How Some Children Played at Slaughtering

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How Some Children Played at Slaughtering

One of these days we’ll both be fine

The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: the complete first edition, Edited by Jack Zipes

My mother, who has Alzheimer’s, has been in the hospital for nearly five months waiting for a spot in long term care.

To help her pass the time, I’ve been reading her stories from the complete first edition of The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm over the phone.

I like these versions because often they are rough and a little violent and sometimes very absurd. My mother loves the absurd and enjoys reading them together.

As I read “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering,” both of us were shocked by the graphic violence.

Here’s the complete tale:

How Some Children Played at Slaughtering1In a city named Franecker, located in West Friesland, some young boys and girls between the ages of five and six happened to be playing with one another. They chose one boy to play a butcher, another boy was to be a cook, and a third boy was to be a pig. Then they selected one girl to be a cook and another girl to be her assistant. The assistant was to catch the blood of the pig in a little bowl so they could make sausages. As agreed, the butcher now fell upon the little boy playing the pig, threw him to the ground, and slit his throat open with a knife, while the assistant cook caught the blood in her little bowl.A councilman was walking nearby and saw this wretched act. He immediately took the butcher boy with him and led him into the house of the mayor, who instantly summoned the entire council. They deliberated about this incident and didn’t know what to do with the boy, for they realized it had all been part of a children’s game. One of the councilmen, a wise old man, advised the chief judge to take a beautiful red apple in one hand and a Rhenish gold coin in the other. Then he was to call the boy and stretch out his hands to him. If the boy took the apple, he was to be set free. If he took the gold coin, he was to be killed. The judge took the wise man’s advice, and the boy grabbed the apple with a laugh. Thus he was set free without any punishment.IIThere once was a father who slaughtered a pig, and his children saw that. In the afternoon, when they began playing, one child said to the other, “You be the little pig, and I’ll be the butcher.” He then took a shiny knife and slit his little brother’s throat.Their mother was upstairs in a room bathing another child, and when she heard the cries of her son, she immediately ran downstairs. Upon seeing what had happened, she took the knife out of her son’s throat and was so enraged that she stabbed the heart of the other boy, who had been playing the butcher. Then she quickly ran back to the room to tend to her child in the bathtub, but while she had been gone, he had drowned in the tub.Now the woman became so frightened and desperate that she wouldn’t allow the neighbors to comfort her and finally hung herself. When her husband came back from the fields and saw everything, he became so despondent that he died soon thereafter.

After we read stories or poems, I often will ask her what she thinks they mean, and she usually has fascinating insights. My mother was an English major in university and has always loved to read. The cruelty of this disease is that it has taken reading away from her. She stopped being able to pay attention to books several years ago.

So when we’re reading together, I recap the story after each paragraph and at the end. I also make sure that each story or poem is short because she can only retain about 30 to 60 seconds of short term memory.

With this tale though, the senseless violence of the story had her baffled. It did me too.

This was one of the tales that never made it into the later editions because it was not seen as suitable for children.

When I asked my mother what she thought the story was trying to say, she said, “I don’t know what means. What do you think it means?”

I said a few things off the cuff about how the story seems to be saying that human violence is innate and that violence breeds more violence. In the first story, the child gets away with murder without any consequences simply because he grabs an apple instead of a coin, a flawed and unfair system of justice.

Then I yammered on about the second anecdote and how the father slaughtering the pig results in a domino effect of violence as one-by-one members of his family are slaughtered or die. The story comes full circle when the father has to face the consequences of his own actions and then he too dies from despair. Everyone is destroyed. Bleak.

For some reason, my very simple, rushed, and mediocre interpretations blew my mother’s mind. Like blew her mind. It was as if I had discovered gold, she was so excited. “Oh my god, Kathryn,” she said. “Oh my god!!! How on earth did you come up with that?” “Humans are violent,” she said. “I agree.”

We talked at length about the story—the religious symbolism of the apple and the fact that the first child murderer appears unrepentant with his little laugh. We were both convinced that he would probably murder again.

And the more we talked, the more my mother was in utter disbelief about my interpretations.

At first I thought she was so awestruck because we were having a stimulating conversation, but then it occurred to me that my mother might have thought she was talking to a younger version of me. At this point in her disease, she has no sense of time. She thinks her parents are still alive and that she is in her 30s or 40s.

As a child I had undiagnosed ADHD and likely a learning disability, which made school hell and I got terrible grades. It was so bad, I was told by my elementary school guidance counsellor not bother with university.

Growing up I always felt like the unintelligent one in my family of very book-smart people.

My mother used to say, “You’re smart too, you just don’t apply yourself.” And it was her belief in me that made her defy the school’s recommendations.

So it is very likely that my mother’s shock and awe about our discussion of the fairy tale was the result of her thinking she was talking to the child version of me who hated to read, did terrible in school, and was suddenly able to interpret a fairy tale out of the blue—a prodigy. No wonder she was flipping out!

I’ll never know, but her enthusiasm was very amusing.

What do you think “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering” means?

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