The word ‘poison’ conjured up so many images – most of them literary. There was, of course, Juliet. According to Shakespeare, she pretended to end her life with poison because she couldn’t see any other way to be with Romeo whom she fell in love and married after knowing him for only a few days. Then she really had to end her life after, unbeknownst to him, her grieving new husband found her temporarily lifeless body and ended his own life because he couldn’t live without her. Definitely a tragic tale and probably Shakespeare’s best known. However, I prefer a more ancient tale of doomed young love that involves a slightly more complicated love story that ends in a similar fashion found within the pages of ‘Tristan and Iseult’. A medieval tale that became popular in the 12^th century.

My mind then jumped to modern fairy tales where beautiful young girls tend to get poisoned just because they are young and beautiful. I immediately thought of the two immortalized by Walt Disney and idolized by little girls everywhere: ‘Snow White’ and ‘Sleeping Beauty’. Snow White became an orphan. However, instead of loving her, her stepmother envied her for her beauty, goodness, and youth. That envy grew into hatred, which… you know where this story goes. Then in Sleeping Beauty’s case, she was poisoned because her parents made a faux pas and left a rather important (and powerful) person off the guest list for her christening. Rather than letting it go, that slighted guest allowed her anger to consume her, so she cast a spell that of course involved poison and voilà: the beautiful, very much-loved, young girl was put in a coma.

I apologize for my glibness.

These stories are all beautiful and at the same time sad, but they tell us something about the human psyche too. As long ago as medieval times – and probably before humans had written languages – we’ve been obsessed with love, violence, and death. ‘Romeo and Juliet’ and ‘Tristan and Iseult’ are passionate love stories where violent incidents bring the main characters together and then end with their tragic deaths – albeit by their own hands.

Similarly, violence is inherent to fairy tales where we see children, men, and women repeatedly threatened by all manner of actions that can, and often do, result in their deaths. Even more interesting is that fairy tales are styled the way they are because they were written originally for adults, which makes sense when thinking about what kind of story would keep adults entertained.

I had no idea this is where my thoughts would take me when I started thinking about this post. Nonetheless, writing about this makes me wonder, whether telling these stories to children and young adults – I was introduced to ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in ninth grade – doesn’t somehow poison their thinking and normalize violence with very little effort.

This is probably the kind of thing I should think about while savouring a good glass of wine…