Natalia Naman Temesgen: Those fairy tales aren't really so fair

My husband and I read to our 18-month-old daughter before bed. Sometimes I'm tired of "Moo, Baa, La La La," and instead lull her to sleep with fairy tales from memory. "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" is my favorite. As she drifted off the other day, I told her again about the little girl who found an empty house, broke the furniture, ate the food, and slept in strange beds only to find -- oops! Bears live here.

My husband's job at the district attorney's office must have been on my mind, because I realized Goldilocks has some charges coming her way! Theft. Breaking and entering. She might be looking at real jail time. Not the innocent bedtime story I presumed, perhaps.

Indeed, most of the classic fairy tales we grew up with, many sanitized by Walt Disney, were originally rife with violence, sex and misfortune. For example, the original Charles Perrault version of "Little Red Riding Hood" ends with naïve Red being led astray and devoured by a devious wolf. No woodsman comes to save the day. She's just dead meat. Moral? Stranger danger. And also, don't trust a wolf in drag.

Consider Snow White. Even in the 1937 Disney film, there is a serious threat of violence. The evil queen asks the huntsman to find Snow White, kill her and bring her heart back as proof. He doesn't, and he brings a boar's heart back instead. In the original Grimm version, the queen wanted her lungs and liver too. Why not save your breath and keep baby up for the latest "American Horror Story" episode?

How about Sleeping Beauty? This story seems pretty harmless. Well, the original version was an Italian fairy tale called "Sun, Moon and Talia." Like Aurora in the Disney film, Talia is the daughter of a great lord who pricks her finger on a spindle one day and falls unconscious.

Here's where the two versions differ greatly. Her father keeps Talia in a wooded estate, where he hopes she will one day awake from her slumber. She is discovered there by a huntsman who finds her incredibly beautiful and, unable to wake her and get a "yes means yes," he is intimate with her lifeless body. Then, the charmer heads back to town and gets hitched.

What about true love's kiss? Well, it isn't really a kiss at all. From her deep sleep, Talia delivers twin babies (the Huntsman's). Hungry, they suck her fingers looking for milk and happen to suck out the splinter that sent her into the deep sleep all those years ago. True love's kiss comes from her newborn, not a man.

Most of these stories were cautionary tales. If it gave the kids a little fright, but kept them from wandering off in the woods alone, trusting strangers or touching what didn't belong to them, the fright was worth it. I get it. But all the same, Goldilocks suddenly made "The Hunger Games" seem tame. "Moo, Baa, La La La" it is, baby girl!

-- Natalia Naman Temesgen is an independent correspondent. Contact her at nataliadian1@gmail.com or on Twitter @cafeaulazy.

This story was originally published October 11, 2014 at 10:28 PM with the headline "Natalia Naman Temesgen: Those fairy tales aren't really so fair."