Violence in the Brothers Grimm's fairy tales: a corpus-based approach

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to carry out a corpus-based study on the presence of violence in a selection of eight tales by the Grimm's Brothers by looking at the terms which can be said to relate to the semantic field of violence. More specifically, this study will analyse a selection of eight tales in which the frequency of the words cut, dead and blood will be studied in detail. These words have been chosen due to their possible connection to violence after carrying out a quantitative analysis of the frequency of the whole main corpus. My initial hypothesis is that the corpus-based study of those eight tales would support my intuition regarding the high percentage of violence in the Brothers Grimm collection as opposed to the content of violence in a wider variety of texts. The study initially involved the analysis of frequencies of the lexical units in the Brothers' Grimm corpus and, secondly, a comparison of the results obtained in the frequency test to two reference corpora: the British National Corpus and the Cobuild Concordancer. The comparison and its results seem to indicate that there was a higher than average percentage of the use of words related directly or indirectly to violence.

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‘A Story of a Bird Named Bìm Bịp’: Lies, Violence, and Meaning

“…In "Hansel and Gretel," the two kids are abandoned by their parents, and later it is the sister who had to kill the witch. Alcantud-Diaz (2010) highlights that the classic Brothers Grimm collection of fairy tales contains an alarming amount of violent words, either directly or indirectly [3].…”

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“…These colorful narratives bring to life the identities, practices, values, and norms of a culture from a bygone era that may provide insights on speech play and tongue-twisters (Nikolić and Bakarić, 2016), habitat quality of farmers (Møller et al, 2017), and contemporary attitudes and beliefs (Michalopoulos and Xue, 2019;Thenmozhi et al, 2018). While the stories tend to honor the value of hard work, honesty, benevolence, and many other desirable virtues, many of such messages are undercut by actions that seem outlandish, morally questionable, or brutally violent (Meehan, 1994;Victor, 1990;Haar, 2005;Chima and Helen, 2015;Alcantud-Diaz, 2010. For example, in a popular Vietnamese folktale known as "Story of a bird named bìm bịp (coucal)," a robber who repents on his killing and cuts open his chest to offer his heart to the Buddha gets a better ending than a Buddhist monk who has been religiously chaste for his whole life but fails to honor his promise to the robber-i.e., bringing the robber's heart to the Buddha.…”

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“…In order to highlight the unique interpretation of the possible interplay between religious teachings/values and deviant behaviors such as violence and lies in folklore, this study applies Bayesian networks analysis, which is based on conditional probability and helps researchers reduce the risk of overestimating effects or making logical inconsistencies (Downey, 2012;Gill, 2002;Jackman, 2000Jackman, , 2009Kruschke, 2015;Malakoff, 1999;McElreath, 2016). Indeed, while scholars have pointed out the prevalence of elements related to violence and lies in folktales (Alcantud-Diaz, 2010Chima & Helen, 2015;Haar, 2005;Meehan, 1994;Victor, 1990), few have offered a rigorous statistical method to understand the interactions between these elements and their religio-cultural contexts. The research method follows the wave of studies on computational folkloristics, which emphasize the digitization of resources, the classification of folklore, and the necessary algorithms for data structure development (Abello, Broadwell, & Tangherlini, 2012;Dogra, 2018;Nguyen, Trieschnigg, & Theune, 2013;Tangherlini, 2013;Tehrani & d'Huy, 2017).…”