Origin/al/s

With folklore having no written record in europe or africa, the stories passed on are essentially the same but differ with time and culture. As mentioned in class, when the game "telephone" would be played in grade school, once the story or sentence got to the end of the line, it would usually be highly skewed from the original variation. However, certain elements of the original statement can still be heard. For example the same amount of syllables and words can exist at the beginning as the end, or key words that stick out can still exist in the phrase at the end of the telephone line.

With this in mind we can start to see how folk tales evolved but shifted with time. For example, in the Darton reading, the first "little red riding hood" story, the girl wasn't even called little red riding hood, she was just called "a little girl." So obviously, the title of "little red riding hood" had to come from somewhere as the story was told throughout the years. Additionally, the gruesomeness of the tale has also been toned down. Riding hood's grandmother doesn't get chopped up and cannibalized by her granddaughter, but instead she and red riding hood are saved by the huntsman. Granted, he kills the wolf and both women pop out of its stomach undigested and un-mutilated (I'm not sure if "un-mutilated" is a word; forgive me), but that version is less vivd than "He killed the grandmother, pored her blood into a bottle and sliced her flesh onto a platter." In modern day terms, it would be equivalent to comparing a "Saw" movie to a "Harry Potter" movie. Yes there is death in both, but one is stark, gruesome, and bloody whereas the other acknowledges death but doesn't show the brutal reality of how a body can come apart.

So the question then arises as to the reason for these changes. Why tone down the gore? Why hold back? The answer, frankly, is arbitrary. These tales have evolved for hundreds of years through the dark ages, the renaissance, the victorian age and into modern day culture. Movies showing epic battles, unrelenting love, and odysseys are common place and repeated time and time again but with different characters and settings. So as times change, so does the perception of culture and humanity, and ultimately, our own reflections on these points as displayed through film/text/sound.