Words: 1000
The major assignment’ writer’s choice who’s voice’ required us to alter a piece of text and present the planning and thought processes back to the class in an oral presentation. I chose the fairy tales Hansel and Greeter by Brothers Grimm to use as my discussion piece. The brothers Grim are possibly still to this day one of the greatest writers for fairy tales riddles and children’s stories. The brothers we born in 1785 and passed away in the years of 1860-1870. Theses brothers pretty much spent their whole life writing theses stories.
The story was a favorite of mine as a child. My understanding of the story has altered a lot since a was little . As a child I was always was exited to find in my imagination the gingerbread house covered in chocolate, marshmallows, Jujubes all the sweets you could think of , I would always pose the question “mum why can’t we have a house made out of leslies” . Witches and trolls and dragons always fascinated me as they were s different to everyday life. Although I am now 15 1 would still much rather see a fantasy film then an action movie. Reading the story now was quite different and surprising for me.
The story was written and told as a fairy tale but it is really an awful story with no cute animals or princess or knights in shining armor that we normally associate with fairy tales. In preparing my creative response I decided not to rewrite the story by changing “the voice” of the story but to pull out of the story the social wrongs that I believe the story was portraying . Elf I had changed the “story teller” to another person I could not have discussed all of the social issues There for my creative response was in the form off newspaper in modern day time’s . Ought a copy of the Canberra times and posted my own stories and articles onto the newspaper. I found this more difficult than I thought it would be as I tried to find newspaper testing and appropriate paper to make it look real but could not achieve this. The creative response was not the only difficult part to this assignment. I found it really hard trying to read the old formal English language and understand the big words!! I had to go too million and one internet sites to get a story that I actually could milady understand and translate to Jersey’s English.
As I mentioned before this story has a very brutal and quite sad story behind it after thinking about it and re reading it over and over it got less and less child friendly . I defiantly will not be able to read these apparent “children’s poem “the same again. Some of the issues in Hansel and Greeter are child abuse, famine and if you think about it murder. Before getting this assignment even if I read the story last week I still don’t think as a teen boy I would pick up the brutality in this story, again I think it would slip right by me!
After blabbering on for the last few minutes about Hansel and Greeter I apologize for those of you that have never heard the story. Ill now read a quick summary of the story so you can take in all of the information I have given you and really think about this fairy tale. The story of Hansel and Greeter is a German story set in the early sass’s. It is a fairy tale written about a poor woodcutter and his wife and the children Hansel and Greeter. The woodcutter’s wife does not want to keep the children as there is not enough food to eat and she convinces the woodcutter to take the children out into the forest and leave them here.
The first time they do this the children find their way home because Hansel had put a handful of pebbles from outside his house in his pocket so when they got dropped in the forest he had a path of pebbles to follow home. After getting greeted by their stepmother when they got home she again convinced they husband to take the kids back out even further into the forest. This time Hansel sprinkled bread crumbs on the path to know his way home although when they were left and set out to go home they had discovered the bread crumbs had been eaten.
The children leaked until they found a house made of sweets, they started to feast on the house when a lady greeted them and invited them in. The children’s thoughts of being in heaven quickly changed to hell, Hansel was locked up and Greeter was made to feed and look after him until the witch wanted to eat. The witch decided it was time to eat Hansel so she heated up the oven and made Greeter get in the oven to test the heat Greeter played dumb and got the witch to demonstrate. Greeter pushed the witch in and let her burn to death. Greeter ran to Handel’s cage to let him out. After releasing
Hansel they stole pearls and Jewels from the witch. They made there was across a river accompanied by a duck and could see their fathers house in the distance . They hugged their father and threw their pearls in the air. After hearing the story once more or for those of you that have never heard it for the first time , Do you guys really thing that it is appropriate for kids ? And how was it changed your thoughts towards the story? Now I’m going to finish by saying never Judge a book by its cover and what looks sweet and yummy on the outside often is not so sweet and yummy on the inside Thankful for listening .