With Halloween around the corner, it’s time to pull out the flashlights and prepare for some spooky evenings. In the spirit of the season, we’ve researched some Grimm’s fairytales involving dance. If you’re not familiar with Grimms, be prepared, it’s not the light and fluffy version of Disney you may be familiar with. For example, at the end of the original German version of Snow White (penned by the brothers Grimm), the wicked queen is fatally punished for trying to kill Snow White. However, the method she is punished by is exceptionally strange. she is made to dance wearing a pair of red-hot iron shoes until she falls over dead. Yikes! Check below for more controversial fairytales that fit perfectly with the Halloween season.
The tale of the 12 Dancing Princesses is a dark story about a king who discovers that his daughters are secretly escaping their bedroom every night to dance with a group of princes in an enchanted underground palace. The king offers a reward to anyone who can uncover the secret passage to the palace, but every suitor who tries is found drugged and unconscious the next morning. Finally, a young soldier is given a cloak of invisibility by an old woman, and he follows the princesses to the palace. He collects evidence of their nightly escapades and presents it to the king, who is then forced to allow his daughters to marry the princes.
The Shoes That Were Danced to Pieces is a fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm. The story follows a king who holds a ball every night and dances with a mysterious woman wearing golden shoes. The king becomes obsessed with the woman and demands that she dance with him every night. Eventually, the woman grows tired and asks for a pair of iron shoes to wear. The king agrees, and the woman dances until the shoes are worn to pieces and she disappears.
The Grimm’s fairytale, The Golden Bird, is a story about a prince who sets out to capture a magical golden bird that is capable of dancing and singing enchanting melodies. The prince encounters a group of people dancing in a circle who provide him with crucial information about how to capture the bird. The prince is then turned to stone for trading a magical horse he was instructed not to give away and his brothers go on their own quest to find the golden bird, but they are also punished for their greed and deception. One brother is turned into a bear, while the other is trapped in a well. The Golden Bird is a cautionary tale about the dangers of greed and the importance of honesty and integrity. While there are some harsh punishments in the story, they serve to reinforce these moral lessons and the bird is used as a symbol to showcase the power of dance and music to enchant.
Grimm’s fairy tales are known for their dark and sometimes gruesome themes. This is because the original purpose of these tales was not solely for entertainment, but to help teach children about the harsh realities of life and provided valuable life lessons. The Grimm brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm, collected these stories from various sources and published them in the early 1800s.