Billy Ray Blog #13


This course has taught me more Fairy Tales than I could have imagined at the beginning of this semester. With all the different variations of tales across different cultures, I was able to see how similar, yet different all the tales were from each other. These tales we have learned reflect on their time periods and cultures they were brought forth in, and it’s so interesting how they stay the same, but change over decades. I learned a ton about the original tales by the Brothers Grimm and Charles Perrault. I really enjoyed the Grimm’s tales the most, and Maria Tatar’s interpretations of all the tales really helped me in understanding the tales motifs, functions, and basically just their meanings.
I must admit that I did not expect to read as much as we did in the class. Keeping up with the readings was tough because there were a lot of tales to read, some being pretty long and difficult to understand. Having other classes definitely made it a task to get the readings done. Though I thought the class was sort of challenging, I enjoyed learning all of these tales still. I spent more than enough time reading the tales and I think my grade for the course reflects that right now. I really enjoyed learning the psychological aspects of these Fairy Tales, such as when we spoke of Jung. I didn’t think Fairy Tales had this much of an impact and underlying meaning in our subconscious.
My favorite tale of all were probably the Little Red Riding Hood tales. This is because of how iconic the tale is, and since I know this tale the best out of all the tales we read. There are also so many different variations of these stories, so it was interesting to compare and contrast the variations. Some of the material we covered was pretty surprising, such as the gruesome Bluebeard tales. I didn’t think Fairy Tales had so much violence, but these tales and a lot of the Brothers Grimm’s tales provided some horrific content. All in all, I really liked this course because of how much I learned in it. It was really cool to see how these tales have changed over time in order to become the tales we know them as today.

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