The Grimm brothers were preceded as writers by Charles Perrault (1628–1703), a Frenchman whose 1697 Histoires ou Contes du Temps passé, provided readers with what may have been the earliest written collection of fairy tales. His most famous book, subtitled Les Contes de ma Mère l’Oye (Tales of Mother Goose) contained eight stories, including Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, and Puss in Boots, and its reception by the public elevated the fairy tale into a new literary genre. As it would be with the Grimm stories, Perrault’s fairy tales often contained a heavy dose of cannibalism. For example, most children and adults will recall that the wicked queen in Snow White wanted the title character killed. Less familiar, perhaps, is that in the original tale, the queen not only orders a huntsman to murder Snow White but to return with her liver and lungs as proof that the deed had been done. Taking pity on the innocent beauty (Harpagus style), the hunter slays a boar instead and brings the queen a Snow White–sized portion of porcine organ meat. Then, in a scene that somehow wound up on the cutting room floor at the Disney studios, the misled monarch cooks up the offal in a stew, which she eats, thinking perhaps that except for an unfortunate gravy stain, she has seen the last of Snow White.
An equally disturbing revelation is found in the source material for the Perrault fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood. Unaltered from Perrault’s story is the setup, in which the wolf gets to Granny’s house before Red. But in the original story (a French peasant tale that may date from the 10th century) as translated by Paul Larue and reported by fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes, instead of gobbling down the old woman whole (so that she can later emerge, Jonah-like, from the wolf’s bisected belly), the werewolf murders the old woman and cuts her up—storing pieces of Granny meat in the cupboard, along with a bottle of her blood. When Red Riding Hood arrives, the creature directs her to the cabinet, saying, “Take some of the meat which is inside and the bottle of wine on the shelf.” After unknowingly eating her own grandmother and drinking her blood, Red strips and the wolf tosses her clothes into the fire (“You won’t be needing those anymore,” he tells her). She then gets into bed with the hirsute granny, and after a famous bit of dialogue, Red escapes after convincing the creature that she needs to go outside for a pee (I’m not making this up).
In Perrault’s Hop o’ My Thumb, seven young brothers, led by Little Thumb, the smallest but smartest sibling, are abandoned in the forest by their destitute parents in a time of great famine. A kindly woman, who turns out to be the wife of a “cruel Ogre who eats little children,” eventually takes in the lost kiddies. In the nick of time, she hides them under a bed as her giant husband returns (luckily he knocks before entering his own house), but soon he smells “fresh meat” and drags the children out from their hiding place. Even as the kids fall to their knees, begging for mercy, the ogre is already “devouring them in his mind,” especially since “they would be delicate eating, when [my wife] made a good sauce.”
The story ends badly for the ogre who, thanks to Little Thumb, slits the throats of his own seven daughters by mistake. Adding to the ogre’s misery, Little Thumb not only manages to steal the ogre’s magic boots but also cheats Mrs. Ogre out of all of their money. The tiny lad then returns home “where he was received with an abundance of joy” from his father who quickly realizes that he can probably retire from a career spent tying together bundles of twigs. One moral of this story is that you should not knife anyone in a darkened room where your kids are sleeping. Another appears to be that child-eating cannibals will not live happily ever after.
The brothers Grimm revisited a similar plot in Hansel and Gretel, which also detailed the abandonment of the young and the threat of cannibalism. The story begins with a concise and vivid portrayal of famine (“great scarcity fell on the land”) but in the Grimms’ tale, rather than an ogre’s wife, a kindly old woman takes in the lost brother and sister. The hag, however, quickly reveals both her true witchy identity and her intentions after she locks Hansel in the stable. “When he is fat I will eat him,” she cackles, and later, “Let Hansel be fat or lean, tomorrow I will kill him and cook him.”
Other fairy tale writers also employed the cannibalism angle, most notably Englishman Benjamin Tabart (1767–1833) in his 1807 story The History of Jack and the Beanstalk. According to Maria Tatar, a leading authority on children’s literature, Tabart, like Perrault and the brothers Grimm, based his tale on older tellings of the story. Although Jack existed in many versions, it is Tabart’s that would become the model for subsequent adaptations, notably that of Joseph Jacobs, who compiled and edited five popular books of fairy tales in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
In Tabart’s story, Jack is “indolent, careless, and extravagant,” and his actions bring his mother to “beggary and ruin.” Trading in the family’s milk cow to a stranger for a handful of seeds seems like a typical move for this lame incarnation of Jack, but of course things get interesting when his mother tosses the seeds away and an enormous beanstalk shoots up in hyper-bamboo fashion just outside their cottage. Climbing the ladderlike super stem, Jack meets a curiously tall woman and asks her for some breakfast. “It’s breakfast you’ll be if you don’t move off from here,” she tells him. “My man is an ogre and there’s nothing he likes better than boiled boys on toast.” But Jack is starving and, ignoring the danger, he convinces the wife to bring him back to her place for a bite. Soon enough, though, the ground is rumbling and Jack barely has time to jump into the oven before the Big Guy bursts in, reciting the most famous lines in all of ogredom:
Fee-fi-fo fum,
I smell the blood of an Englishman,
Be he alive, or be he dead