Hunger And Greed In Ogre Tales Essay

Hunger and Greed in Ogre Tales

Cassie Ray

In the Ogre Tales stories, we read that the main trickster is often the child. This is quite interesting, but even more interesting is the way that the stories are written and received. The children are abandoned. However, the parents never seem to come under fire for the abandoning of their children. Not only that, but the children never come under fire for stealing from the so called monsters they often meet. They’re actually seen as good children, helping their families – and their own futures. So what does that say about the roles that hunger, greed, and even financial stability play in these stories? These stories have a much darker ‘moral’ than what is seen as the main one by most readers.

In

All of the boys are between the ages of seven and ten, and so they were considered unable to earn anything of worth for the family. The parents decide to abandon them because they are unable to feed them. This is the story where the hunger of the family is given as the entire reasoning for abandoning the children. The different part of this is that the children found their way home. The parents had been given money, and were then able to feed the entire family for a while. However, when the money was gone and the food was once again scarce, they once again abandoned the

Their hunger is seen as this thing that excuses anything, even abandoning their children to starve or be eaten by wild animals. They do it for a good reason, and always one of them is highly saddened by what they’re doing. Hunger plays the role of this terrible thing that causes the parents to do this terrible thing, and then later the children manage to fix it and return to the parents’ house, living happily ever after. And in the case of the first story, the girls marry into royalty and live happily ever after, never returning to their