The Lesser-Known Fairy Tales in Grimm

Here is Rachel Rackham to give us this week’s guest post from Dr. Rudy’s Applied English class Winter 2017.   Warning, spoilers ahead! If you have not watched the series finale of Grimm, or are not caught up with the episodes, stop reading, and go catch up first! Then, keep reading, as Grimm is pretty great! “The wolf thought to himself, what a tender young creature. What a nice plump mouthful . . .” Not only is this excerpt found in the 1812 …

Fairy Tales on the Small Screen: Summing up the Salon

Not so long ago, not so far away, a group of project participants and like minded individuals gathered to discuss the classic salon topic of fairy tales and this newfangled invention of television. Well, maybe television is not exactly bleeding edge, but it would certainly be foreign to those creating the genre of fairy tales in salons in the 18th and 19th century. We replicated these social and educational gatherings to celebrate and discuss what might be the end of …

Fairy Tale and Place: Between Portland and Storybrooke, PT 1

When it comes to fairy tales on television, the big heavy hitters are, of course, NBC’s Grimm and ABC’s Once Upon a Time (OUAT). Both of these fairy tale shows are live-action and share a protagonist that is introduced to the hidden, fairy tale world. These protagonists, Nick from Grimm and Emma from OUAT, first inhabited our world—Nick from Portland, Oregon, and Emma from Boston, Massachusetts. In the course of the shows, both Nick and Emma encounter the other-wordly. Nick unearths a hidden society of fairy-tale and dark creatures in …

Pied Piper in Police Procedurals

Picture the scene: police tape, a music institute, a car, and inside the car, a well-esteemed music teacher—or what’s left of the well-esteemed music teacher. Crawling over him and in him and through him are the furry bodies of nightmares, rats.  Music, crime, rats. What comes to mind? For me, anytime music and rats are linked, I think of the “Rat-Catcher of Hamelin,” aka, “The Pied Piper.” Of course, fairy tales are a very big part of my life, but then again, fairy …