In fairy tales,
Everything beautiful is golden and strewn
with pearls; there are even golden people living there;
misfortune, by contrast, is a dark power,
a horrid cannibalistic giant who is, however,
vanquished,
since a good woman who knows just how to avert
misfortune stands ready to help.
These narratives always end by opening the prospect
of boundless happiness.
Evil is also neither inconsequential
nor something close to home, and not something
very bad,
to which one could become accustomed,
but something terrible, black, and wholly alien that you
cannot even approach; the punishment
of evil is equally
terrifying: snakes and poisonous reptiles devour their
victims, or the evil person dances to death
in red-hot iron shoes.


by Wilhelm Grimm,
Preface to the first edition of Kinder und Hausmärchen
Art by Caspar David Friedrich