Paranormal Metrou Read your children Fairy tales The old woman in the chest Only slightly less crass, applying twentieth-century standards, than Little Peters mortal exploitation of his old mother is the tale of the woman in the chest (type 1536A), also a story of how a poor man becomes wealthy at the hands of a rich man, using an innocent old woman (usually the heros own mother) as a sacrificial pawn. The Chilean version The Miserly Rich Man and the Unlucky Poor Man is typical of versions found throughout Europe and beyond. A rich man suspects, with justification, that his poor brother is stealing food from him. To gain evidence, he puts his old mother into a chest, which he asks the poor man to safeguard for a few days. From her hiding place the old woman does indeed hear her poor son boasting about stealing a cow from his rich brother. Startled, she breaks her silence, and the poor man opens up the chest. Upon discovering the spy, the poor man jams a great chunk of hot meat and a piece of bread into her mouth, and she chokes to death. The rich brother reclaims his chest and finds his dead mother inside. Not knowing how she died and obviously fearing any official investigation, he takes the body to his brother and pays him a substantial sum to bury it. The poor man takes the money, but only pretends to bury the corpse, using it instead to extort more and more money from his miserly brother. Source: Pino-Saavedra, Folktales of Chile, no. 45. Additional examples: Die Geschichte von der Metzelsuppue, (The Story of the Meat Soup -- Swabia), Zaunert, Deutsche Märchen seit Grimm, no. 23; The Artful Lad (Sweden), Booss, Scandinavian Folk and Fairy Tales, pp. 208-220; The Woman in the Chest, Ranke, Folktales of Germany, no. 52; Wie ein Frau dreimal beerdigt wurde (How a Woman Was Buried Three Times -- Ukraine), Mykytiuk, Ukrainische Märchen, no. 35; Die gestohlene Sau (The Stolen Sow -- Austria), Haiding, Märchen aus Oberösterreich, no. 19. Tales of type 1535 and 1536A thus turn the hostility felt by members of different socio-economic classes and different generations toward each other into morbid jokes. Freud, in his famous essay Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious (chapter 3, section 3) noted that a common function of jokes is to provide verbal outlets for brutal hostility, forbidden by law. Anecdotes of the types discussed above playfully depict the killing of old people and the use of their corpses for the betterment of their offspring. These tales thus continue to reflect feelings of hostility toward the aged long after civilization has developed safeguards against the literal killing of people deemed too old to be of further use.
Posted on: Mon, 14 Jul 2014 02:49:39 +0000
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