Is Poland going soft?

Yesterday doing the weekly shop at Auchan, I happened upon Iza and Aleksander, wife and son respectively of regular Jeziorki commentator Adthelad. Little Aleksander, now two and half, has featured on this blog before (here and here). I asked the wee monsieur what his current interests were. His mother replied "Dinosaurs and dragons" (smoki). We entered into a conversation about the Smok Wawelski.

"What did the smok eat?" I asked Aleksander.

"Baranek" (a lamb) he replied.

"What was inside the lamb?" I asked.

"Sól" (salt) he replied.

Hmm... A variance from the legend that I once learnt. The Wawel Dragon was indeed baited with a dead lamb, though stuffed with sulphur rather than with salt. I can understand that whereas Polish children of yore would associated sulphur with meat preservation, pesticide and other agricultural processes, this substance is entirely alien to small Poles today. Anyway...

"So what happened to the smok once he'd eaten the lamb stuffed with salt?"

"He drank water... lots and lots of water."

"Good! And what happened next?" I asked, expecting the answer "He exploded".

But no. Mum answers this question and says that the smok then left Kraków for good and now lives in the Amazon river along with his friends, the crocodiles...

I was saddened by the way this legend of the founding of Poland's ancient capital has been sanitised for today's toddlers.

This morning I was discussing this with Marzena, whose younger daughter is of a similar age to Aleksander. Marzena said she was finding the same thing with the children's stories that she was reading to her children. Shortened, deprived of their emotional force and watered down to the point where they were barely recognisable, these modern-day versions of Poland's founding legends disappoint the parents who buy the books, she said.

The way previous generations of Poles had learnt the story was far more bloodthirsty!

The smok, who dwelt in a cave on the banks of the Vistula near Kraków, lived on a diet of young maidens, who were regularly sacrificed to him to prevent him wreaking destruction all around. [Moral: appeasement as a strategy is ineffective.] When all the maidens but King Krak's daughter had been fed to it, the King offered a prize of her hand in marriage to anyone who could defeat the smok. And so it befell a poor young cobbler's apprentice to come up with the idea of stuffing large volumes of sulphur into a lamb's skin and then leaving this for the smok to eat. Which he did, leaving him so thirsty that he drank so much river water that in the end he exploded, showering Kraków with body parts of dragon.

I hope that one day Aleksander will hear the full, unabridged version of this quintessentially Polish legend, and that Polish legends will not be further watered down in years to come. A nation's legends are part of the glue that hold it together down the centuries.

Here's the legend as retold on the BBC's Travel pages:

The [Wawel] castle has been the residence of Polish kings and queens for five
centuries, and there's even a Dragon's Den - the damp cave beneath a line of
turret fortifications is said to have housed a firebreathing beast that
terrorised local residents in the city's early days. The ruler, Prince Krak,
offered his daughter's hand in marriage to whoever could kill the dragon. Many
died trying before a young cobbler struck upon a scheme to stuff a sheep with
sulphur and leave it outside the animal's lair. When the dragon ate it, he
became unbearably thirsty and went to the river to drink - and the water caused
his stomach to swell until it exploded. The dragon died. And the cobbler? He and
his princess lived happily ever after.

I wonder what readers think? Is it better to wait a year or two and give children the unadulterated tale, bloodthirsty as it is? Are rapacious publishers, trying to get picture books of Polish legends (centuries out of copyright) sold to ever-younger age-groups, taking care first to tone down the emotional impact on sensitive toddlers? Should national legends be protected to prevent them from being watered down? Comments please...