The Meaning of the Fairy Tale "The Ginger bread man"
Run, Run as fast as you can you can't catch me I'm the Gingerbread Man.
Of all the fairy tales the Gingerbread man is perhaps one of the oddest. After all what are we to make of parents who wish for a child and so make one of Gingerbread only to have it run way from them and everyone else it encounters except for the one thing it should run away from? The Gingerbread Man is a good example of how religion can be mixed into a fairy tale and than be forgotten to leave most people bewildered. To understand the Gingerbread Man’s fairy tale then we must begin with the religious aspect of the fairy tale.
We must first understand that the oven itself was a sacred space throughout most of Europe, one which was prayed to for many things including healing. Thus if a child was deformed such that they would be unable to walk the parent would wrap them in dough and put them in a warm (but not hot) oven and ask that their deformity be healed. The hope was that when the child came out he would be whole and thus able to walk, run, help in the fields, and keep the parents company. Yet the child doesn’t keep them company, instead he runs away from them, the question is why?
This is of course one of the parents great fears, that their child will simply reject them and the Gingerbread Man appears to have done just that as he sets out to fulfill all their worst fears, fleeing from everyone but the one sly creature he should fear, ‘the fox which eats him.’
The question than is this purely a morality tale for children, that they shouldn’t run off, that they shouldn’t be so trusting of strangers? It may very well be, on the other hand it may have another message, ‘that parents should not try to create a child with supernatural means.’ Such a lesson might be confusing given the number of supernatural children there are but such children were given to them by fairies and deities not created by them.
Certainly in the Japanese fairy Tale of this motif the parents of the boy scrape the muck from their bodies to form the child directly imitating one of the kami (gods) of Japanese by the name of Izanagi who scrapes the muck from his body which then turns into other kami. Still Japan is far away from Germany and Russia so although they could easily have passed this tale back and forth from village to village that doesn’t mean that it has the same meaning for just as the religious act used to create the child changed so to could the meaning have.
What we are left with than is the obvious moral that the child ran away from home and trusted someone dangerous, whether the parents were also wrong in their means of creation or this tale simply warns them that their children may do something stupid with their freedom is another question.
written by Z
