Should We Still Chop Off Their Heads?

Violence, Chidlren, and the Responsibility of the Storyteller

"Cut his head off!"

The cry comes from somewhere near the front.

Other voices quickly join in.

"Cut his head off!"

There is laughter now. Some of the children already know what is coming. Others have simply sensed that something deliciously terrible is about to happen.

Meanwhile, somewhere towards the back of the room, an adult winces.

I have watched versions of this scene unfold many times. It happens when I tell Constantses and the Dragon. It happens with Dirty Earth. It happens when I tell The Laddie Who Herded Hares. Stories in which, sooner or later, somebody's head is destined to become separated from the rest of them.

What increasingly fascinates me is the difference between the children and the adults listening alongside them. Where adults sometimes recoil at the casual brutality of an old story, children can respond with extraordinary enthusiasm. Those who already know the tale demand the gruesome ending before I reach it. Change the ending and they notice. Sometimes they even complain.

I know this particularly well because I have an enthusiastic critic at home. My daughter knows these stories, and whenever I have allowed my own discomfort to get the better of me and replaced a beheading with the considerably more civilised prospect of imprisonment, her judgement has been unequivocal.

The heads should come off!!!

I haven't always shared her confidence!

There have been occasions when I have stood before a group of children, reached the violent ending of a traditional story and hesitated. Do I really need to chop his head off? Wouldn't prison do? Sometimes I have quietly changed the ending because it felt more appropriate. At other times I have remained faithful to the version I learned, while watching the adults rather than the children for signs that I may have gone too far.

Over time, I began to realise that my discomfort was raising a much more interesting question than whether a particular character should live or die: what responsibility do I carry when I place an old story before a modern child?

I carried that question into our latest Story Tribe gathering, an online circle of storytellers who meet each month to tell tales and reflect together on the craft we love. I described what I had been noticing: children's delight at these apparently brutal endings, adults' unease, and my own occasional instinct to soften stories that have survived perfectly well for generations without my intervention.

The conversation wandered, as the best storytelling conversations tend to do. We spoke about violence, humour, trust, age and context, and the strange freedom of entering a world in which giants tumble from beanstalks and wicked characters occasionally lose their heads. We wondered whether children experience these moments differently from adults, whether sanitising an old tale removes something important, and whether "that's how the story goes" is ever sufficient justification for telling something exactly as we received it.

By the end of the evening, I had considerably more questions than answers.

So I went looking.

It didn't take long before I encountered a scholar who appeared to have been listening to my daughter.

Maria Tatar called her book Off with Their Heads!

Tatar has spent much of her career exploring the murder, mutilation, cannibalism and extraordinary punishments that run through fairy tales. More importantly for my question, her work reminds us that these stories have never been fixed. The Brothers Grimm repeatedly altered their tales across successive editions, removing or softening some sexual material while sometimes intensifying punishment and revenge (Tatar, 1992; 2003).

That makes the storyteller's familiar defence — "But that's how the story goes" — rather less straightforward. Which story? Which teller? Which edition? Which century?

Oral stories have always travelled. Each storyteller receives something, carries it for a while and eventually passes it onwards. Somewhere along the journey, words change, characters disappear, endings shift and stories acquire the fingerprints of the people and places through which they have passed. Perhaps, then, sending somebody to prison rather than removing his head is not quite the act of folkloric vandalism I sometimes fear it to be.

Yet the freedom to change a story does not mean every change improves it.

Jack Zipes has spent decades examining fairy tales as evolving cultural forms whose survival depends partly upon their capacity to be retold and transformed, while Marina Warner traces their long history as carriers of warning, advice, hope and fear (Zipes, 2012; Warner, 1994). Bruno Bettelheim went further in The Uses of Enchantment, arguing that the darkness of fairy tales gives children symbolic ways of encountering difficult feelings they already carry (Bettelheim, 1976). Many of Bettelheim's psychoanalytic claims have subsequently been challenged, but one uncomfortable question remains worth sitting with: when adults remove everything that makes us uneasy, are we always protecting children, or are we sometimes protecting ourselves?

That question brings me straight back to the storytelling circle.

"Cut his head off!"

Why are the children laughing?

I don't believe for a moment that they are delighting in real suffering. A head rolling metaphorically across the floor of a fairy tale exists at a considerable distance from real violence. The characters may be exaggerated, the consequences impossible, and the whole event held within a world everyone understands operates according to different rules.

There is also the manner of the telling. A sentence on a page might simply read, "And he chopped off his head." An oral storyteller can make those words horrifying, solemn or so extravagantly ridiculous that a roomful of children erupts with laughter. The words may remain identical; the experience does not.

This is where Marina Warner's writing about stories as a form of shelter has become particularly important to me. Her work has made me think more deeply about something every oral storyteller experiences: the quiet compact of trust between teller and listener. A child can enter darkness partly because someone they trust is holding the edges of the story. We can take listeners into the forest, towards the monster and occasionally even to the chopping block, while everything in the relationship between us quietly says: You are safe here.

That echoes something I discovered while writing recently about why children love scary stories. Research by Mihaela Taranu, Mathias Clasen and colleagues found that recreational fear is remarkably common across childhood. In their study of 1,600 parents and caregivers of children aged between one and seventeen, 93 per cent reported that their child enjoyed at least one recreational-fear activity (Taranu et al., 2025). Children, it seems, commonly enjoy encounters with fear when those experiences remain within manageable boundaries.

Perhaps fictional violence can sometimes occupy a similar space.

But safety alone doesn't explain why the children want the head to come off.

Research into children's responses to punishment in stories offers another possibility. In an experimental study, Dolf Zillmann and Jennings Bryant presented children with versions of a fairy tale in which retaliation against a wrongdoer varied in severity. The four-year-olds' enjoyment increased as the retaliation became harsher, while seven- and eight-year-olds preferred punishment that more closely matched the seriousness of the offence (Zillmann & Bryant, 1975).

Perhaps, then, children are responding partly to the moral architecture of the story. A wrong has been committed, the balance has been disturbed, and punishment restores it.

For a while, I wondered whether this might explain everything I had been seeing. Traditional tales frequently deal in absolutes. The giant is defeated. The spell is broken. The dragon is slain. The wicked ruler loses his crown and occasionally considerably more. There is little lingering uncertainty about whether the danger might return.

Prison is different. Somewhere behind a locked door, the villain still exists. A severed head is, narratively speaking, considerably less ambiguous.

And then I remembered Satish Satash

In Dirty Earth, Satish Satash is no villain. He is a man doing his best to complete an impossible task. Yet when the consequence of failure arrives, the children who know the story are every bit as insistent.

"Cut his head off!"

Justice alone cannot explain that.

If children were simply demanding that wrongdoing be punished or danger permanently removed, Satish should be spared. He has done nothing to deserve their delight. Yet change the ending and something can still feel wrong to them.

Perhaps what they are responding to is sometimes stranger and more story-shaped than morality: the fulfilment of a promise, the pattern that has been established, the outrageousness of the consequence, the release of tension, or simply the peculiar satisfaction of a familiar tale refusing to flinch at the moment everyone knows is coming. Sometimes the shocking ending may be funny because it is absurd. Sometimes its very excess reminds the listener that we remain safely inside the impossible world of story. And perhaps sometimes children simply want the story they know.

That does not mean fictional violence is harmless simply because children laugh.

Research offers a useful warning here. In one experimental study, Marina Krcmar and Stephen Curtis found that children who watched a fantasy conflict resolved through physical violence subsequently judged violent responses as more acceptable and demonstrated less advanced moral reasoning than children who saw the conflict resolved nonviolently (Krcmar & Curtis, 2003). This was a study of screen violence rather than oral storytelling, and one experiment cannot tell us what every violent folktale does to every child. Nevertheless, it offers an important corrective.

Stories may offer symbolic distance, but they still carry messages. What we choose to retain, exaggerate, soften or remove matters.

And this is where I return to my own hesitation.

I think it matters too.

The moment I decide that traditional violence is simply good for children, I stop doing the very thing this question has taught me to do: pay attention to the listeners sitting in front of me.

There is no universal child. A seven-year-old delighting in the absurd demise of a storybook character is not the same listener as a child carrying recent experience of real violence. A family audience at a festival is not the same as a classroom. A comic decapitation is not the same as a lingering description of suffering. A story told within an established relationship of trust is not necessarily the same story when delivered without that relationship or context.

The storyteller matters too. Tone, timing and context all matter, as does what comes immediately before the violent moment and, perhaps even more importantly, what follows it.

When I recently asked my social-media community why they had enjoyed frightening stories as children, one idea appeared repeatedly in their responses: the ending mattered. People remembered fear, but they also remembered being brought safely through it. The story reached somewhere — towards laughter, justice, wisdom, relief, meaning or home.

That seems important.

The responsibility of the storyteller, then, cannot simply be to preserve every violent ending, nor to quietly remove every one that makes an adult uneasy. It is to understand the story well enough to know what that moment is doing, and to know the listeners well enough to judge whether they are ready to travel there with us.

So perhaps, before the sword falls, there are some questions worth holding.

What kind of violence is this?

Is it comic, symbolic, shocking, cruel, absurd, or simply part of the strange logic of the tale?

What work is it doing in the story?

Does it restore order, release tension, complete a pattern, reveal consequence or bring the danger to a definite end?

Who is listening?

How old are they? What experiences might they carry with them? What relationship have we built together, and how safely is the story being held?

And perhaps most importantly:

What happens after the violence?

Does the story leave the child stranded in fear, or does it carry them onwards towards meaning, resolution, laughter, justice, wisdom or home?

This brings me back to my daughter.

She still wants the heads off.

I suspect she will be disappointed to discover that all this reading has not produced a scholarly conclusion proving her right. But I have become much less inclined to assume that my adult discomfort automatically makes me the wiser listener. Children can laugh at things that make adults recoil, tremble at things we consider harmless and insist upon endings whose strange logic they seem to understand instinctively.

Perhaps our responsibility is neither to indulge that response nor to censor it simply because it makes us uncomfortable. It is to pay attention.

Tradition gives us stories, but it does not relieve us of responsibility for how we carry them. Every time an old tale passes into a storyteller's hands, we become its temporary custodian. We inherit its dragons and giants, its tenderness and cruelty, its wisdom and absurdity and, occasionally, its severed heads. Our task is neither to preserve everything unchanged nor to polish away whatever troubles modern ears. It is to understand the story, understand our listeners, and make a conscious choice about what we place between them.

So perhaps the question is no longer simply: Should we still chop off their heads?

Before the sword falls, I want to know what kind of violence this is and what work it is doing in the story. I want to know who is listening, what they may bring with them, and whether the story has created enough trust to carry them safely through. And I want to know what waits on the other side: fear, laughter, justice, meaning — or simply another severed head.

Sometimes, after asking those questions, I suspect the sword should still fall.

Sometimes prison will do.

But perhaps the storyteller's responsibility begins in that brief moment before either happens: when we understand why we are raising the sword at all.

I’d love to hear your thoughts! Feel free to join the conversation in the comments below—your questions, stories, and perspectives are always welcome. Whether we agree or not, every discussion adds depth to these conversations, and respectful dialogue is what makes this space truly valuable.

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References

Bettelheim, B. (1976). The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. Alfred A. Knopf.

Krcmar, M., & Curtis, S. (2003). Mental models: Understanding the impact of fantasy violence on children's moral reasoning. Journal of Communication, 53(3), 460–478. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2003.tb02602.x

Taranu, M., Clasen, M., Rosas, F. E., Dodd, H., & Andersen, M. M. (2025). Recreational fear across childhood: A cross-sectional study of scary activities that children enjoy. Child Psychiatry & Human Development. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10578-025-01850-2

Tatar, M. (1992). Off with Their Heads!: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood. Princeton University Press.

Tatar, M. (2003). The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales (Expanded 2nd ed.). Princeton University Press.

Warner, M. (1994). From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers. Chatto & Windus.

Zillmann, D., & Bryant, J. (1975). Viewer's moral sanction of retribution in the appreciation of dramatic presentations. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 11(6), 572–582. https://doi.org/10.1016/0022-1031(75)90008-6

Zipes, J. (2012). The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre. Princeton University Press.