The tale of The three little men in the wood may come across as being absolutely insane. And it absolutely is.
Our story begins with a man and a woman, both of whom are widowed, each with a daughter. Once again our characters are left nameless, so let’s call them Günther and Lena for the sake of simplicity. Lena wants to marry Günther and asks his daughter to deliver the message. Being the gentleman that he is, Günther responds: “marriage is a joy and also a torment”. Wise words, and perhaps the moral of the story, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. With torment at stake, this decision has profound consequences. So, how will Günther decide? What a silly question. With the time-tested hole-in-the-soleTM method, of course! This test entails hanging a boot (that has a hole in the sole) on a nail and pouring water into it to see if it fills up, in which case the answer will be yes. It does not get any easier than that. Günther begins to pour and, lo and behold, the water “drew the hole together” and filled the boot up. It’s unclear whether this test was performed only once or several times. An n of 1 is hardly rigorous. Oh well, Günther’s fate is sealed, so he and Lena marry. Was it joy or torment? We will never know, because this is the last time Günther appears in the story.
Marriage can be torment not only for the spouse, but also for the stepchildren, because it soon turns out that Lena is jealous of Günther’s daughter (let’s call her Olivia). Olivia is most beautiful, while Lena’s own daughter (Rita) is quite ugly. Naturally, Lena decides to get rid of Olivia in some way that won’t arouse suspicion. She figures that the best way to achieve this is to force Olivia to go outside in a paper dress, during the coldest of winter, and pick strawberries. Lena tells her not to return until the basket is full. She gives her a piece of bread as sustenance and Olivia faithfully obeys. Even a child knows that strawberries don’t bear fruit during winter, and nobody in their right mind would go outside in freezing temperatures wearing nothing but paper, which leads me to think that Olivia is a complete imbecile. She shouldn’t be faulted for this, of course, but where is Günther to put a stop to this nonsense? I guess he must have been away at the time. Anyway, Olivia leaves for the forest where she eventually comes across a small cottage. It’s inhabited by three dwarves, although they’re occasionally referred to as elves or little men, so clearly the politically correct terminology was already under debate at the time. Either way, Olivia shares her bread with them and sweeps their backyard of all the snow, finding lots of strawberries in the process. The little men have magical powers, and they each cast a spell on Olivia, blessing her for being kind and helpful. The first spell causes a gold coin to come out of her mouth every time she speaks. This sounds like both a blessing and a curse to me, but alright. The second spell causes Olivia to grow more beautiful by the day, and the final spell will ensure that a king will marry her. Olivia returns home and conveys what happened (presumably spitting gold coins all over the place). Rather than being thrilled by all this gold, Lena is angered, since she would have preferred for Rita to be blessed. Lena therefore sends out Rita the next day, hoping that she will reap the same rewards. However, unlike Olivia, Rita is provided with a big fur coat to keep her warm, as well as bread, butter and cake to avoid going hungry. Rita arrives at the little men’s house, but does not share any of her food and refuses to sweep their backyard. As punishment, the dwarves curse her to spit frogs when she speaks, grow uglier with each day, and die a miserable death. Few things are as off-putting as a selfish and entitled brat, but this is somewhat of an overreaction in my opinion. I don’t know, maybe she called them midgets. In any case, it doesn’t matter because this is the last time the persons of small stature appear in the story.
Rita returns home, without strawberries, and recounts what has happened (spitting frogs everywhere). Lena is infuriated, and rightly so, for nobody wants a household full of frogs (well, maybe the French), but she directs her anger toward Olivia in the most logical way possible, namely by boiling some yarn, throwing it on Olivia’s shoulder, giving her an axe and ordering her to carve a hole in the lake and rinse the yarn in the icy water. It makes absolutely no sense to boil the yarn if it’s supposed to be rinsed right afterwards, which leads me to believe that Lena is a complete imbecile. Perhaps the point was to force Olivia to do something completely pointless, just to demonstrate power. Well, power she has because Olivia once again obeys and heads out. While she’s rinsing the yarn, a king rides by, is struck by her beauty and asks if she will come with him. Tired of being abused, Olivia agrees.
Eventually, Olivia gives birth to a child. Having heard of this good fortune, Lena visits Olivia when the king is away, flings her out of the window into a stream and brings in Rita to take Olivia’s place. The king returns, notices that his supposed wife is spitting frogs rather than gold coins and gets suspicious. He seems to not be distracted by the fact that it’s an entirely different person, and a very ugly one at that, but Lena assures him that his wife is just feeling ill. Amazingly, the king buys this excuse and carries on with his day, which makes me think that he is a complete imbecile. That same evening, a servant sees “a duck swimming up the gutter” that speaks in verse. The duck nurses Olivia’s baby, then returns to the gutter. Nobody seems to be particularly disturbed by this clearly cursed duck, because they simply ignore it. However, the duck gets tired of nursing after three days and asks that the king swing a sword three times over her head by the threshold to the castle. The king obliges, the duck transforms back into human form (it of course being Olivia) and is reunited with her king. Together, they punish Lena and Rita by putting them in barrels full of nails and rolling them down a hill into the water. The end.
Insane indeed. However, if we look past all the absurd plot points, this story actually has a very interesting lesson to teach. One that keeps recurring throughout these fairy tales. We could easily assume that the moral of the story is to treat strangers with kindness, but we would be wrong. The actual lesson here is to be wary of stepparents. Yes, I said it. As it happens, the presence of a stepparent in the home (all else being equal) is more likely to result in child abuse; a phenomenon which aptly has been called the “Cinderella effect”. Those who adopt, or marry into families with children, deserve admiration, and I don’t doubt that being a stepparent is difficult. However, there is no escaping that we are biological creatures that have been shaped by natural selection to care deeply about those that share our genes, and less so about those more distantly related. Adopted children do not share the genetic relatedness that biological children do. From the point of evolutionary theory, it therefore doesn’t come as a surprise that stepparents are more likely to abuse their adoptive children than their own biological offspring. This unfortunate fact cannot be explained without an evolutionary understanding of human nature. However, sociologists have been hesitant to accept biological explanations for these kinds of social phenomena, if not outright hostile to them. When evolutionary psychologists explain why humans act in terrible ways, it is often misconstrued as condoning the behavior. But this argument doesn’t make any sense, since we don’t accuse biomedical scientists that study how cells metastasize of condoning cancer, which all in all leads me to believe that sociologists are complete imbeciles.
Sorobetea 