One of the most beloved fairy tales of all time, “Hansel and Gretel” shares its overall outline with some of the most endearing and haunting fairy tales out there. For this motif shows both the potential cruelty of parents, the darkness of a world without food, and the ability of children to work together to overcome the impossible. The world of the Middle Ages is different from what we usually portray, people did not want greatness, adventure and love, people wanted food.

It is not a coincidence that the French Revolution occurred during a bread shortage, or that the Russian Revolution was cured of hunger. Those with high ideals in both cases had fought for years to get people to stand up for freedom, but freedom, as always, takes a backseat to food and security. For the peasants, the threat of hunger is very real, and life is certainly very dark.

It is perhaps the need for food that makes the idea of ​​cannibalism so forewarned in folklore, from witches to the wicked stepmother in “The Juniper Tree” folklore, who is ripe with those who would eat others, especially children. And the same goes for the “Hansel and Gretel” motif, where desperation for food leads people to perform the most despicable acts, abandoning children to die and attacking them for food. It can be argued now that it was the stepmother who sent the children to die, but this was not the case in the original story, the Brothers Grimm seemed unable to bear the dark reality of life from which the stories came and thus changed to the mother for the stepmother.

Molly Whuppie portrays this dark reality in perhaps one of the crudest ways possible, as parents who have too many children leave them in the woods to die. However, it is interesting to note how easily children forgive children in all these tales, because when children make their fortune by overcoming the cannibalistic intentions of the woods, they usually go back to the parents or at least one parent. It is always interesting to note that while parents abandon their children to die, the villain in these stories is usually a rich creature in the forest that the children must kill in the ultimate game of eat or be eaten.

The story of Molly Whuppie stands out as one of the best examples of this game, as starving children find a kind woman who takes them in and then tries to protect them from her monstrous husband. In return, the eldest of the three girls plays the latest set of tricks, causing the father to slaughter his daughters and then beat his wife to death, even as the wife freed Molly from certain death. Certainly, the giant husband had tried to murder Molly and her sisters, but the sisters had done nothing to deserve his death.

The wife did not have to deserve hers either because she had tried to save the children from hunger. The message of this story, then, would seem to be that when hunger strikes, children should play with the sympathies of the rich, or rob them, because they have whole houses of food. Then the children should cheat these rich benefactors to death, to steal their treasures. For such are the dark realities of the fairytale world in which we once lived.