This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

Say the words fairy tale and a pleasant vision comes to mind.

Beautiful princesses, charming dwarves, and adorable animals.

But in their original incarnation, fairy tales were a lot grislier

than the sunny stories we tell today.

Grimm's fairy tales, first published in Germany in 1812, included stories like the robber

bridegroom. It told of a young woman who visits the home of the man to whom she is engaged,

only to discover that he is the leader of a band of cannibalistic robbers.

She hides and watches as the robbers murder another young woman,

cut her up, and eat her.

She exposes the robbers by giving the authorities a victim-severed finger,

which has a ring on it.

In another tale, called the juniper tree, a stepmother kills her stepson, chops him up, and serves him in a stew to his unsuspecting father.

His sister collects the boy's bones and buries them under a juniper tree.

The boy is reborn as a bird who kills the stepmom by dropping a stone on her head.

Even Snow White, the sweet story we know from the Disney version, was far scarier in original form.

The evil queen, jealous of her beautiful stepdaughter Snow White,

tries several times to kill the girl. After the evil queen is caught, she is forced to wear

red-hot iron shoes and dance until she dies. Today, these collections of gruesome and ghastly

tales are often presented to children in highly

sanitized form. As parents and teachers, many of us are worried about causing irreparable

psychic harm. But what does that say about earlier generations of caregivers who happily read

...