Le Salon Literary Discussions Le Salon Literary Discussions

Welcome to this new Le Salon Literary Discussions podcast series about the brothers Grimm. You’ve probably heard the name before and can identify some of the fairy tales they collected, but in this series, we’re going to tease out themes from the tales to take a closer look at them—and I think you’re going to be surprised what we find!
In this episode we’ll explore who the brothers were, how they collected and published their most famous work Kinder-Und Hausmärchen, which translates to Children’s and Household Tales, and which stories were included in the first edition.
[2:45] “I promise you this series is going to give you something new to think about regarding these very old tales.”
[10:01] “And while ‘children’ might appear in the title, at first the brothers didn’t even consider what might attract children as readers to their stories.”
[15:08] “But this tradition on paper must begin somewhere, and without the collection from the Grimm brothers we wouldn’t have them to reimagine and reshape as our sensibilities and values evolve. That is the beauty of these stories.”
More resources for you:
Join the book club you’ve been looking for! Follow me on Instagram @lesalonreads. Visit my website.

From women storytellers to male writers, hear how sexism and the patriarchy were woven into the Grimm fairy tales. In this second episode in the series, we’ll trace how the brothers Grimm crafted competition between female protagonists and antagonists (centered on beauty and youth) and made physical labour around the home a way to show marriageability to princes and kings.
And these 19th century Grimm fairy tales aren’t entirely dated. You’ll hear about a study from the 1990s that demonstrate gender bias in these types of stories and we’ll examine the evolution of Disney’s take on the fairy tale princess—from Cinderella to Aladdin, Mulan to Brave.
[4:38] “…telling these stories among women, in spaces that were mostly exclusively female, was a way to offer caution around subjects that still to this day make victims feel shame.”
[6:29] “These edits not only wiped out the female experience we can infer from the original oral tale, but also begins to pit woman-versus-woman and demonstrate ‘desired’ female traits.”
[13:24] “Based on this, female readers come to understand that they must remain industrious to get and keep a husband—there is no room for laziness or complaints.”
More resources for you:
Join the book club you’ve been looking for! Follow me on Instagram @lesalonreads. Visit my website.

In today’s episode we’re looking at the daddy of all patriarchal systems (pun intended!), the church and its teachings and how they are reflected in the Grimm fairy tales. After a quick refresher on Lutheranism, we dive into how Eve’s curiosity in the Garden of Eden becomes problematic, marriage as the only happily-ever-after, and Old Testament justice.
Further reading:
The Truth About Stories by Thomas King The Owl, The Raven, and the Dove: The Religious Meaning of the Grimms' Magic Fairy Tales by G. Ronald Murphy. [7:45] “So even though we get fairy tales, like The Frog Prince or Beauty and the Beast, that propose marriage between a woman and a creature, the animal is generally gendered to be masculine.”
[11:11] “In fact, early editions of the story point to the wife’s curiosity, her disobedience, and her gaining of knowledge as worse transgressions than Bluebeard’s murderous ways.”
[13:22] “In this story, not only do we see religious figures but the emphasis on the redemption found in confession.”
More resources for you:
Join the book club you’ve been looking for! Follow me on Instagram @lesalonreads. Visit my website.

From Germany to Japan, Chile to Iceland! In this episode we’ll be looking at how the tales collected by the brothers Grimm in Children’s and Household Tales have corresponding stories in other locations around the world. We’ll look specifically at fairy tales “Hansel and Gretel” and “Snow White” to demonstrate how the kernel of a story is mirrored in different countries.
[7:59] “Turning our mind east, we can’t ignore the parallels between ‘Hansel and Gretel’ and the often-present fairy tale witch in Russian tales called Baba Yaga.”
[20:42] “And it isn’t a group of dwarves, but Bedouin, who actually teach Rimonah to ride a horse and use a sword. She becomes renown, not for her beauty, but for her swordsmanship…”
[23:28] “The stories from Children’s and Household Tales entered the public domain before the turn of the twentieth century, making them widely available for reproduction—for more than 100 years now.”
More resources for you:
Join the book club you’ve been looking for! Follow me on Instagram @lesalonreads. Visit my website.

This is going to be one of those episodes where once you hear about the patterns, you won’t be able to unsee them as you read the Grimm’s collected tales!
In this episode we examine common symbols in fairy tales and tease out what they mean. What is so interesting is that these symbols—the rule of three, clothing, the forest, roses—create a subtext or language all their own in the stories making them incredibly interesting to analyze. {Here is the link to the Fashion Institute of Technology exhibit on fairy tale fashion.}
[11:28] “While we might find fun sitting back and watching, there is undoubtedly a power dynamic and class consciousness aspect going on here with fashion at the centre.”
[15:21] “There is also something inherently magical about this wildness. It is a place of death and rebirth, decay and beauty.”
[22:14] “I believe it is this aspect that has kept works like the 1812 fairy and folk tales collected by the Grimm brothers interesting to readers and scholars alike.”
More resources for you:
Join the book club you’ve been looking for! Follow me on Instagram @lesalonreads. Visit my website.

Alterations to the Grimm collected fairy tales have been ongoing since, well, the brothers began editing them in the early 1800s! The short tales lend themselves to a kind of metamorphosis that keeps them present across time and borders. In this episode we look at modern retellings of these established stories in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that reimagine and reintroduce elements—creating new fairy tales for us to remember!
[5:09] “A stark contrast to Grimm characters who had these traits of heroism and courage baked into their personality because they are male.”
[13:11] “This allows us to wonder: what if the step-mother didn’t want to be in the mother role at all? Maybe she just doesn’t connect with children.”
[17:27] “Some scholars claim that stories we are exposed to before our teenage years have a lasting impact on us, we absorb them in a way we don’t with stories read later in life.”
Books mentioned in this episode:
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter Bluebeard’s Egg by Margaret Atwood The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood Surfacing by Margaret Atwood My Mother, She Killed Me My Father, He Ate Me [anthology] Uprooted by Naomi Novik Hunted by Meaghan Spooner Boy, Snow, Bird by Helen Oyeyemi's How to Be Eaten by Maria Adelmann Rouge by Mona Awad More resources for you:
Join the book club you’ve been looking for! Follow me on Instagram @lesalonreads. Visit my website.