22 History Facts You Didn't Learn in School, According to Reddit

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Disney chose family-friendly storylines for their fairytale movies, even though many of the stories have an older and more gruesome version in the Grimm brothers’ collection. But the Grimm brothers weren’t the only people who collected and told fairytales. The stories often predate their most famous written versions, and usually had multiple versions—some with happy and some with sad endings—before either Grimm or Disney got to them. They also weren’t necessarily meant for kids.

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There’s a lot of versions where [Little Red Riding Hood] dies and a lot of them where she lives; it kind of depends on where the stories are from and what point the society it came from is trying to impart to people. The purpose and meaning of a particular tale varies depending on the author/teller/collector, what they’re trying to achieve with the tale, and who their audience is. Perrault was writing for the French aristocracy; the Brothers Grimm were (supposedly) attempting to collect the folklore of the peasantry for scholastic purposes.

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...no, children were not originally the target audience of fairy tales. Children were often included in the audience, but they were not the primary audience. As such, the tales had lots of violence, lots of sex, lots of bawdy jokes and references, and lots of frank discussion about issues that impacted the storytellers’ worlds. For some context on when these stories might have been told, women often told such tales to each other while doing domestic work, chores, and other activities, or together with men around the fire after the children had gone to bed.