Cannibalism: A Perfectly Natural History(50)

It is also possible that Shakespeare may have gotten his cannibal inspiration from Seneca’s 1st century Roman tragedy, Thyestes, in which the title character not only tricks his twin brother, Atreus, out of the throne of Mycenea, but also takes his sister-in-law as a lover. Thyestes continues his bad behavior by chiding Atreus that he can have the throne back as soon as the sun moves backward in the sky. Zeus however, overhears the taunt and “drives the day back against its dawning.” Before you can say “banished,” Thyestes is forced to surrender the throne. Atreus, though, isn’t done with his slimy sibling, and after learning of his wife’s infidelity, he invites Thyestes to a reconciliatory banquet. As part of the party prep, Atreus murders Thyestes’s two sons from the forbidden relationship and serves them to their unsuspecting dad (who has obviously not been keeping up with his readings of Herodotus). At dinner’s end, Atreus presents Thyestes with the hands and heads of his slain children on a platter, forever defining the term Thyestian Feast as one at which human flesh is served.

In short, from the Ancient Greeks to William Shakespeare, and in stories written across a span of 2,500 years, cannibalism was depicted as either the ultimate act of revenge or the gruesome work of gods, monsters, and savages (a.k.a. non-Christians and anyone living in the vicinity of some gold). By the 17th and 18th centuries, with the taboo firmly established, the threat of cannibalism would reach a new audience and serve a new purpose—as a way to terrorize children into behaving.

Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm (born in 1785 and 1786 respectively) were German academics who collected oral folk tales during the early 1800s. They did so by interviewing peasants, servants, middle-class types, and aristocrats, and they published hundreds of fairy tales in the years between 1812 and 1818. In the parade of new editions that followed, the brothers changed, added, and subtracted stories, depending on how well they had been received previously. Like the ancient Greek and Roman myths, the original fairy tales depicted violence, desire, heartbreak, and fear. They also portrayed the all-too-common hardships of their own time, especially famine and the abandonment of children by destitute parents. The language was often scatological and, as such, many of the updates the authors initiated reflected the fact that the originals were definitely not kid-friendly.

As the Grimms sanitized these tales for publication, and for a much younger readership, themes were also modified. But rather than molding them into the bedtime stories familiar to modern readers, the brothers transformed them into cautionary tales, many of which ended badly for children who chose not to obey their parents. On one level at least, fairy tales can be seen as literary relics from a time when terror was an accepted educational tool. Bearing almost no resemblance to the politically correct stories written today for kids, the original Grimm’s fairy tales were tools employed by parents to socialize children, to increase their moral standing, and to frighten them into obeying the directives of their elders.

The Grimm brothers were preceded as writers by Charles Perrault (1628–1703), a Frenchman whose 1697 Histoires ou Contes du Temps passé, provided readers with what may have been the earliest written collection of fairy tales. His most famous book, subtitled Les Contes de ma Mère l’Oye (Tales of Mother Goose) contained eight stories, including Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, and Puss in Boots, and its reception by the public elevated the fairy tale into a new literary genre. As it would be with the Grimm stories, Perrault’s fairy tales often contained a heavy dose of cannibalism. For example, most children and adults will recall that the wicked queen in Snow White wanted the title character killed. Less familiar, perhaps, is that in the original tale, the queen not only orders a huntsman to murder Snow White but to return with her liver and lungs as proof that the deed had been done. Taking pity on the innocent beauty (Harpagus style), the hunter slays a boar instead and brings the queen a Snow White–sized portion of porcine organ meat. Then, in a scene that somehow wound up on the cutting room floor at the Disney studios, the misled monarch cooks up the offal in a stew, which she eats, thinking perhaps that except for an unfortunate gravy stain, she has seen the last of Snow White.

An equally disturbing revelation is found in the source material for the Perrault fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood. Unaltered from Perrault’s story is the setup, in which the wolf gets to Granny’s house before Red. But in the original story (a French peasant tale that may date from the 10th century) as translated by Paul Larue and reported by fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes, instead of gobbling down the old woman whole (so that she can later emerge, Jonah-like, from the wolf’s bisected belly), the werewolf murders the old woman and cuts her up—storing pieces of Granny meat in the cupboard, along with a bottle of her blood. When Red Riding Hood arrives, the creature directs her to the cabinet, saying, “Take some of the meat which is inside and the bottle of wine on the shelf.” After unknowingly eating her own grandmother and drinking her blood, Red strips and the wolf tosses her clothes into the fire (“You won’t be needing those anymore,” he tells her). She then gets into bed with the hirsute granny, and after a famous bit of dialogue, Red escapes after convincing the creature that she needs to go outside for a pee (I’m not making this up).

In Perrault’s Hop o’ My Thumb, seven young brothers, led by Little Thumb, the smallest but smartest sibling, are abandoned in the forest by their destitute parents in a time of great famine. A kindly woman, who turns out to be the wife of a “cruel Ogre who eats little children,” eventually takes in the lost kiddies. In the nick of time, she hides them under a bed as her giant husband returns (luckily he knocks before entering his own house), but soon he smells “fresh meat” and drags the children out from their hiding place. Even as the kids fall to their knees, begging for mercy, the ogre is already “devouring them in his mind,” especially since “they would be delicate eating, when [my wife] made a good sauce.”