Now, at this point, I wanted to kill the boy myself. How stubborn can he be! When I realized I was already in the last paragraph, which meant there was no time to make it any better, I felt even more frustrated; it’d been so long a climax that the story had lost me out of annoyance. I thought the writers could have been better entertainers, right? But it was a hit two hundred years ago, so it was probably my bad. But wait! A hit I said? Rapunzel (ATU 310) is still a hit, The Bluebeard (ATU 312) and Little Red Riding Hood (ATU 333) still are, too; all them in the category of Supernatural Opponents along with this tale of this morose fellow who goes crying all along the story.

So why do children—and adults—continue to read, buy and recommend stories like these? Let’s be casual and digress a little. I think It’s like what happened to many of us with that old school anime Takahata’s Haha o Tazunete Sanzenri from the seventies (3000 Leagues in Search of Mother)—which I’ve just learned is loosely based on the story of Marco in Edmondo De Amici’s children’s novel Heart (1886)—. Go back forty years in time and we’re there—well, I am—, watching today’s episode, suffering because deep down we know he’s not going to find his mom this time either, but we can’t help it, perhaps we crave for the customary emotional whiplash, or we want to exercise our clinging to hope—maybe faith does work—.

Well whatever keeps us engaged to stories like this one seems to be difficult to appreciate in “The Tale of One Who Traveled to Know What Shivering Meant.”

I think this goes beyond Disney’s picking up “on the scariness of fairy tales as something which appeals to both children and adults” (Tatar qted. in Evans, par. 15).

Even when one decides to put aside other brilliant annotations like the ones made by professor Maria Tatar (1987), with her functional synthetic approach “drawing on the methods promoted by folklorists, the insights developed by psychoanalytical critics, and the data provided by historians” (qted. in Ward, par. 1), we have that the hero fails to be empathic; and in turn, we fail to establish empathy with him. Even the disgusting Frog in “The King-Frog; or Iron Heinrich” (aka “The Frog-Prince,” ATU 440) shows empathy when he asks the princess what ails her so much after she has lost her golden ball (like we’re told in some of the most popular versions). And one certainly talks about this matters not without fearing that professor Alan Dundes should come back from the dead just to reprimand us for treating the matter so lightly (mainly for our fallaciously dealing with a single version of a folk tale).

Our hero doesn’t display any valued trait at the beginning. And although he proves himself a man of prowess throughout the story, let’s say he does not make a first good impression. Besides, we might fail to feel bad for him because his father treats him unjustly, but we are not sure about that. In spite of being rude, his father seems to be right. Also, it is difficult for us to establish empathy because he doesn’t wish for something universally understood. Fear is natural and inherent to all human beings, unless biology fails to do its job; we don’t roam the world trying to discover what this is like; at its best, we could compare his to the want for adrenaline some people experience. And I know this is a fairy tale, but.

Good must always win. Bettelheim knew it was important for children, and so does our fairy tale. One of the problems of the story, in my humble opinion, is that most evident evil is defeated too easily; there’s hardly tension, or emotional contagion. While the less evident evil but which actually triggers the action, his father’s rejecting him, his brother’s ridiculing him, plus the social scorn which he had to stand not only are dwarfed by his obsession with learning what shivering feels like, but are never resolved—as if those lines never mattered—. At the beginning of the story we are presented with a hero and a conflict in a family context, and in the end we are left with the feeling that it will linger there forever, waiting.

(And yes, I have already considered this is ATU 326, “Supernatural Opponents” category. But I like to think Aarne, Thompson, and Uther would agree on this and then say, “Hey, we’re just doing our job.”)

Was it supposed to be funny perhaps? If they wanted to parody some Lancelot’s adventure, which I can’t tell, I’m sure Chaucer would have done it outstandingly—Certainly, I could not think of Sir Thomas Malory for this—. The kind of spicy humor we find in “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” for example, would have made this Grimm tale become not exactly a mock-heroic story, but it would have added some flavor in the last scene, when the princess, on one of her chambermaids’ advice, pours a pail of cold water and fish over her husband, making him finally—Lord, finally!—shiver. The princess would make a nice Pertelote; just imagine her telling her husband to stop the foolishness and go about some serious business—other than learning what shivering means now that he has finally learned it.

Finally, you and I know the difference between shivering because we’ve seen a ghost and shivering because we’re cold. And you and I know that this boy must have felt cold before, right? Right. Then how are we supposed to make this tale relevant for any reason other than it is one Grimm tale? That’s what I mean.