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With two Snow White movies coming out in theaters next year, it seems like an appropriate time to explore the original story itself. As it turns out, there are two true inspirations for the tale, both covered in detail over on Mental Floss. A lot of the details you recognize are included, for example:
Born in 1729, Maria grew up in a castle in Lohr, Germany. The castle is a museum today, and if you visit, you’ll be able to look into a certain famous mirror. It’s believed that Maria’s father, Prince Philipp Christoph von Erthal, gave the looking glass to his second wife as a gift.
That’s right, the mirror, the dwarves and the poison (although not served in an apple) are all here in these two fascinating stories.
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I love these fairy tale recreations by artists Larry Moss and Kelly Cheatle of Airigami.com. Kelly would use Photoshop to alter the images to look more 2D and Larry did the actual bending and twisting of the balloons. See more over at Environmental Graffiti.
Update: Kelly contacted me to let me know they both created the balloon sculptures.
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Brain Candy Toys came up with a great advertising strategy by simplifying nursery rhymes and fairy tales into adorable little math equations. Check out the rest on the ad company’s site.
Link via Laughing Squid
There have always been movies that put a clever spin on a fairy tale to make it creepy and dark. But most of the famous fairy tales we all know were fairly horrifying in their original versions. One of the seven tales is Little Red Riding Hood.
This classic went through a few revisions before it became the staple of bedtime stories around the world. In the bloodiest version, there is no hunter that saves the day and the evil wolf is actually a werewolf (but not the type to fall in love with.) After killing and dressing himself up as grandmother, the werewolf feeds bits and pieces of the deceased to Red Riding Hood. Eventually she sees through the disguise and finds a way to escape. But it’s pretty safe to say that Red Riding Hood probably had some issues to deal with after that incident.
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We all grew up with the beloved Disney versions of fairy tales and stories, which have wonderful "all’s well that ends well" happy endings. What you may not know is that Disney left out a few horrifying details from the original version in order to keep its customers happy.
Here’s a post about 10 original fairy tales in their full and gruesome glories. Take, for example, Snow White:
In the tale of snow white that we are all familiar with, the Queen asks a huntsman to kill her and bring her heart back as proof. Instead, the huntsman can’t bring himself to do it and returns with the heart of a boar.
Now, fortunately disney hasn’t done too much damage to this tale, but they did leave out one important original element: in the original tale, the Queen actually asks for Snow White’s liver and lungs – which are to be served for dinner that night!
Also in the original, Snow White wakes up when she is jostled by the prince’s horse as he carries her back to his castle – not from a magical kiss. What the prince wanted to do with a dead girl’s body I will leave to your imagination.
Oh – in the Grimm version, the tale ends with the Queen being forced to dance to death in red hot iron shoes!
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I love Mark Velasquez’s portrayal of Little Red Riding Hood in this photo. His gallery has a variety of other amazing images. Stop by and enjoy them all.
You might know beans are delicious. You may even remember all the words of the schoolyard rhyme about them, but what else do you know about the fruit? Most people take beans for granted because they seem to be such a simple side dish, but there’s a whole lot more to beans than you probably realized.
A Bean By Any Other Name
Because beans are grown all throughout the world, it’s common for certain species to have multiple names. In fact, at least 11 types of beans have four names or more and certain species like the fava bean and navy bean have over 10 names. Other names for the fava bean include broad bean, butter bean, Windsor bean, horse bean, English bean, fool, foul, ful, feve, faba, haba and habas. The navy bean is also known as Yankee bean, white pea bean, pearl haricot, Boston bean, Boston navy bean, pea bean, haricot blanc bean, small white bean, haricot bean and fagioli. You may have thought you never tried a type of bean and actually just heard one of its alternate names.
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Beans Kick It Old School
These fruits are one of the longest plants to be cultivated by humans. Broad beans have been planted and grown since at least ancient Egypt and common beans were harvested over six thousand years ago in the Americas. Most of the beans we eat fresh come from the Americas and were first discovered by Christopher Columbus.
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They Really Are Somewhat Magical
Or at least, magical enough to be involved in folklore. There are multiple folk tales that involve magical beans growing all the way into the clouds –the most famous of these is, of course, Jack and The Beanstalk. There is also a Grimm’s fairytale that describes a bean that laughs at the failure of others so hard that its sides actually split open.
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They’re Often Considered Lucky
Multiple cultures associate eating or planting beans on certain days with good luck. Certain areas of Europe consider it to be lucky to plant beans on Good Friday. In Nicaragua, newly weds eat a bowl of beans for good luck. New Year’s Day involves a number of superstitions, in the Southern U.S., Malta, Brazil and Italy eating beans or lentils is considered to bring increased prosperity in the next year.
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Attack of the Killer Beans
Certain beans, especially those that are red in color, contain harmful toxins that can only be removed through cooking. Strangely, eating these beans when they are undercooked may be more toxic than eating the beans raw. Sometimes the undercooked beans will still taste and smell fine though. The toxicity will usually not result in death, but in severe nausea and diarrhea.
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Ever Wonder What Makes Them So ‘Musical?’
It’s widely known that beans and cabbage can make you fart. The reason is that many beans have the same sugar molecules found in cabbage. Because a certain enzyme that humans don’t have in their body is needed to digest these molecules, bacteria in the large intestine digest the sugar. This digestion produces increased gases as a byproduct. Soaking the beans in water for a few hours can help reduce this problem, so will the induction of certain other enzymes, like those found in Beano.
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Hold the Beans Please
The followers of Pythagoras had a lot of dietary restrictions, on top of being vegetarian, they also refused to eat beans. The reason is unclear, but many people believe it was due to flatulence, while others believe it was because they look like female genitalia. The most commonly accepted reason though is that the beans and humans were said to be created from the same material.
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In a strange traditional ceremony, two 7 year-old girls in Tamil Nadu, India were married off to two frogs.
The ceremony, an annual feature during the Pongal (harvest) festival, is conducted “to prevent the outbreak of mysterious diseases in the village”.
The girls, Vigneswari and Masiakanni, dressed up in traditional bridal finery — gilded sarees and gold jewelery — married the frog ‘princes’ in separate, elaborate ceremonies at two different temples in the presence of hundreds of villagers.
These are two frogs that will not be turning into fairytale princes, they actually got released back into temple ponds after the ceremony. I wonder if the girls are still allowed to get married when they grow up.
Link Image Via Somegl [Flickr]
