You might have heard that the original Grimm fairy tales were far more grim than the cleaned-up versions with which we’ve become familiar.

Well, Jack Zipes, a professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, decided to translate the earliest edition of these stories into English for the first time, with all of the horror and unsavory details included.

Rapunzel is impregnated by her prince, the evil queen in Snow White is the princess’s biological mother, plotting to murder her own child, and a hungry mother in another story is so “unhinged and desperate” that she tells her daughters: “I’ve got to kill you so I can have something to eat.” Never before published in English, the first edition of the Brothers Grimms’ tales reveals an unsanitised version of the stories that have been told at bedtime for more than 200 years…

How the Children Played at Slaughtering, for example, stays true to its title, seeing a group of children playing at being a butcher and a pig. It ends direly: a boy cuts the throat of his little brother, only to be stabbed in the heart by his enraged mother. Unfortunately, the stabbing meant she left her other child alone in the bath, where he drowned.

Should kids read stories this scary? Professor Zipes thinks so,and apparently so do many other writers. Including me!