Many adults will recall having fairy tales read to them when they were children, and experiencing a little jolt of fear when hearing about some of the frightening characters who dwelled within the pages of their storybooks.
In this list, you will read about the five of the scariest fairy tale characters. Some are well-known, and some are lesser known to modern-day audiences. But all are terrifying!
Read on to discover the five scariest fairy tale characters.
Bluebeard in Bluebeard:
Bluebeard is a fairy tale of French origin, first recorded by Charles Perrault in the 17th century. This story featured in a volume of stories that was gifted to Louis XIV’s teenage niece. Given the morbid subject matter of this fairy tale, this seems a very strange gift for a teenage girl indeed.
In this extremely dark tale, the eponymous Bluebeard, a wealthy noble, seeks a new bride. All of his previous wives have disappeared in mysterious circumstances. He invites two sisters to his country estate, in an attempt to woo them. The younger of the two girls capitulates, and marries Bluebeard, despite his frightening reputation and strange blue beard.
Eventually Bluebeard trusts his new wife enough to leave her with the keys to his estate, whilst he attends business elsewhere. However, he does so with a strict warning that she can enter all of the rooms except for one.
Naturally, her curiosity gets the better of her and she unlocks the secret room, only to discover the bloodied corpses of Bluebeard’s other wives!
Luckily, her brothers come to her aid in the nick of time, and she escapes with her life.
Clearly, Bluebeard is certainly not a story for young children. The antagonist in this story is essentially a serial killer, and thus frightening in the extreme.
The father in Allerleirauh
Allerleirauh is a German folk tale that was first put into writing by the Grimm Brothers in the early 1800s.
In this dark tale, Allerleirauh is the daughter of a king. When her mother dies, her father devises an evil plan to marry his own daughter.
Allerleirauh bides her time by setting the king various tasks, to give him time to come to his senses. She asks him to have made for her three dresses – one as golden as the sun, one as silvery as the moon, and one that glitters like the stars.
When he fulfils her request, in despair Allerleirauh asks him to gift her with a cloak made of the fur of every animal in the kingdom. When the king manages to have this cloak made for her, she decides to run away. She dresses in her cloak and hides in the forest. Her name, translated into English means ‘all kinds of fur’.
Allerleirauh winds up back at the palace, where she decides to remove her fur cloak and don her beautiful gowns, attending several balls thrown by the king. When he recognises Allerleirauh, he does marry her, and they ‘lived happily ever after’.
What is never satisfactorily explained is why Allerleirauh finally ends up agreeing to the king’s unnatural request, which is as frightening as it is exasperating. The king in this story is terrifying because of his unnatural love for his own child.
The stranger/Devil in The Girl Without Hands
The Girl Without Hands is yet another tale from the Grimm Brother’s canon, dating back to the early 1800s.
The Girl Without Hands tells the story of a stranger who approaches a miller and offers him wealth in exchange for whatever stands behind his mill. Thinking that only an apple tree stands behind the mill, the miller agrees to the stranger’s request.
Unfortunately, the miller’s beautiful daughter was standing behind the mill at the very moment that the deal was struck, and the stranger (who is in fact, the Devil) returns to collect what he believes is rightfully his.
However, because the girl is good and pure, and keeps her hands clean, the Devil cannot take her away. Her clean hands protect her from him.
Enraged, the Devil threatens the miller, saying that unless he chops his daughter’s hands off so that he can take her, then he will take the miller himself. The stupid and selfish miller agrees, and cuts off his own daughter’s hands.
This stranger must have been very scary indeed if he was able to frighten the miller into carrying out such a horrid deed on his own child!
The step-mother in The Juniper Tree
Once again, we have an entry that comes down through history via the Brothers Grimm from the early 19th century.
In this macabre offering, an evil step-mother devises a plan to do away with her husband’s son from his first marriage, in order for their daughter to inherit the father’s entire estate.
The evil step-mother invites her daughter to take an apple from a chest, which she does. Then the step-mother invites her step-son to do the same, except this time she slams the lid shut on his neck, thus decapitating him.
In order to hide her crime, she props the boy’s head on his neck, and secures it with a handkerchief. When his step-sister speaks to him and does not answer, she boxes his ears and is horrified when his head falls off.
The evil step-mother blames the hapless girl then proceeds to make the boy into soup, and feeds it to his unwitting father!
Luckily, there is a happy ending to this story. The boy, reincarnated as a bird, drops a millstone on the evil step-mother, crushing her to death.
The revolting step-mother in The Juniper Tree makes this list due to her bloodlust and her cannibalistic tendencies.
King Shahryar in One Thousand and One Nights
This list entry is of Middle-Eastern origin, and was thought to have been dreamed up during the Islamic Golden Age (the 8th to the 14th century). One Thousand and One Nights first appeared in English some time during the early 18th century.
This tale is several stories within an overarching story. And it is in this overarching tale where we meet a most frightening character called King Shahryar.
This king has been cuckolded by his wife, and in his embittered rage he decrees that he will marry a virgin every day and then have her executed the following day so that, unlike his first wife, no subsequent wife of his will ever have the chance to be unfaithful to him.
Finally, no more virgins can be found, for the king has killed them all.
Enter the Vizier’s clever daughter, who agrees to marry him. She manages to evade execution by enchanting the king with her bed-time stories, so much so that he lets her live until the following day, so that he can hear more. By the time her story reaches its conclusion, 1,000 nights later, he has grown to care for her and allows her to live.
King Shahryar deserved a place on this list as one of the scariest fairy tale characters of all time because, simply put, he is a maniacal and murderous misogynist!
References:
“Allerleirauh” (article). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allerleirauh. Accessed 2nd August, 2021.
“Bluebeard” (article), Wikipedia, https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluebeard. Accessed 2nd August, 2021.
“Girl Without Hands, The” (article). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Girl_Without_Hands. Accessed 2nd August, 2021.
“Juniper Tree, The” (article). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Juniper_Tree_(fairy_tale). Accessed 2nd August, 2021.
“One Thousand and One Nights” (article). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Thousand_and_One_Nights. Accessed 2nd August, 2021.
