Wednesday'sRose
Really Experienced
- Joined
- Oct 12, 2004
- Posts
- 124
graceanne said:It's been a long time since I read Beowolf (like 10 years), but as I recall it's pretty morbid and bloody, too.
Beowulf isn't a fairy tale and it was never meant to be. It was originally a saga coming out of Viking Age storytelling in Norse society. Sagas generally came out of the drunken stories of men at feast which were mostly grand tales of adventure and word-play designed to one-up each other. The best part is that it got so popular that the Christian missionaries decide to come along and rearrange it to their purposes of conversion and they were the ones to write it down. Hence, the older version is now lost. There have been published efforts of retelling the story without the Christianized pieces in order to get it back closer to the original, but the exact story is pretty well lost forever. The version closest to the original is much better when understood for what it was, a tale of heroics and bravery from the Norse perspective at the time. It was never meant to be the morals of Christians or the times it has come into. These were different people in a different culture and the story has just been adopted by others. Besides, I doubt the early Christian missionaries saw it as much gorier than the Old Testament or the hellfire sermons that children were raised to fear.
Just two cents from someone who happens to like fairy tales and thinks that children are too oversensitized about everything today. I doubt anyone really thought anything amiss in Grimm's Fairytales when they came out, but now people get up in arms about the watered down Disney versions of them. *shrug* They are historic to when they are written and history isn't always pretty.

