Posts tagged: x
Gruesome Fairy Tales: Sleeping Beauty
Fairy tales weren’t always for kids. Back when these stories were first told around campfires and in taverns in some medieval village there were very few kids present. These were racy, violent parables to distract peasants after a hard day’s dirt farming, and some of them made Hostel look like, well, kid’s stuff.
Sleeping Beauty: Coma Sex
The Version You Know
Sleeping Beauty is the story of a young Princess who is cursed by an evil witch so that she will prick her finger on a spindle and die on her 15 birthday. The old woman does this because she wasn’t invited to the party celebrating the girl’s birth, where other good fairies/wise women are bestowing gifts upon her. Fortunately, one still hasn’t given her a gift, and so tempers the curse–the Princess won’t die, she’ll just fall asleep for 100 years. We guess she did what she could, but still, a pretty major downer for the party.
Of course the King orders all spindles burned, plunging the kingdom into a fashion nightmare, but with the inevitability of fairy tale logic bearing down on her, the princess manages to find the one working spindle in the kingdom, and pricks her finger on her 15 birthday. She falls asleep for 100 years, until a dashing young Prince comes along in timely fashion and kisses her, breaking the spell. Everyone lives happily ever after.
What Got Changed
The first major departure in this from the version we know today is when the Princess pricks her finger on her 15 birthday. In earlier versions the Princess instead gets a piece of flax caught under her fingernail which pricks her and puts her to sleep. This might seem like a small difference but it becomes important when you consider the other major, and unsettling, change to the story.
Previous versions of the tale have the Prince who finds Sleeping Beauty think she’s so damn beautiful he just goes ahead and has his way with her right then and there. Yes, while she’s still comatose.
If that’s not disturbing enough, the rohypnol-style coupling leads to a pregnancy, and the Princess gives birth to twins, all while asleep. One of the babies, seeking momma’s milk, sucks on her finger and dislodges the flax, waking her, at which point we imagine she had a few questions.
Death from “Four Horsemen of Apocalypse” (1887) by Viktor Vasnetsov
“The Nightmare”, by Henry Fuseli (1781) is thought to be one of the classic depictions of sleep paralysis perceived as a demonic visitation.
Self-Portrait with Death Playing the Fiddle
Arnold Böcklin (1872)
spider moose, spider moose, does whatever a spider moose does..
kábé tizedik megnézésre esett le, miről is van szó
o____________________o
That awkward moment when you look at your name so much it begins to not look like a word and you begin to question your very existence and then you have an out of body experience and you start to freak out and now you have to go take a nap to calm yourself down.
this is beautiful. oh. so. beautiful.
Instead of your name keep repeating the word “me” in your head (in whichever language you usually think in); keep your eyes open but keep looking in the same direction, and try to grasp the whole concept of being “me” every time you repeat it.
Should lead you into an existential crisis in less than a minute.
(If it doesn’t, you’ve spent too much time on the Internet and/or in company of other people, and you no longer exist as an individual.)
Painting by Akseli Gallen-Kallela, depicting a scene from Kalevala, a Finnish epic poem.
The warrior Lemminkäinen had been killed, his body hacked to pieces and thrown into the dark river that flows through the underworld, Tuonela. His mother, having collected the parts from the river and sewing them back together, looks up to see a single bee bringing back honey from the halls of the god Ukko, a wondrous ointment that would bring her son back to life.
