When I was five, my favorite poem for Dad to read aloud to me and my 3-yr-old sis was "The Highwayman"; I don't know if I was attracted by the cadence or the illustrations. I completely understood that [a] the girlfriend killed herself to warn her lover of the ambush and [b] the soldiers killed him anyway when he rode back to her after hearing about her death. What my 5-yr-old brain couldn't comprehend was why he rode away in the first place; if he was going to let the soldiers kill him, that could've happened the first time he rode toward the girlfriend, right? LOL! I remember being satisfied that they got to be together as ghosts.

But yeah, there's some horrific stuff in traditional nursery tales -- Hans Anderson and Brothers Grimm -- which people have ignored with the way Disney has sanitized many aspects. Somehow, most of us managed to grow to relatively normal adulthood.