“A Tale about the [Ignorant] Boy Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear [Adulthood] Was”

The very second tale I ever read for this course (Week 1) was “A Tale about the Boy Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was,” and I do not think I shall ever forget it because it was just so peculiar. It has very interesting things to say about boyhood educational development, as well. Zohar Shavit writes [in “The Concept of Childhood and Children’s Folktales”] that by the nineteenth century when the Grimms were writing their tales, children had become a distinct people and that society had come to place a great emphasis on the education of these children. This is derived from the emphasis on teaching morals to child protagonists in many of the Grimms tales.

What is curious about “A Tale about the Boy Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was” is that the father has no interest in educating his youngest son, who is written off as stupid. Certainly, the boy’s education comes from his own desire to learn about “the creeps,” which is strange because children are psychologically egocentric, so why would his father just let him do what he wants? A child does not know what he needs in life; in fact, the desire to do whatever you want without care is particularly child-like. Maybe the boy is stupid, but he obviously does think about at least something, if only himself. I actually think the boy is probably just ignorant, and there is a big difference between ignorance and stupidity. (Ignorance means you just do not know something, and stupidity means you have been taught something, but you just do not understand it, or you do not know how to apply it.) Again, I would argue in favor of the boy’s ignorance because his father has no desire to teach him anything. As he says, “Learn what you want. It’s all the same to me.”

I would say that this family is actually very backward. If many German (or Prussian, at the time) families were teaching their children how to read so that they could piously read the Bible (for example) and grow up to be well-to-do adults, then why does the father not care to educate his youngest son? To me, his son is quite resourceful. He survives three nights in a haunted castle with his resourcefulness. In a way, though, I think it is his ignorance that saves him. Because he hasn’t been taught what to fear, he has no fear. Is fearlessness stupid,” though? Why is it that fearlessness is coded as stupid in this tale? (In the Daredevil comic book series, Matt Murdoch is certainly not stupid, but he is also “the Man without Fear.”)

Also, why does he get “the creeps” because of the minnows at the end of the tale? Are “the creeps” tickles? Does the boy just need to be touched? Do “the creeps” indicate a desire on the young son’s part to enter the adult world? That is, do “the creeps” carry a sexual connotation that would mark a rite-of-passage from childhood to adulthood? Also, if “the creeps” indicate fear, then is the boy actually scared to enter adulthood? Is the concept of adulthood, then, “the creeps”? In either case, it all circles back to adulthood...

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