Name: Top 10 Scary Fairy Tale Dark Origins
Uploaded: 2020-05-13T03:54:47.000Z
Duration: 10 min 45 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hello and welcome back to the Most Amazing Channel on the internet.

I am your host Rebecca Felgate, and today we are talking about the dark and scary origins of your favourite fairy tales!

Before we get into the video, why don't you guys let me know what your favorite fairy tale is!

I think maybe "Sleeping Beauty", but now I've found out what the origin is—not so much.

Also, while you're down there, why don't you like this video and share it with a friend.

If you guys want to connect with me on social media, there's a link to my Instagram in the description box.

Coming in at number 10 we have "Pinocchio".

All Pinocchio wants to do is be a real boy, but that is not happening in Carlo Collodi's original version of the tale.

In the 1800s' version of the tale, Pinocchio kills Jiminy cricket by throwing a hammer at him.

Well, he's angry at the cricket for being a bit of a know-it-all, so he batters him.

He doesn't even really feel that bad about it, to be honest.

He then falls asleep by the fire and his feet burn off, but it's alright because good-old Gepetto builds him some new ones.

Then, naughty Pinocchio is hung from a tree and suffocates.

One way to scare the kids into good behaviour, I guess.

Coming into number 9, we have "Sleeping Beauty".

So the original tale of "Sleeping Beauty" is a story called "The Sun, Moon, and Talia", and is like sleeping beauty, about a princess that falls into a deep sleep.

OK, at first, the similarities are on point.

And instead of being prophesied to prick her finger on a spindle and spinning wheel, it's flax and hemp that are a problem.

The girl does get flax stuck under her fingernail and falls into a deep sleep.

Her rich father has her enshrined in a mausoleum in the woods, where one day an older king from another kingdom finds her.

He then rapes her corpse, then leaves her.

She then gives birth, and fairies look after her babies, until one day, one of her kids sucks the flax out from under her fingernail and she wakes up to 2 surprises.

She names her kids Sun and Moon as they, like the celestial bodies, are a mystery to her.

The rapey and older king returns to find her awake and they fall in love, which is really weird.

The only problem is, other than the rape, is that he has a wife.

His wife then finds out and orders her chef to cook her husband's kids and kill the mistress, but he manages to find out first and kill her.

The king, Talia, Sun, and Moon live happily ever after.

Coming in at number 8 we have "Cinderella".

"Cinderella" is a heartwarming rags-to-riches tale.

And yeah, the version we know today is sad, what with Cinderella being an orphan and everything, but beyond that, Cinders does get a benevolent fairy godmother who helps her deal with her sisters and wicked stepmother.

It all works out alright in the end, though.

That slipper fits and she marries her prince.

Alright, sure, but in the origin version, her ghastly sisters chop parts of their own feet off to be able to fit in the slipper.

The prince only finds out when he finds blood in the shoe.

Eventually he does find out that Cinderella is the true owner of the slippers and they get married, but that isn't all.

Coming in at number 7, we have "Snow White".

So, we all love a bit of Snow White, right?

In the story we know and love, Snow White is a princess with a wicked stepmother who forces her out of her home, because she's jealous of her beauty.

She meets 7 kindly dwarves in the woods who take care of her, but when the wicked stepmother finds out she's still alive, she tries to poison her.

Later, she's awoken by a prince with a true love's kiss.

Things weren't so cutesy in the original Brothers Grimm Tale.

Snow White is indeed cast out, but the wicked stepmother, Queen of the Kingdom, asks a huntsman to murder her in the woods and bring back her heart and lungs so she can eat them.

The huntsman does spare her, but the queen finds out and eventually tries to kill her 3 times.

Eventually, she gatecrashes Snow White and the prince's wedding, and is then forced to put on a pair of burning hot iron shoes that have like, been in a fire all day and then she's forced to dance in them until she dies.

Her flesh is immediately badly burned, but she eventually drops dead of exhaustion.

Honestly, that sounds more like the origin story behind the "Red Wedding" not a beloved fairy tale. Coming in to number 6.

I hadn't heard of "The Goose Girl" but I hear it's a very popular tale in Germany and Eastern Europe after doing A bit of research,

It's a bedtime fairy tale and its origins are the stuff of nightmares.

To cut a long story short, in the original tale, a deceitful maid is thrown into a barrel with spikes and rolled around till she dies.

That does sound particularly grim. Is it worse than being hung, drawn, and quartered or better?

Coming in to number 5, we have "Hansel and Gretel".

There are kind of two twisted origin stories here that merged to create one tale told verbally for hundreds of years, but first written down by the Brothers Grimm.

So, back in medieval Germany, where the tale is set, there were wide-spread famines and people simply could no longer provide for their children.

So they abandoned them, leaving them to die alone in the woods, possibly from starvation, or maybe by being savaged by animals.

The next part of the tale comes from the story of a pair of rival bakers.

One of them had the misfortune of being a woman.

Katharina Schraderin was well-known for her incredible gingerbread in her German village in the 1600s.

A competing male baker became jealous of her success, so played on a timeless trend of smearing the woman with nasty rumours.

In accusing her, he convinced others to track her down.

The posse then rounded her up and burned her to death in her very own baker's oven. Right.

The original "Mulan" was written by Chu Reno and was called "The Ballad if Hua Mulan."

In the ballad, like in the fairy tale, she disguises herself as a man in order to join the army and she falls in love with Luo Cheng.

When she comes back from war, she discovers hat her father has died and her mum has remarried.

Not only that, the man who waged war in the first place has called for her to be his concubine, so basically a sex slave.

Instead of doing that, she commits suicide.

But before she does, she gets her sister to dress as a man and send a letter to Luo Chang.

Her sister does, but then ends up sleeping with him herself.

Coming in to number 3, we have "Red Riding Hood."

The story of "Red Riding Hood" that we know and love today, includes a grandma, a wolf, and a little girl, and a hunter.

Despite a few darker undertones, the story has a happy ending and Red Riding Hood is reunited with her grandma and the bad wolf is killed.

In the earliest versions, which were said to originate in Italy and were said to be named things like "The Story of Grandmother" or "False Grandmother," actually things are pretty gnarly.

In these early versions, while it was usually a wolf that did the taunting, some actually had vampires or ogres after the little girl.

In the origin tales, the wolf does kill the grandmother and then gets Red Ridinghood to unwittingly eat her body and drink her blood.

He then strips the girl naked, forces her to burn her clothes and then makes her get into bed with him.

In most of the old stories he eats her, but in some, well, it's worse.

Coming in to number 2, we have "The Pied Piper of Hamlin."

It's a popular, but admittedly dark, fairy tale in which a town in lower Saxony, Germany is infested with rats, as it probably would have been in the Middle Ages.

Enter the Pied Piper, a man with a magical pipe who does a deal with the town mayor to lure all of the rats away.

He does this successfully and the town is rid of the rodents, however, the mayor refuses to pay, so the Pied Piper uses his magic pipe to lead away all of the town's children in revenge.

Well, it turns out the dark origin here is that, it's actually true.