Grimms' Fairy Tales Themes

Nobody starts out life a hero. Many of the Grimms' Fairy Tales show us young 'uns who grow up and come into their own over the course of the story itself. By being bright or beautiful, or sometimes...

Maybe you don't hear about God a lot in the Disney versions of fairy tales, but holy cannoli are the Grimms' Fairy Tales full of religious references. We get saints, baby Jesus, the devil, and othe...

Nothing is as it seems in Grimms' Fairy Tales. A frog might be a prince; an old hag might be your next BFF; and you'd better watch where you take a leak in the woods. You know, in case one of the t...

Long before the invention of tax evasion, peasants and other lowly characters in the Grimms' Fairy Tales were outfoxing their oppressors, fiscal or otherwise. Sometimes foxes outfoxed their oppress...

Be loyal, or be in deep doo-doo, goes the message of many of Grimms' Fairy Tales. It doesn't matter what you think you stand to gain by betraying someone, or whether it's just hilarious to stick it...

Mawwiage. It is kind of the point of most fairy tales. More than half of the tales in the Grimms' Fairy Tales deal with marriage (yes, we counted; you can thank us later), either by describing the...

Are you sick to your stomach of beautiful princesses? Yeah, we are, too. Fairy tale appearances tend to be extreme when they're mentioned at all; someone's either the fairest in the land, or not wo...

Grimms' Fairy Tales have a strange sense of justice. Sure, the wicked get punished—except for when they don't. Cannibals and incestuous fathers often go free, while wicked stepmothers and stepsis...

Grimms' Fairy Tales are all about the haves and the have-nots. Pretty much every character is immediately identifiable by social class (unless, you know, they're in disguise). To quote the Boss, po...

Humility in Grimms' Fairy Tales is a lot like pie: it's impossible to have too much of it. You can, however, have too little of it. Having too little pie will just make you sad, but having too litt...