A CHILD (or two)

Both “Hansel and Gretel” and “Little Thumbling” feature the children of two poor families who are sent into the forest because their parents are no longer able to feed them. There are slight differences, as there are in most tales—in Hansel and Gretel there are only two children, whereas the parents in the Little Thumbling have seven all male children, although only one is the main character. In “Hansel and Gretel”, the stepmother is the “evil” one, but it’s Little Thumbling’s father who drives him and his brothers away. The supernatural villain of the story also changes, from a witch who is alone in her house to an ogre, who’s married with seven daughters.

Little Thumbling’s brother do nothing to rescue themselves, while Hansel and Gretel save each other and can rely on each other. This is because the lesson from Hansel and Gretel is about children maturing, and becoming less dependent on their parents, while Little Thumbling is about (at least according to Perrault) not underestimating someone for their small size or quietness.

 

Hansel and Gretel try to eat the witch’s house, which is made of bread and cake and sugar, while Little Thumbling actually knocks on the door and asks the ogre’s wife for a place to stay the night. Here is when “Little Thumbling” becomes more like “Jack and the Beanstalk” rather than “Hansel and Gretel”, where the child (or children) is taken in by the kind wife of a monster instead of the monster themselves. Jack goes back several times to steal from the ogre, while Little Thumbling ransoms it from his ogre’s wife. Hansel and Gretel, on the other hand, don’t actively try to get any treasures, they just get it from the house once they kill the witch. Here, the children’s crimes differ. Hansel and Gretel experience oral greed (although narratively it makes sense they would be hungry and start eating the first food they see, and not think about “hey we might be eating someone’s house”), but Little Thumbling and his brothers do not come across a house made of food. The lessons from the two stories differ, and so the oral greed of Hansel and Gretel is very important to the story, even though it wouldn’t make sense in “Little Thumbling”. This also means Little Thumbling seems more mature than Hansel and Gretel, because there are no obvious psychosexual issues in his story. Little Thumbling, however, can be seen as materialistically greedy—he steals the shoes from the ogre and bribes all the ogre’s money from his wife. But again, it makes sense narratively that he would want to find money and use it to save his family from the starvation they were experiencing.

 

Both stories contain also murder: Hansel and Gretel actively murder the witch by pushing her into the oven, and Little Thumbling causes the death of the (presumably) innocent ogre daughters by changing their headgear. Both these actions are excused, however, because the children did not have malicious intentions and were merely doing it to survive.