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The case for not sanitising fairy tales

Haley Stewart recommends reading classic fairy tales to children without sanitizing them.

The stories compiled by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm include their fair share of violence and twisted crimes: men who chop young women up into pieces, a father who lusts after his own daughter, and many, many characters who make deals with the devil himself. While we haven’t always been so leery of the violence in fairy tales, in this strange age we subject our children to drills at their schools to prepare them for active shooters in the classroom but consider them too fragile to be told stories that take evil and death seriously. After all, as the theologian Vigen Guroian beautifully puts it in his fantastic book Tending the Heart of Virtue, “Fairy tales lead us toward a belief in something that, if it were not also so veiled in a mystery, common sense alone would affirm: if there is a story, there must surely be a storyteller.” And in this lies our deepest hope.

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