Museum tells truth of Grimm’s fairy tales
At the USU Museum of Anthropology, Saturday, Lynne S. McNeill, a professor from the English department, showed how surprising and funny the origins of today’s “Little Red Riding Hood” and Disney princesses can be.
McNeill’s lecture, “What Big Eyes You Have: The Truth Behind Grimm’s Fairy Tales,” presented the history of 19th Century German scholars Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s collection of fairy tales “Kinder — und Hausmärchen” (Children’s and Household Tales).
“Chances are if you think of a folktale off the top of your head, they collected it,” McNeill said.
Many of today’s fairy tales have been censored over time, starting with the Brothers Grimm themselves.
“We’re still able to build on these things, while still maintaining their original meaning,” McNeill said. “They were escapist sorts of stories that encouraged imagination and creativity.”
The audience laughed throughout McNeill’s lecture as she read several passages from Cinderella, such as “She cut her heel off, at her mother’s request” and “the pigeons pecked out one eye from each of them.”
McNeill said she decided to study folklore as an undergraduate at the University of California-Berkeley.
“I took a class called the rhetoric of folklore,” she said. “And pretty much on day one, I was like, ‘You can study this?'”
Brian Cook, a recent USU graduate who has taken one of McNeill’s classes, said “I’m not way into old folklore, but the way she presents it is clear and enjoyable.”
Cook heard about the lecture through an anthropology department email.
“You can be open to learn stuff wherever you go in folklore,” he said. “So whenever there’s a presentation on folklore I eat it up.”
Activities were programmed along with the lecture to entertain children. Kids could make masks of their favorite fairy tale characters, then pick a tale out of one of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales books and act out the story. Or they could color and combine different pictures to create their own storybooks.
Several of the museum’s exhibits and programs are geared towards children. There is a working loom which children can operate, a display of animal furs such as those used by different native groups and merit badge classes for Boy Scouts.
“We have events every week and a lecture about once a month,” said Jessy Swift, program coordinator for the museum.
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