Jewish Fairy Tales and Stories

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Rammstein and Snow White

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The music video for Rammstein’s “Sonne” has many elements that are very different from other versions of the story but is also very similar. A common symbol in the different depictions of Snow White is of the glass coffin. In “The Young Slave”, when Lisa is cursed, her mother puts her in “seven caskets of crystal, one within the other” (92) where she stays until the curse is broken. Likewise, In the Grimm Brothers’ version of “Snow White” the dwarves find Snow White lifeless on the floor after eating the poison apple and “They were about to bury her, but she still looked like a living person with beautiful red cheeks” so they put her in “a transparent glass coffin” and brought “the coffin up to the top of a mountain” where “one of them was always there to keep vigil” (101). In Ann Sexton’s “Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs” the seven dwarves cannot bring themselves to bury her, so they “bury her in the black ground / so they made a glass coffin / and set it upon the seventh mountain...
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The Turtle and The Swan

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The difference between animal brides and animal grooms is made obvious in the Japanese tale of “Urashima the Fisherman” and the Scandinavian fairytale “The Swan Maiden.” There are two types of stories about relationships between humans and beasts – The Man on a Quest for His Lost Wife and The Search for the Lost Husband . In the stories about a woman with an animal husband, she is usually faced with a terrifying beast or otherwise disgusting animal who then later has his curse broken and becomes a handsome prince. (This does not apply to the story “The Tiger’s Bride,” in which the beautiful woman is transformed into a beast and becomes more like her husband.) In the stories with animal brides, however, the woman does not usually remain a human. In most of these stories, the woman becomes human because of her love for a man. They spend time together, usually getting married, but then one day the woman, either through her becoming her animal form once again or through a folly of her h...
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1 Beard, 2 Beard, Redbeard, Bluebeard

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  I’m not sure why, but I really enjoyed the various Bluebeard stories we read for class, but If I had to pick a favorite it would be Margaret Atwood’s “Bluebeard’s Egg.” My favorite types of stories are ones with nuance, and for me this modern retelling was nuanced in which character matched up with which traditional counterpoint, as well as if the symbols and motifs meant the same things. Something that particularly interesting to me was the concept of the Egg, and how it relates to Ed in Atwood’s story.  In the story, the narrator Sally reads the story of Bluebeard in one of her classes and reflects “Ed isn’t the Bluebeard: Ed is the egg. Ed Egg, blank and pristine and lovely. Stupid, too. Boiled, probably.” (223) This is particularly interesting to me, since the character of Bluebeard in this story is not as obvious and is left up to interpretation over whether it is Ed or Sally’s friend Marylynn who is the Bluebeard figure. The image of the egg itself is also very intere...
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