Özet:

The term ‘Witch Hunt Age’ refers to the period that begins at the end of the fifteenth century and ends at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In that period, which lasted about three hundred years, fifty thousand people were tried, and generally burned and executed. Hence, that period left some traces in the memory of the society, and those traces can be found in the verbal accounts of that society. In the early nineteenth century, the Grimm Brothers, who collected those verbal expressions through fairy tales, have conveyed the fears, feelings and traces of that time; that is, the zeitgeist. In this study, the concept of witch and witch hunts were investigated through the documents of Grimm Brothers’ Fairy Tales. The relationship between the concept of witch (hunts) and the historical accounts was also tried to be built. A total of 20 Grimms’ Fairy Tales consisted of witches and sorcerers, and those witches and sorcerers died or were killed in more than half of those tales. It was revealed that the most common form of death was being burned that was also applied to those who were found guilty as witches at that time. Moreover, the image of witches in ‘Hansel and Grethel’, ‘Snow White’ and ‘The Six Swans’ were examined because those fairy tales had the most prominent witch figure among the other tales of Grimm Brothers. Furthermore, the relationship between witch hunting and famine, bad products, illness, wars, adverse weather conditions was established by means of the historical accounts. Accordingly, for all those negative conditions, the wanted scapegoat became the aforementioned witches. The accumulation of the witch image and the social memory emerged throughout the whole 300 years also overlapped with the image of witches examined in the previously stated fairy tales

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