March 14th

         In the Introduction to the Trickster(s), the narrative decision to include food and hunger in many fairytales from childhood is an interesting one. Although I had never noticed it before, after reading the introduction it became apparent to me that this theme is quite prominent in many fairytales and even across the many versions of Hansel and Gretel that we see in this book. 

        When speaking about food in general, I think it is important to note that in many of the versions of Hansel and Gretel that we are reading, the children start out as healthy and normal children. For kids, this is a resemblance to their own lives, being well fed and able to nourish their bodies. However, the sudden change to the forest or other "foreign" areas leads the children to be starved. This lack of food, resembles a child's worst fear of being left and vacated to fen for themselves at a young age. Children cannot take care of themselves, so for fairytales to poke fun at something as scary to a child as their parents abandonment and their lack of basic necessity, is very dark. 

        On the topic of starvation and food, some can take the idea of the consistent entrance of nourishment in a religious context as well. When the children are in the forest and left to starve, they are being pushed away from what nourishes them (i.e. God). What pushes them away is a question that came across my mind while reading. In Fulano De Tal, the children were foresaken by their own teacher turned stepmother, which could be taken as the knowledge barer or in my opinion, the parental figure in ones life. Symbols of knowledge and wisdom in the Bible tend to be wild animals like deer, ravens and even sometimes trees, so the use of the forest as the "stripper" of what the children knew was very unique. On top of this, the "Juniper Tree" is used as the title of one of the versions of the story, is known as the rationale and understanding visual. In the story, the mother of the girl was buried under the Juniper tree, and the mother of the son was evil and was said to have been taken control of by the devil-- the rationale was dismissed by the inherent sin of man. In the end, the nourishment that these children find is in their own regard-- their own wrong doing and understanding, which is interesting. 

        In all of the stories we read and all of the versions of this tale that we looked at, food and nourishment is something that is seemingly a small detail. However, I would argue that in the context of these works, they reach further than just the surface level understanding and go much further into depth of our knowledge base, elating our understandings of religion as well as childhood fear.