The Socio-Historical Interpretation of Fairy Tales

There's a lot of context and background that I think people imbue with a lot more fancifulness than need be. For example, like the presence of wicked stepmothers throughout or in the case of Hansel and Gretel, a child abandonment. Like if you look back at the 14th century during famines and plagues, I think it was the Black Death in particular that just leveled Europe. A lot of people abandoned their children because they just couldn't feed them any longer. So this wasn't like so outlandish that it only belongs in fairy tale. It might have been like a fairly approachable theme that people talked about to kind of hash out the feelings of collective societal