When Fairy Tales Were Actually Terrifying (And Other Stories We Were Fed As Kids)
[From Ryan:] I need to start this off with a confession: I spent the first 15 minutes of recording this week’s episode thinking my sister wanted to do a deep dive on Wallace and Gromit. You know, the claymation duo? The cheese-loving inventor and his loyal dog?
She did not.
She wanted to talk about the Brothers Grimm. You know, the guys who basically invented every Disney movie you’ve ever seen, except their versions involved significantly more dismemberment and considerably less “happily ever after.”
But before we get there, let me tell you about the absolutely unhinged parables we were told as children growing up in Ajax, Ontario.
The Chocolate Chip Cookie Parable (Or: How We Were Brainwashed)
Here’s the thing about growing up in our household: we weren’t just told normal bedtime stories. We were subjected to elaborate morality plays disguised as tales about chocolate cake and the color red.
Stay with me here.
There was this story—we called it “The Parable of the Chocolate Chip Cookies”—about a town where the only two rules were: 1) you couldn’t wear the color red, and 2) you couldn’t eat chocolate cake. That’s it. Murder? Fine. Grand theft auto? Have at it. But chocolate cake and red clothing? Absolutely forbidden.
Enter the troll character (because of course there was a troll) who wanted to corrupt the townspeople. He couldn’t get them to jump straight to chocolate cake and red clothes, so he started small. First, it was chocolate milk—”It’s not chocolate cake, just milk with chocolate in it.” Then pink clothing—”It’s not red, it’s just pink!” Eventually, chocolate chip cookies—”Sure, there are chocolate chips, but the rest of the cookie is so good you don’t even notice them!”
The moral? You can’t even get close to making a bad choice. You need to stay as far away as possible from anything that might lead you down the wrong path. No half measures. No compromises. Just pure, unadulterated distance from anything remotely questionable.
Now, as an adult wearing a full red tracksuit while eating Godiva chocolates, I can see the irony.
The Other Parables We Survived
The chocolate cake story wasn’t alone. There was also:
The Truck Driver Story: Multiple drivers interview for a job, bragging about how close to the cliff’s edge they can drive. Two inches! One inch! Half an inch! The guy who gets the job? The one who says he’ll stay as far from the edge as possible. The intended lesson: don’t get close to danger. The lesson I learned: that half-inch guy probably drives F1 now and everyone talks about him at school.
The Egg Story (which I apparently blocked from memory): According to Jacqueline, our Mom would draw a face on an egg, tell a story about little Egbert who didn’t listen to his mom about not riding his skateboard down the big hill, and then —at the climactic moment— DROP THE EGG INTO A BOWL to demonstrate what happens when you dare not to listen to your mother. The moral? Listen to your mom or you’ll splat like Egbert. The therapy bills? Stacking higher and higher.
These weren’t Disney fairy tales. These were weapons-grade cautionary tales designed to keep us from roaming the streets of South Ajax wreaking havoc. The results? Questionable.
Speaking of Disturbing Children’s Stories...
Which brings us perfectly to today’s actual topic: the Brothers Grimm.
Here’s what I knew about the Brothers Grimm before this episode: literally nothing except that they existed and weren’t Wallace and Gromit.
Here’s what I know now: they were German academics named Jacob and Wilhelm who basically invented the concept of collecting folklore and turning it into bedtime terror fuel.
These guys were responsible for:
* Cinderella
* Snow White
* Sleeping Beauty
* Rapunzel
* Hansel and Gretel
* Little Red Riding Hood
* The Frog Prince
* Rumpelstiltskin
You know, just basically every Disney movie ever made. Except—and this is crucial—their original versions were significantly more violent than anything Walt Disney would touch with a ten-foot pole.
The Original Stories Were WILD
In the Brothers Grimm’s original Cinderella, the stepsisters don’t just fail to fit into the glass slipper. They cut off their toes to make it fit. Because ambition, I guess?
In the original Snow White, it’s not her stepmother who’s the villain… it’s her actual mother. And she doesn’t just want Snow White dead; she specifically requests her heart and lungs so she can eat them to become beautiful. Which is both disturbing and, according to my limited exposure to Sephora, a fundamental misunderstanding of how beauty works.
The Frog Prince? In the original, the princess doesn’t kiss the frog. She picks him up and throws him into a wall, where he dies and transforms into a prince. Romance!
The Brothers Behind the Tales
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were born in Germany in 1785 and 1786, only a year apart. They were two of nine children, and their father died when they were just 10 and 11 years old.
This is where it gets interesting. Look at any Brothers Grimm story and notice: there are almost no father figures. And who’s the villain? Almost always a mother or stepmother character. They idealized fathers (who were largely absent from their lives) and villainized mothers (who struggled to raise nine children alone after their father’s death).
It’s fascinating and tragic and also explains why every Disney villain is either a stepmother or literally named “Mother” something.
After their mother died in 1808, Jacob, barely in his early twenties, became financially responsible for all his siblings. Both brothers worked for the War Office in Germany, where Jacob’s job included recovering artworks stolen by Napoleon (which is an absolutely wild resume line).
Wilhelm got married in 1825, and then, in a plot twist that would make any sitcom writer jealous, Jacob moved in with Wilhelm and his wife. The three of them just lived together. Forever. Which, honestly, sounds like the dynamic of every friendship group in their twenties where one person gets married but everyone pretends nothing has changed….
The Legacy That Almost Wasn’t
Here’s the kicker: if you asked the Brothers Grimm what their enduring legacy would be, they’d have said their dictionary, not their fairy tales. They worked on it their entire lives. They viewed language as what made people German, that the ultimate bond uniting the German people was their shared language.
Their fairy tales? Just a side project. A little collection of 85 stories they released in 1812 to see how it would go.
Those stories are now translated into 160 languages and are only outsold by Shakespeare and the Bible.
Let me repeat that: The Bible, Shakespeare, and then the Brothers Grimm. That’s the bestseller list.
The Dark Side (Besides the extreme and unnecessary Violence)
During World War II, some of the original stories had anti-Semitic tones, and Nazi Germany made them required reading in schools. Every good German home was supposed to have a copy.
But then, and this is where it gets interesting, after the war, people started using these same tales to fight against the Nazis. They’d say, “I understand how you’d interpret it that way, but here’s what it actually means.” At which point the Nazis banned them entirely.
So these stories went from required reading to forbidden literature in the span of a few years. Wild.
What This Says About How We Tell Stories Today
Sitting here in my house in Okinawa, telling my daughters stories about neighborhood bad guys who jumped fences and family vacations we were mysteriously left out of (true story—I was 14 and woke up to a note that said “We went to Prince Edward Island for your birthday, here’s $25 for pizza, see you in a week”), I realize we’re all just doing what the Brothers Grimm did.
We’re taking the weird, sometimes traumatic, often bizarre things from our lives and turning them into stories. We’re giving them morals, or at least trying to make sense of them. We’re creating a narrative that helps us process what happened and maybe, just maybe, gives our kids a framework for understanding the world?
Except instead of “and then the stepsisters cut off their toes,” it’s “and then daddy and Uncle Dan stole the magic diamonds from Mayor Humdinger’s neck, which shrunk him back to size for the Durham Police to arrest him and bring him to jail.”
Progress… I guess?
My daughter and I tell stories at dinner where we take a sliver of truth from my childhood and just… see where it goes. She adds details. I add plot twists. We’re creating our own little folklore in real-time, and maybe someday her kids will listen to these podcast episodes and think “What the heck were they talking about?”
Which is exactly what I think when I remember the chocolate chip cookie parable.
The Real Moral of the Story
The Brothers Grimm had rough childhoods and used their stories to make sense of the world. They documented the brutal reality of peasant life, then tried to sanitize it enough that it wouldn’t completely traumatize children. They mostly failed at that second part, but their stories endured anyway because Disney succeeded with the sanitization.
And isn’t that what we’re all doing? Taking our experiences, whether it’s being left behind on family vacations, or watching neighborhood kids jump fences and then get arrested, or being told elaborate parables about chocolate cake and turning them into something we can share?
Stories are how we process. They’re how we connect. They’re how we make sense of the absolutely bonkers things that happen in our lives.
And if the Brothers Grimm taught us anything, it’s that sometimes the stories that stick around the longest are the weird ones. The ones that don’t quite fit the mold. The ones that maybe shouldn’t be told to children but are told anyway because someone thought there was a lesson in there somewhere.
So here’s my question for you: What weird stories were you told as a kid? What bizarre parables did your family subject you to? And more importantly: do you find yourself telling equally weird stories to your kids now?
Let us know. Seriously. We need to know we’re not alone in this.
---
Listen to the full episode for: Ryan’s confusion about F1 drivers (and his newly assigned favorite, Carlos Sainz), Jacqueline’s deep dive into why Disney owes everything to two German brothers, and Jonathan’s perfectly timed roast of Ryan’s disco-ball Christmas tree.
Subscribe to the podcast and leave us a 5-star review so we know whether to keep doing this or just accept that we’re creating content for AI training data and international cafes that play podcasts in languages their customers don’t understand.
Question for the week: What’s the weirdest parable or cautionary tale you were told growing up? Drop it in the comments or send us a message. We’re collecting material for when we inevitably write our own disturbing children’s book.
---
The Dreyer Drive Podcast: Where two siblings process their childhood one unhinged memory at a time. Hosted by Ryan (currently in Okinawa, overthinking everything) and Jacqueline (in her log house in Utah, planning surprise episodes). New episodes every two weeks.
