It's always so weird looking through older childrens books
This is one that my grandma gave to me when I was little (that's been used a LOT since I'm the oldest of nine lol. Most of the stories in the book are from before the 1940s). As a child I didn't find it weird at all that the father was forcing his young daughter to sleep with the creepy boy frog but now I read it and am just like... "Why?" 馃槀
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By no means all mid-20C children's stories were like that; and you cannot sweep centuries of many countries' various traditions up in one bundle.
Those written from that time onwards certainly weren't; but you have to remember that if your experience of the much older, European-tradition fairly-stories was out of Disney pseudo-sentimentality by Victorian mawkishness, that is nothing like the originals!
My parents had kept a compendium published in the 1930s, that included some translations, with graphic illustrations, of some of [i]Der Struwwelpeter[/i] poems written in Germany in 1845. They were morality-tales aimed at children, making their point by absurd levels of hyperbole - and some were really horrible.
Looking that title up simply to verify the spelling, I found [i]Der Strewwelpeter[/i], translated, is apparently still in print, rather surprisingly perhaps. Though they are most certainly [i]not[/i] the "MERRY STORIES AND FUNNY PICTURES" - in capital letters - that Frederick Warne & CO, New York, tries to claim. Unless you think that as I remember happens in one of them, it is "merry and funny " to have your fingers amputated by a supernatural figure with a giant pair of scissors.
@ArishMell wow, and awesome! thanks for the info. I love in depth knowledge, and we must make allowances for what once was normal, and now is not. Ythanks for all this!
