Fairy Tales 2010

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Castle with and Awesome Name

I'm going to go ahead and comment on The Castle of Murder because holy crap, that is one of the coolest names for anything. Ever. Not that I approve of murder, but you know only a badass can live in a place named that.

First of all, I thought it was really strange that the author just sort of randomly included the fact that the same fate destined for the protagonist bride had been ordered for her two sisters as well. There is no mention of their involvement anywhere before or after this point and its like the tidbit was just thrown in as a second thought. It seems like an important point to note, so why is it simply a tiny afterthought? If "One must indeed know that this was the way her two sisters had lost their lives before her," why does the author render it a seemingly inconsequential and removable detail? Strange.

Second, the exchange between the bride and the old woman scraping intestines just seems weird. Initially, the old woman claims that she will be scraping her intestines tomorrow, yet somehow, only after the key had been dropped in the blood, does she assert that now the bride's death is certain. If the bride was going to die either way (i.e. whether she entered the room or not), why was the detail about the key with the unwashable blood included at all? In fact, the husband never even forbade her to enter any particular room, so logic follows that she was indeed doomed no matter what. Consequently, the detail about the key and the blood is irrelevant and seems out of place.

Lastly, unlike the other stories where the "villain" is slaughtered at the end in some fashion, at the end of this story he is only arrested (as far as we know). Considering the fact that his castle was the Castle of Murder, and considering what his former bride had said about the dealings in that place, it would seem a more fitting punishment was in order. Now that I think about it, it seems like there was an attempt to keep this story sort of "clean" by excluding any explicit killing and any excessive gore (save for the scraping intestines scene). Maybe all my points are connected.

1 comment:

  1. When studying this particular story as well, I failed to notice these inconsistencies that you've pointed out. But the more I think about it, I realize that it is a strange story with weird bits and pieces that don't really seem to fit. I agree that the comment about the bride's two sisters was completely random, but maybe it was the Grimms' way of trying to make the story more like "Fitcher's Bird". I also found it odd that the husband never forbid her to enter the room, but I think it's interesting that you say this fact means she was doomed from the beginning. Therefore, it was not her curiosity that got her into trouble; she was going to be in trouble regardless of her obedience to him.

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