole version. You can imagine that meeting, can't you? Cinderella is a story that we, I've grown up watching it as a kid. I'm sure I'll tell it to my daughter when she's old enough. The pecking out of eyes feels very dark. I mean, I suppose it's vengeance, isn't it? I suppose in Disney movies, you get your sort of adorable animal friends to do the washing up for you or to sing you songs. You don't get them to wreak havoc upon those who've wronged you.

So why is there so much violence in the grim versions? Is it a comeuppance thing? Is it a karmic thing? Remember, these tales were what John Updike beautifully put it in this way. They were the television and pornography of an earlier age. So imagine, you know, no streaming, no electronic devices, and you're shelling peas and mending clothes and fixing tools. How do you make time pass? You tell these stories, and they have to be melodramatic and operatic and scary so that everyone will stay awake, basically. So the violence, I think, is really strategic. I mean, mean presumably these were times of suffering and difficulty

for people and presumably there's more comfort in the imaginative destruction of one's enemies than there is in the reconciliation yeah well life was nasty, brutish and short at that time and so

these are also stories they give you encounters with death. And, you know, think of Sleeping Beauty, death and resurrection, salvation, or all those stories, some versions of Bluebeard in which the chopped up women are reconstituted. The heroine has magical powers and is able to put the dismembered back in place and revivify. They're mythical. If we move on to Snow White, which again is another kind of classic story that's got so many iterations, but the Grimm version is a lot darker than the Disney version. Sally, I assume you've seen this Disney version. I have. I have. It was very nicely coloured.

I enjoyed the birds. Disney version? I have, I have. It was very nicely coloured. I enjoyed the birds. Yes. Nowadays, I think the depiction of the achondroplasic individuals is slightly offensive and hard for people with that condition at Christmas when people still choose to put on as a pantomime. I have a friend who has achondroplasia, the most common form of dwarfism. And he says that everyone with that condition just hates it when Snow White is the pantomime that year. It's just horrendous. Whenever you go anywhere, people bother you. But there's lots of versions in which Snow White doesn't live with seven dwarfs. She lives with... Thieves?

Thieves and robbers. We should start campaigning for that to change. Yeah, I think that's a very important point. In the Grimm version, there's some real violence that happens. I mean, we have the evil queen. In Disney, she asked for the heart. But in Grimm, do you know what she asked for, Sally?

I don't. Is it her uterus? No. That would be a lot more Jungian Freudian, maybe. It's the lungs and liver, I think. She wants to eat them. There's a Spanish version. She asks for a bottle of Snow's blood with a toe in it as a cork.

I don't know if that's airtight, a toe. So I guess that story is toe white rather than Snow White. They're so imaginative, the Spaniards. That's the version for the foot fetishists. But also in Snow White in Grimm, the evil queen tries to kill Snow White three times. Do you know what the three murder weapons are, Sally? Well, apple comb.

Yes. Well, huntsman apple comb are the ones we know. There's a third one. Let's think. It would be really fairy tale-y. No, I don't. Think fashion. Oh, high heel.

Oh, nice. It's a corset stays, isn't it maria it's oh i do remember that yes pulling it too tight so she falls to the ground that's pretty dark in itself then we get snow white dying and then she's in a glass coffin and then the prince comes along and he says oh can i have the body i'll take it back to the castle but in the grim version it's not a kiss that wakes snow white it is an accidental heimlich maneuver the men pick up the coffin and drop it and the jolt i so thought you were going to say something else and i'm really relieved it was something as vanilla as a heimlich

maria is there something lodged in her throat the apple is just lodged from her throat and she comes back to life so no kiss no kiss needed no non-consensual kiss yeah but in the grim tale the big finale is the evil queen shows up at the wedding of the prince and snow white and she gets a comeuppance do you know what it is maybe you remember i want to say that she is swarmed by 12 angry swans oh that's that's nice. That pull all her hair out and drag her to a lake, to a silver lake where she drowns. Very visual. Spencer, isn't it?

It's good. It's really good. What happens? Maria, do you want to tell us the grim finale? She dances to her death in red hot iron shoes. Does she? They've been specially heated up for her. But that's so interesting, isn't it?

Now, is it just ridiculous to say that the red shoes are periods? I've heard that being given the red shoes, having your own red shoe, because the story of the red shoes, she makes her own shoes, doesn't she? Oh, and Little Red Riding Hood is read that way all the time. And you think it's just nonsense. The red cap or red... It's just visible, isn't it? I don't want to insult some of my colleagues. It's one interpretation.

Yes, it's one way of looking at it. Exactly. And actually, I mean, that brings us to Little Red Riding Hood quite neatly, really. And again, in the Grimm Tales,

she's not called Red Riding Hood, is she? Little Red Cap. Old caption. That's not far. That's a reasonable translation. It's not far off, is it? Little Red R. Old caption. That's not far. That's a reasonable translation. It's not far off, is it? Little Red Riding Hood.

Little Rude Riding Hood is the story I'd like to write. But, I mean, again, Maria, Red Riding Hood or Red Cap, there are so many versions of the tale internationally. So do you want to just run us through some of the different ways that she escapes from the wolf? Because there's so many different iterations, aren't there? There are. And in the Grimm's version, she needs a huntsman to rescue her, to get her and her grandmother out of the belly of the wolf. In France, the story that is still read to children today ends with the girl is swallowed by the wolf and that's it.

followed by the wolf, and that's it. But in some of the early aurels, the folklorists tell us about a version in which Little Red Riding Hood performs a striptease in front of the wolf, gets in bed with him, realizes it dawns on her. It takes her a while, but it dawns on her that it's a wolf and not her grandmother. And she tells him she has to go to the bathroom. She has to relieve herself. So she persuades the wolf to let her out and she runs back home. Sorry, we're just letting it go that she did a striptease for her grandmother. Remember what big eyes you have? Well, in this one, every article of clothing is enumerated as it's taken off. Should I take my apron off? And so on. I love there's an African story about a girl named Celane. But the Mary Mo is the monster in that story. And who rescues

Celane but her mother, who puts the demon into a sack that is filled with scorpions and vipers. One of the stories has a spear chucked in the wolf's mouth. Is that right? That's right. It's an china, is it? The gold flower. She spears the wolf in the face, basically, which is very Tarantino. So there's lots of different iterations. And it's funny, I suppose, in France, the Red Riding Hood just gets eaten. And that's the end of the story. Sorry, kids. And then in other versions, she escapes. In other versions, she kills the wolf. In other versions, she's saved by a man. There's so many different ways to tell this story.

That's such a basic foundational story. And then it's culturally inflected all over the world in different ways. The theme, the one-liner with Red Riding Hood is don't stray from the path. And modern cinema has often reinterpreted that in horror movies like Hard Candy and so on. But then we get to a quite different story, which is The Little Mermaid. And this is Anderson. And this, as we've already said, is him, perhaps as a man who had a real suffering and sadness in his personal life. And he's written a story about yearning and longing. And Maria, you've written beautifully about this in your works about the fact that The Little Mermaid is a tale of a young woman who wants to adventure. She wants to go and see the world.

So straying from the path is the purpose. She's upwardly mobile, but she gets into this toxic relationship. But think about this. A free-spirited, art-loving creature falls in love. She leaves her family. She loses her voice and her mobility. And she lives with a man in love with another woman. Remind you of any? I mean, Brits, please, hello? Remind you of anyone? And Meghan Markle said in the interview that she read that tale

or she watched the movie and went, it's my story, which is fascinating. Well, how about Di and Charles? It's extraordinary. I guess The Little Mermaid is, you know, the Disney version of it is so iconic. I was in a, as a child I played Sebastian the Crab, although I weirdly, I had to do a French accent for some strange reason

so I didn't do a problematic Jamaican accent but that tale to us is sort of bizarre and kooky but romantic but the Anderson story is sad. She falls in love with the prince, he marries someone else and she chooses to die rather than murder him and be saved and the whole purpose of her adventure is she wants a soul because mermaids

live to 300 years, but they don't get to have a human soul. And in the end, she dies. And then she is reincarnated as a spirit of the wind and she has to do favors for people and that saves her. So it's a lot of loss in there, a lot of sadness, a lot of disappointment in that tale, isn't it? Well, not really, because salvation will come after 300 years of community service. And I love the way at the end of the story, Anderson turns to the child reading the book and says, don't be naughty, because you'll make her sentence even longer than it already is. So it has this disciplinary edge. And again, the idea of redemption and salvation comes in very powerfully with Anderson. And then Disney has turned it into something else. So it speaks a lot to the ability to take these stories and keep reframing them, doesn't it?

So the great thing about it, again, the malleability, they're so elastic. It's our duty, actually, to keep changing them. They're not written in stone. We have to keep making them relevant. And the only way to keep them alive is by changing them. There's something else that starts to make these more child-friendly, and that's picture books. In the 19th century, illustration arrives. Could you tell us a bit more about that, please, Maria? elementary illustration arrives. Could you tell us a bit more about that, please, Maria? The story really begins in 1823 with George Cruikshank, who decided to illustrate the British translation of the Brothers Grimm. Illustrations are whimsical. They're child friendly. And I think they help nudge the tales into the nursery in many ways. And then comes the golden age of children's book illustration

with Walter Crane, Arthur Rackham, Duloc in France, Kai Nielsen. And you have these gorgeous illustrations. You know, I always think about the way that my first book of fairy tales, it was in German, and I couldn't read German at the time, but I was so taken by the illustrations. I just fell in love with the stories.

And of course, they were in the air, so I quickly figured out what was going on in the tales. But the way in which the beauty of the illustrators' images really amped up the power of the tales. And of course, who doesn't want to buy this beautiful gift? Some of them were gigantic. Gustave Doré in France illustrated Perrault. And the volume is two feet by one foot or something like that. So it's both child-friendly,

but adults then love the stories too, because they can appreciate the artwork in them. Obviously, Disney commits to a lot of these stories to film, and that's how they become iconic. But actually, cinema was doing them earlier than that. In the 1890s, George Méliès was filming fairy tales at the very birth of cinema. One more story I just want to talk about very quickly, and that's Rapunzel. Do you remember the story, Sally, of Rapunzel? That sort of fairy tale, it's a hairy tale. Yes, I do remember Rapunzel. Does the Wicked Witch take her away from her parents and put her up in a high tower with no door? That's right.

And she just grows hair, but the Wicked Witch would climb up her hair. But her name is not Rapunzel necessarily. She's named after something. The taking process is a deal done by the child's father, isn't it, Maria? He's caught stealing something and a deal is done. Is it a turnip or lettuce? It's lettuce, that's right. It's a type of herb called Rapunzel and he's caught stealing it in the garden the witch says all

right uh instead of punishing you i get to have your child and he's like fine because apparently his wife needs it because of her pregnancy cravings so there we go that's the intensity i was really hoping you were going to say that Rapunzel in German means ropehead. But no, it's the old lettuce. I remember being confused by that as a child. Like, they don't want us very much, our parents. That's the sort of message from that. I mean, pregnancy cravings are strong, but I think, I don't know, I don't think I'd give my child up. It's not even for ice cream, it's for lettuce. What kind of person craves lettuce? Gwyneth Paltrow.

Yeah, maybe. Well, I think we've come to the point of the show where we've heard enough about fairy tales in terms of their type, their structure and how they work. So I'd love to hear a new fairy tale written and created for us by the wonderful Sally Phillips. When you say written for you, you mean about to be improvised. Totally improvised. Right now. But that's how the best tales are told, isn't it? So what's your tale about? My tale, I will stick with the apple.

The rule of improvisation is just stick with your first instinct. So once upon a time there was and and there was not, a massive apple. An apple so large it broke the back of the tree that bore it, but an apple so handsome that all the ladies of the town fell in love with it at first sight. It was burnished with bronze and gold and all the greens of the forest. And the luckiest girl was called Leslie. And Leslie was the daughter of the weaver.

And Leslie, the daughter of the weaver, was given in marriage to this massive apple. And she took it to her bed bed but the apple was so heavy it broke the bed and it rolled down the hill with Leslie, the daughter of the weaver, chasing after it. It went down the hill

and it went through the valley and up the other side and Leslie chased after it but she wasn't terribly fit. But then all the young ladies of the next village chased after the massive, handsome, burnished apple. And they fell upon it and they tore it to bits and they ate it and were full.

Then they burped loudly and the apple became a spirit of the air and and became a small cloud and when it got to the top of a mountain it became ice and apple flavored ice fell upon the tops of the mountain where it was eaten by the bunny rabbits and the bunny rabbits even i'm bored guys i think the bunny rabbits all went green and told stories and stood up on their hind paws and that is why the bunny rabbits of the snow are green and to this day know the story of les, the weaver's daughter, and the massive apple that wouldn't have sex but rolled down a hill instead. The end. Absolutely magnificent. Extraordinary creative powers. The burp was very enjoyable.

I mean, that's really, I would argue, a very compelling story, Maria. What do you think? I love the way you sort of enacted the process of storytelling, because in some ways we dropped the ball, because we, the audience, are supposed to help you create the story. So we should have been shouting, turned into a kangaroo. When you said turned into and hesitated, we should have come back. So, you know, this improvisational quality, it's hard to do that alone. But when there's an audience there participating, it's more fun. I think it's a beautiful story.

The Nuance Window! We have reached the Nuance Window. This is where Sally and I take a little break and we allow our expert Professor Maria to talk for two uninterrupted minutes about something that we need to hear about the history and understanding of fairy tales. So, Maria, without much further ado, I would love you to launch into the nuance window, please. Well, we have seen how fairy tales are really riddles wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. They have this high coefficient of weirdness, which is what gets us hooked. And we are all storytellers. What do we all do at night? When I ask my students that question, they blush and they start stuttering. And the answer is

really quite simple. We tell ourselves stories in the form of dreams. So the storytelling instinct kicks in. And then what do we do? We remember the dream and the reflex is to interpret it, to find its meaning, to explain it. So we're not just homo sapiens, but also homo significans, always searching for meaning through these symbolic stories, which also help us create these conversational contact zones. Because what we've seen is that these stories connect all of us. That is not a German cultural heritage. They're not your property or my property.

They're ours. Go around the world and you find Cinderella, you find Jack, you find Snow White, you find Bluebeard, but they all have different names. So if you take the fairy tale train to China, you find Ye Sin, who's persecuted by her stepmother. Go to Nigeria and you'll find the story of the beautiful girl who is a cousin of Snow White, really. who is a cousin of Snow White, really. And then in Italy, there's Silver Nose, who murders his wives like Bluebeard in France. Arthur Huff Fawcett described folklore as a golden network. And it's a golden network that I think really links us not just to our ancestors, but also to our contemporaries, because these stories cross linguistic boundaries, national boundaries, cultural boundaries. And they tell us not just about our similarities, but also our differences. And they show us how things should be, how you secure a fair,

happily ever after. And that, I think, reminds me of the utopian power of the stories. We can envision a better world, a land of milk and honey, somewhere over the rainbow, Camelot, Shangri-La, Arcadia, a place where we can all live happily ever after. Thank you so much. So what do you know now? So what do you know now? Now it's time to see how much Sally has remembered. You knew quite a lot of this anyway, so I'm not sure I even need to quiz you, to be honest. But contractually, I am meant to quiz you. There are 10 questions.

This is called the So What Do You Know Now? How are you feeling? I get the feeling you're very good at exams. You're good under pressure. Are you feeling confident? That was all before I had children. I'm kind of curious now, but I feel there's no failure because there's an all-time low score to aim for. Don't aim for that. Which would be a medal I would wear with honour. Right, here we go. Question one. The French writer and Baroness Madame d'Aulnoy is credited

with coining which popular term for folk stories or wonder stories? Fairy tales. It is fairy tales. Question two. In the German fairy tale Rapunzel, what do her parents trade her in for? Lettuce. It is lettuce. Question three.

In Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, what sensation does the mermaid feel when she walks on land? Walking on razor blades or broken glass or something like that. Yeah, swords and things. Yeah, absolutely. Question four. Apple, comb, poisoned comb and corset, I now know. Yeah, absolutely. Question five. How many story types are there in the Ernie Thompson-Utter index?

I don't know, but I know you said one of them was 420B. I did. That's what I remembered. It's 2,500. 2,500, yeah. Question six. Name two different endings of Little Red Riding Hood's story around the world. In France, she's just digested. Yeah. the world in france she's just digested yeah uh in other places the huntsman has to cut her out that's right you also could have had the lap dance striptease thing next question uh how does snow white get revived from her glass coffin they drop it and it's a rudimentary harmonic maneuver and the poisoned apple flies out of her mouth

smashing against the glass of the glass coffin yeah it's probably a bit a bit like cider by that point so maybe it's a bit of a party okay next question probably to avoid criticism for writing fairy tales what did 17th century french writer charles perot do when it came to crediting his book he said that they were it was written by his son, Pierre. That's right, written by his kid. Question nine. In the 19th century, what helped make the fairy tale genre more successful and child-friendly?

The arrival of the picture book. That's right, illustrations. And final question, this for nine out of ten, which is very impressive. In the grim snow white, how does the evil queen finally die? She's branded with red hot iron shoes and dances herself to death. Absolutely right.

Sally Phillips, nine out of 10. Very, very strong. Well done. You learn from the best. Professor Maria is a world expert. It's been a brilliant episode. I've learned so much. It's been so fascinating.

I hope you've both enjoyed it. I'm sure listeners have too. If listeners want to know more about stories,'ve done other episodes if you want to sink your teeth for example into the episode on gothic vampire literature that's a fun one and of course the mary shelley episode is really great as well and remember if you've had a laugh and learned some stuff then please share this podcast with your friends or leave a review online make sure to subscribe to you're dead to me to Me on BBC Sound so you never miss an episode. But all that's left for me, really, as I wrap up my fairy tale,

is to say a huge thank you to our guests. We've had in History Corner, the miraculous Professor Maria Tata at Harvard University. Thank you, Maria. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. What fun. Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo.

I'd like to cast a happy spell on all of you. I love Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo. That's great. And Comedy Corner, we've had the spectacular and slightly magical Sally Phillips. Thank you, Sally. Thank you so much for having me. What a very great pleasure it's been. And to you lovely listener, join me next time as we turn the page on another historical tale with two different bookish buddies.

But for now, I'm off to go and order myself a pumpkin carriage on Uber to see if I can turn myself into a glamorous princess. Bye! to go and order myself a pumpkin carriage on Uber, see if I can turn myself into a glamorous princess. Bye! You're Dead to Me was a production by The Athletic for BBC Radio 4. The research was by Harry Prance and Emma Neguse. The script was by Emma Neguse and me.

The project manager was Saifah Mio and the edit producer was Cornelius Mendez. Sneakers? Trainers. Whatever you want to call them, they are amongst the most iconic cultural objects of our time. But their evolution is a story rarely told until now. From BBC Radio 4, this is Sneakernomics. Across this podcast, we're going to be telling the crazy origin stories of the most well-known sports companies

and their relentless quest to be the world's number one brand. Sneakernomics tells a story of fierce competition and rivalry, one that tore families and friendships apart and even divided towns. We'll follow in the footsteps of mavericks, hustlers and dreamers and hear their tales of boom and bust, fame and infamy, hope and heartbreak. Above all, this is the story of the people behind the shoes. From BBC Radio 4, this is Sneakernomics. Subscribe at BBC Sounds.