Grimm's Fairy Tales (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

By Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm, Elizabeth Dalton and 3 more

&&LDIV&&R&&LDIV&&R&&LDIV&&R&&LI&&RGrimms Fairy Tales&&L/I&&R, by &&LSTRONG&&RWilhelm and Jacob Grimm&&L/B&&R&&L/B&&R, is part of the &&LI&&RBarnes & Noble Classics&&L/I&&R&&LI&&R &&L/I&&Rseries, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of &&LI&&RBarnes & Noble Classics&&L/I&&R: &&LDIV&&R

• New introductions commissioned from todays top writers and scholars
• Biographies of the authors
• Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events
• Footnotes and endnotes
• Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work
• Comments by other famous authors
• Study questions to challenge the readers viewpoints and expectations
• Bibliographies for further reading
• Indices & Glossaries, when appropriate

All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. &&LI&&RBarnes & Noble Classics &&L/I&&Rpulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each readers understanding of these enduring works.&&L/DIV&&R&&L/DIV&&R&&LP style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"&&R &&L/P&&R&&LP style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"&&RWith the words “Once upon a time,” the Brothers Grimm transport readers to a timeless realm where witches, giants, princesses, kings, fairies, goblins, and wizards fall in love, try to get rich, quarrel with their neighbors, and have magical adventures of all kinds—and in the process reveal essential truths about human nature. &&L/P&&R&&LP style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"&&R &&L/P&&R&&LP style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"&&RWhen &&LB&&RJacob and Wilhelm Grimm&&L/B&&R set out to collect stories in the early 1800s, their goal was not to entertain children but to preserve Germanic folklore—and the hard life of European peasants was reflected in the tales they discovered. However, once the brothers saw how the stories entranced young readers, they began softening some of the harsher aspects to make them more suitable for children. &&L/P&&R&&LP style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"&&R &&L/P&&R&&LP style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"&&RA cornerstone of Western culture since the early 1800s, &&LI&&RGrimm’s Fairy Tales&&L/I&&R is now beloved the world over. This collection of more than 120 of the Grimms’ best tales includes such classics as “Cinderella,” “Snow White,” “Hansel and Grethel,” “Rapunzel,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” and “The Frog Prince,” as well as others that are no less delightful.&&L/P&&R&&LP style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"&&R &&L/P&&R&&LDIV&&R&&LB&&RElizabeth Dalton&&L/B&&R is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Barnard College. She has published fiction and criticism in &&LI&&RThe New Yorker&&L/I&&R, &&LI&&RPartisan Review&&L/I&&R, &&LI&&RCommentary&&L/I&&R, and &&LI&&RThe New York Times Book Review&&L/I&&R.&&L/DIV&&R&&L/DIV&&R&&L/DIV&&R

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble Classics
• Release date: Jun 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411432277

Jacob Grimm

With his brother Wilhelm, Jacob Grimm collected and published Germanic and European folk and fairy tales during the early to mid 19th century. Some of the world’s most classic and beloved stories have been published by them, including “Rumplestiltskin,” “Snow White,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Rapunzel,” “Cinderella,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and many more.

Book preview

Introduction

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Originally intended for adults, the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Stories) of the Brothers Grimm has become not only the world’s most important collection of folk and fairy tales, but also the central work in the literary culture of childhood. Paradoxically, the tales have been criticized ever since they first appeared as inappropriate for children—too frank about sex, too violent, too dark. The Grimms themselves began censoring the sex as they brought out successive editions, and subsequent editors and translators have continued the process, modifying the violence as well. But the darkness remains.

These tales of enchantment and ordeal contain terrifying encounters with witches, giants, and devouring beasts. Even the more benign tales usually involve suffering or danger: persecution by a cruel stepmother or abusive father, a battle with a demon, at the very least marriage to a hedgehog or some other strange creature. There are confrontations with death itself, as in The Three Snake-Leaves and The Godfather Death, and with the enchanted sleep that resembles it, as in The Glass Coffin and Briar Rose, the Sleeping Beauty story. Yet in spite of these dark and deathly elements, or perhaps even because of them, the Grimms’ tales have a compelling vitality. They are cruder, wilder, more violent, and more fun than the elegant and poignantly beautiful tales of the Grimms’ Danish contemporary Hans Christian Andersen.

Unlike Andersen, the Grimms did not invent new tales but collected old ones, with the intention of preserving the oral tradition of the German peasantry. Whether in fact they fulfilled that intention has been questioned. Their tales do afford a glimpse of a world of castles and forests, nobles and peasants, superstitious beliefs and primitive practices that suggest origins at least as old as feudal Europe, and often much older. Some of the tales have been traced back through the centuries by way of earlier versions until they disappear into prehistoric times.

Residues of the social and material conditions of the societies from which they came can be found in the tales, but transformed, as in a dream, by wish, fear, and fantasy. Indeed, the tales often have the strange logic, the freedom from the constraints of time and space, and the abrupt and violent action that characterize dreams and that Freud attributed to what he called primary process, the kind of thinking that prevails in the unconscious and in childhood. The boundary between reality and fantasy is porous and unstable; everything, including inanimate objects, is alive and responds magically to wishes and fears. There are mysteries and secrets everywhere, as in the lives of children, who are kept in the dark about fundamental realities—sex, death, money, and the whole complex mystery of their parents’ desires and disappointments.

The sense of mystery and the belief in the magical powers of thought never go away entirely, but live on in the adult unconscious, accounting for the inexhaustible appeal of fairy tales. They reappear continually in new forms, not only for children but as sophisticated works for adults, such as Jean Cocteau’s classic film La Belle et la Bêete (1946), Donald Barthelme’s ironic postmodern novel Snow White (1967), the unconventional feminist fictions of Angela Carter, the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods (1987), and so on. Most German writers who came after the Grimms tried sooner or later to write a fairy tale. Even the stories of Franz Kafka are like fairy tales gone wrong. The patterns of fantasy and the narrative structures of the tales apparently satisfy profound psychological and aesthetic needs, endlessly generating new versions.

Motifs from the Grimms’ tales also appear in older classic works of fiction and drama, including some that could not possibly have been influenced by them, such as Shakespeare’s plays. In The Merchant of Venice (c. 1595), the riddle of the three caskets posed to the candidates for Portia’s hand is like the wooer-tests in many tales. In King Lear (c. 1605), the old king demands from his daughter all her love, including that owed to a husband, like the incestuous king in the Grimms’ tale Allerleirauh (Many Furs). Lear’s good and loving daughter, Cordelia, is persecuted, like Cinderella, by two wicked elder sisters.

The Cinderella pattern is perhaps the most widespread of all: The transformation of a poor and insignificant girl into a belle is the theme of innumerable novels, plays, and films. In Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818), for instance, Anne Elliot is treated like a servant by her hateful sisters, yet it is she who wins the love of the princely Captain Wentworth. Isabel Archer, in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady (1881), even has a fairy godmother—as Charles Perrault’s Cinderella does, although the Grimms’ does not—a male one who leaves her a fortune, enabling her, ironically, to choose the poorest but worst of her canonical three suitors. This figure of the mysterious benefactor, like the dwarf in The Singing Bone, recurs frequently in the tales, and also in novels, especially those of Dickens—Magwitch in Great Expectations (1860-1861), for instance. Novels and plays differ from tales in many respects, notably in giving their characters rich inner lives, while in tales psychological conflicts are worked out in action. Nonetheless, the parallels at the level of plot between tales and the larger and more fully developed forms are striking and could make a very long list. It seems that the Kinder- und Hausmärchen form a great repository of narrative motifs that have circulated throughout Europe in various forms for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. How they made their way into the tales is only one of the many unresolved questions associated with the Grimms and their work.

The Brothers Grimm were born a year apart—Jacob in 1785 and Wilhelm in 1786—into the family of a prosperous lawyer in the German village of Hanau. When Jacob was eleven years old and Wilhelm ten, their circumstances changed radically, after a sudden blow of fortune like those that befall children in the tales they would later produce. Their father died, precipitating his wife and six children (there had been nine; three died in infancy) into dire poverty. With the help of relatives, the boys managed to get an excellent education, although they were miserably lodged and fed, and with a kind of bizarre fairy-tale logic were denied financial grants to attend university on the grounds that they were too poor. Nonetheless, like the dogged, resilient heroes of their tales, they persevered.

At the University of Marburg they came under the influence of a distinguished legal scholar, Friedrich Karl von Savigny, who studied German law in the context of its origins in the language and culture of the early Germanic peoples, inspiring the Grimms to apply the same methods to their studies in philology and literature. The brothers began collecting and transcribing old tales, believing that these remnants of a vanishing folk culture could offer some understanding of the origins of German poetry. The first volume of their collection was published in 1812, followed by a second in 1815. At first, the Kinder- und Hausmärchen sold modestly, but it went through seven editions during the Grimms’ lifetime, eventually becoming the all-time world best-seller in the German language, second in Germany itself only to the Bible.

After 1815 Jacob left most of the work on the tales to Wilhelm, but both brothers went on to become prodigious scholars, pioneers in the study of the grammar, history, and mythology of the Germanic languages, and in medieval studies. Jacob formulated Grimm’s law, a theory of consonant changes in the Germanic languages, and with Wilhelm began the great German dictionary that had reached the letter F at the time of Jacob’s death, and was finally completed only in 1961. All told, Jacob published twenty-one books, Wilhelm fourteen, and the two together eight, in addition to many volumes of essays, notes, and letters. Both Grimms worked as librarians, and both became professors at the University of Goöttingen. In 1837, when the new king of the state of Hanover dissolved parliament and required all state employees to swear allegiance to him, the Grimms declined to do so. They were fired and became known, along with five others who refused, as members of the Goöttingen Seven. Jacob was actually exiled from Hanover and was escorted to the border by an enthusiastic band of student supporters. In 1840 the brothers were appointed to the faculty of the University of Berlin.

Both Grimms were elected to the parliament established at the time of the revolution of 1848, but they withdrew from politics after the frustration of their hopes for German unification and democratic reform. They continued to live in the same household even after Wilhelm married and had children, and seem to have been inseparable until the death of Wilhelm in 1859; Jacob died four years later.

The first edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen had prefaces and scholarly notes, and was intended primarily for adults and for other scholars. It was the most ambitious and systematic collection of German folktales to have appeared, if not the first. The passion for folklore was one of the principal currents of German Romanticism, with its interest in origins and its love of the spontaneous and the natural. Moreover, the search for the roots of an authentic German literary and linguistic identity had intense political as well as cultural significance. When the Grimms began their research there was no unified German state and German lands were under French occupation; Jeéroôme Bonaparte, the younger brother of Napoleéon I, had established his court in the city of Kassel, where the Grimms then lived. In 1814, after the French defeat, Jacob was appointed secretary to the Hessian peace legation and went with it to Vienna, and later to Paris.

In the preface to the first edition, the Grimms celebrate the purely German and authentically oral and peasant origins of the tales. They had the good luck, they say, to find a village storyteller, Frau Viehmann, whose tales were genuinely Hessian, thus from a rough-hewn and relatively unchanged and isolated region.a The folktales, they write, have kept intact German myths that were thought to be lost; further search in all the hallowed regions of our fatherland would reveal other treasures. The German and oral roots are emphasized again and again: Everything that has been collected here from oral traditions is (with the exception of ‘Puss in Boots’ perhaps) purely German in its origin as well as in its development and has not been borrowed from any sources.

Actually, the character and provenance of the tales are much more complicated than this. As Jack Zipes explains in The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World (see For Further Reading), the Grimms did in fact get tales from peasants and lower-class people, but they also acquired them from other kinds of informants, including educated young women among their friends from upper-middle-class and aristocratic families. These women had heard some of their stories from peasant nannies or servants, but they had also read them in books and magazines. The Grimms themselves took Jorinde and Joringel and other tales from books; The Juniper Tree, written by the artist Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810), first appeared in a magazine. The use of something other than oral materials is hinted at in the rather confusing sentence above referring to Puss in Boots. At least one of the Grimms’ young women informants came from a French-speaking Huguenot family and would have known the celebrated fairy tales of Charles Perrault, published in 1697, including Le Maôître Chat, ou le Chat botteé, the Puss in Boots story. According to the German philologist and Grimm scholar Heinz Roölleke, even Frau Viehmann, the Hessian storyteller, was actually the daughter of an innkeeper, of partly French Huguenot ancestry, and thus not quite the echt German peasant portrayed by the Grimms (McGlathery, ed., The Brothers Grimm and Folktale).

Apparently troubled by these issues, the brothers return to them in the preface to the second edition, where they write, We have reviewed everything that seemed suspicious, namely what might have been of foreign origin. . . . They threw out Puss in Boots, but retained other tales almost identical to those of Perrault—among them Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Allerleirauh (Many Furs), which is essentially Perrault’s Peau d’aône (Donkey Skin). The Grimms knew the earlier collections well and even allude explicitly in the preface to the tales of Perrault, Giambattista Basile (1575-1632), Giovan Francesco Straparola (c. 1480-1557), and the collection of medieval Welsh tales known as The Mabinogion.

Although all of these works long antedated their own, indicating that some of the tales they were collecting must have derived from these earlier foreign sources, the brothers seem to have convinced themselves that their versions were separate German tales that somehow resembled the foreign ones or were even their true originals. Trying to account for the widespread diffusion of the German tales, they write, we find . . . precisely these tales, throughout Europe, thus revealing a kinship among the noblest peoples. Here, in their eagerness to praise the superiority of northern Europeans, they appear to be ignoring some obvious non-European sources, such as The Thousand and One Nights, the famous collection from Arab, Persian, and Indian sources, in which, to cite just one example, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves contains elements that will later appear in the Grimms’ Simeli Mountain.

In the preface to the second edition, the Grimms emphasize the accuracy and truth of their methods and condemn others who embellish folk materials. Yet they acknowledge their own editorial efforts: Fragments have been completed, many stories have been told more directly and simply, and there are very few tales that do not appear in improved form. Moreover, stories that complemented each other have been combined—sometimes producing, it must be said, awkward results. The Grimms also put into the stories rhymes and proverbs to give the sense of real peasant storytelling. Yet they write, We did not add anything from our own resources, but only sorted out what is pure, simple, and yet intact from what is inauthentic. Authenticity, then, was not a quality intrinsic to the tales as recorded, but rather an ideal to be striven for, something to be created in order to give the tales their true character.

The same kind of self-contradiction characterizes the Grimms’ attitude toward certain matters. As the tales became popular with children, parents complained about references to sex and other bodily functions. In the first edition, the brothers dismiss such criticism on the grounds that everything in the tales is natural: Nature itself . . . has let these flowers and leaves grow in these colors and shapes. In the second edition, however, after positing the innocence . . . of a straightforward narrative that does not conceal anything wrong by holding back on it, they go on to say, nonetheless, in this new edition, we have carefully eliminated every phrase not appropriate for children. Over the course of successive editions, many erotic and excremental references were cut out or toned down. In the first edition, for example, the donkey in The Table, the Ass, and the Stick emits gold from both ends, but later the gold comes only out of its mouth. In the first edition, after her nightly frolics with the prince, Rapunzel notices that her clothes are getting tighter; later editions delete any reference to this suspicious weight gain. The process of revision and editing to make the stories less offensive, more coherent, more authentic, and so on, went on continuously, beginning with the first handwritten transcriptions from oral sources until the final edition of 1857. In their attempt to find and record the authentic voice of the German folk—the value of a voice speaking directly to the heart—the Grimms seem to have ended up with all the ambiguities of writing.

The whole idea of a purely oral tradition of the tale has in fact been questioned. The French stories that made their way into the Grimms’ volumes were certainly written. They came, via Perrault and others, out of the French conte, a sophisticated mode of storytelling that had been a pastime and jeu d’esprit in aristocratic salons in France since the late seventeenth century. Some of these stories were invented by their upper-class authors, but others were acquired from peasant nurses and servants. It seems that tales passed in and out of print in France, as in the German lands and elsewhere. Just as upper-class writers heard tales from illiterate tellers and embellished and published them, so lower-class people heard stories from books, modified them, and passed them on, until eventually they made their way once again into print.

The distinction between oral and literary material is thus not clear. Nor is there a clear distinction between the conte de feées, the fairy tale that dealt mostly with aristocratic characters and marvelous events, and the folktale, with its real-life setting of farm and village. The Grimms’ collection contains tales of both kinds and many that are mixed, with the forest, which is both natural and full of mystery, functioning as a kind of intermediate space between the real world of peasants and farm animals and the fantastic realm of talking beasts and enchanted castles.

Whether oral or written, the modes of transmission and dispersal of the tales remain somewhat obscure. How do the same tales or motifs turn up in widely separated cultures? The farther these motifs are pursued through time and space, the more tangled the lines of possible influence and transmission. The German Sanskrit scholar Theodor Benfey proposed in 1859 in his preface to the Panchatantra, a collection of Indian tales, that the European tales had originated in India and spread from there. This theory of monogenesis was challenged in 1893 by French philologist and medievalist Joseph Beédier, who argued for polygenesis, the independent origins of tales found in different parts of the world. In the latter case the remarkable re semblances among tales from different times and places would have to be accounted for by fundamental similarities in the physical and psychological patterns of human life across cultures.

In the blurred logic of their prefaces, the Grimms seem to be struggling with all of these problems, and with the ambiguous and heterogeneous nature of their material. In their search for the purity and simplicity of the German oral tradition, they found both less and more than they sought. The tales—natural flowers and leaves supposedly plucked from pristine country lanes—turn out in many cases to be complex hybrid blooms whose genetic structure and inheritance are still not fully understood.

The study of folk and fairy tales has given rise to many theories and schools of interpretation. Anthropological and mythical interpreters find in the tales allusions to primitive rituals, especially initiation rites, as well as prescientific and mythic representations of natural phenomena, such as the change of the seasons. For Freud, fairy tales reveal unconscious fantasies like those in dreams. The psychoanalytic approach is most fully developed in a study by Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, which contains interpretations of many of the Grimms’ tales. Under the influence of the theories of Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, sees in the hero of the tale and his trials archetypes of the collective unconscious, the timeless reservoir of universal human experience. In Morphology of the Folktale, the Russian formalist critic Vladimir Propp classifies tales according to a limited number of functions performed by the characters, always in a fixed sequence. The historical-geographic method of the Finnish folk lorist Antti Aarne and the American Stith Thompson traces tales back through variants to their presumed places of origin. Feminist critics try to show how fairy tales reflect and perpetuate patterns of male domination and female subjection and passivity, an argument incorporated into a broader Marxist critique focused on the political and social dimension of the tales by Jack Zipes, a scholar and translator of the tales.

No single theory can account for the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, a complex, multidimensional work made up of more than 200 smaller works of varying type and quality, with many layers of intention and meaning. Although the Grimms selected, edited, expanded, revised, and generally imposed their own sensibility on the tales, giving them a certain unity of tone, they did not invent them. The tales come from different times and places and retain the traces of their origins—oral and written, primitive and sophisticated, peasant, middle class, and aristocratic—all filtered through the particular historical and class consciousness, the moral ideals, and the unconscious wishes and fantasies of the brothers themselves. Thus they present difficult problems for criticism. A comparison of two of the most interesting approaches—the Marxist analysis of Jack Zipes and the psychoanalytic explication of Bruno Bettelheim—may cast some light on these problems and on the tales themselves.

Jack Zipes focuses on the social and historical context and consciousness of the Grimms and their work. In Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion, he asserts that in the early folktales the main characters and concerns of a monarchistic, patriarchal, and feudal society are presented, and the focus is on class struggle and competition for power (p. 8). Although injustice and oppression are temporarily overcome to produce the usual happy ending, this happens through magical means, leaving relationships of power fundamentally unchanged. Zipes argues that the Grimms adapted the old tales to the ideals of nineteenth-century capitalism, with the goal of socializing children to bourgeois society:

The male hero learns to be active, competitive, handsome, industrious, cunning, acquisitive. His goal is money, power, and a woman (also associated with chattel). His jurisdiction is the open world. His happiness depends on the just use of power. The female hero learns to be passive, obedient, self-sacrificing, hard-working, patient, and straight-laced. Her goal is wealth, jewels, and a man to protect her property rights. Her jurisdiction is the home or castle. Her happiness depends on conformity to patriarchal rule (p. 57).

The child reader, in Zipes’s view, is being indoctrinated unconsciously to accept these bourgeois ideals. The tales are particularly apt for this purpose just because they are thought of as timeless classics outside the real world of history, politics, and class conflict.

In Fairy Tale as Myth, Myth as Fairy Tale, Zipes says that the best-known tales have become myths, thereby taking on a quasi-religious authority that disguises their roots in a particular historical and political context. Following the ideas of the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes (1915-1980), Zipes claims that this mythification of the tale makes what is contingent, political, and ideological appear natural, true, and universal. In this way, the classic tale has become dehistoricized, depoliticized to represent and maintain the hegemonic interests of the bourgeoisie (p. 6). In a chapter entitled Rumpelstiltskin and the Decline of Female Productivity, Zipes analyzes the tale of the miller’s daughter who spins straw into gold with the aid of a tyrannical gnome in the context of changes in the manufacture of linen after the invention of the spinning machine in 1764: The Grimms were making a social-historical statement about the exploitation of women as spinners and the appropriation of the art/craft of spinning by men (p. 55).

Like Jack Zipes, Bruno Bettelheim also sees folk and fairy tales as influencing the child’s development and relationship to society, but in quite a different way. In The Uses of Enchantment, Bettelheim is concerned not with the historical and political dimensions of the tales, but rather with their representation in symbolic form of the child’s inner life, which he sees as essentially timeless rather than rooted in a particular historical context. By dealing with universal human problems, particularly those which occupy a child’s mind, these stories speak to his budding ego and encourage its development, while at the same time relieving preconscious and unconscious pressures (p. 6). The reality of the fairy tale is not that of the external world, says Bettelheim: No sane child ever believes that these tales describe the world realistically (p. 117). The fairy-tale kings and queens, with their arbitrary power, are not the unjust authorities of the world of history and politics, but rather the monarchs of the child’s daily life, the father and mother. The prevalence of evil stepmothers in fairy tales is attributed by Zipes and other critics to the frequency in earlier centuries of death in childbirth, which left widowers to take new wives hostile to the first wife’s children. Bettelheim, however, sees the evil stepmother character not as a product of actual historical conditions, but as a psychological stand-in for the cruel, angry, or rejecting side of the real mother, who can then be idealized, in the person of the dead biological mother, as all good and loving. This interpretation is substantiated by the fact that after the first edition, Wilhelm changed mothers to stepmothers in Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs and Hansel and Grethel.

The extremes of absolute good and evil in the tales, according to Bettelheim, appeal to the tendency to polarization on the part of the immature ego, which cannot yet tolerate the mixed and ambiguous nature of real mothers and of reality generally. Dragons, giants, and demons also correspond to aspects of the child’s inner life—anxieties, hatreds, sadistic fantasies. In these frightening creatures, the child meets and conquers the monster he feels or fears himself to be, and which also sometimes persecutes him (p. 120).

One of Bettelheim’s most sustained analyses is of Briar Rose, the Sleeping Beauty story; which he reads as an account of adolescence and sexual maturation. In this story a king, having been told by an evil fairy that his daughter will prick her finger on a spindle and die, tries to avert the curse by banishing all spinning from the castle. Yet inevitably, at the age of fifteen, the princess manages to find a spindle, pricks her finger, and begins to bleed, inheriting the prophesied curse of menstruation. She falls into an enchanted sleep—the narcissistic trance of adolescence—protected against premature sexual encounters by a thorny hedge, until wakened to mature sexual love by the prince’s kiss.

Zipes, who attacks Bettelheim’s interpretations on the grounds that they ignore historical and social contexts, reads the Sleeping Beauty story very differently, as a bourgeois myth about the proper way males save . . . comatose women (The Brothers Grimm, p. 152). The charge of sexual stereotyping in the tales, however, does not concern Bettelheim: Even when a girl is depicted as turning inward . . . and a boy aggressively dealing with the external world, these two together symbolize the two ways in which one has to gain selfhood: through learning to understand and master the inner as well as the outer world (p. 226). Bettelheim believes that children are able to relate a story to their own experience regardless of the main character’s sex.

Bettelheim explores the psychological richness of the tales in fascinating detail, opening up endless possibilities of understanding and interpretation. But he does tend to idealize them, emphasizing their beauty and their healing properties. In a detailed analysis of Cinderella, for example, he argues that the tale deals with the hidden sexual and aggressive tensions within the family and finally resolves them in a positive way: ‘Cinderella’ sets forth the steps in personality development required to reach self-fulfillment, and presents them in fairy-tale fashion so that every person can understand what is required of him to become a full human being (p. 275).

There are, however, other related but less beautiful tales dealing with the relationship between a widowed father and his daughter, such as The Handless Maiden and Allerleirauh (Many Furs), which Bettelheim does not analyze, perhaps because they do not present such positive developments, at least not very convincingly. These stories are less famous than Cinderella, and for good reason. In Allerleirauh the widowed king wants to marry his daughter, who runs away, disguising herself as a kitchen maid. In The Handless Maiden, the king asks his daughter to let him chop off her hands in order to save himself from the Evil One, suggesting powerful evil desires that can be thwarted only by mutilation; the daughter submits and then flees her father.

In both of these fascinating stories, the father—like King Lear, whose story originates in a related legend—demands an excessive and unnatural love from his daughter. The Oedipal horrors—incestuous desire, abuse, and mutilation—are too obvious and frightening to make for entirely agreeable reading. Both stories end well: The Handless Maiden gets silver hands and then grows new ones, and both heroines marry kings—perhaps new father figures. But the happy endings seem unconvincing—especially the new hands!—and not fully adequate to the anxieties aroused by the original situations.

In another version of the Handless Maiden story, considered more authentic by the Grimms themselves, the girl’s father asks for his daughter’s hand in marriage and, when she refuses, has her hands and breasts chopped off. As usual, the most shocking details were deleted from the published version by the Grimms. In the words of the critic Peter Dettmering, Faced with monstrously cruel mothers and with fathers driven by incestuous desires, they sought their salvation in the editing of texts (quoted in Tatar, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, p. 37). Going back to the earlier versions of one of their tales is rather like the process Freud describes in interpreting a dream: The edited text, like the manifest dream remembered in consciousness, conceals a repressed forbidden content, often an unedited account of cruelty and incest.

Abuse of children is presented more openly where there is no explicitly sexual element. In dozens of tales children are starved, beaten, persecuted, or abandoned, mostly by their own fathers or (step)mothers. These tales do not always reach a hopeful resolution like that of Hansel and Grethel, which Bettelheim reads as an account of the difficulties and anxieties of the child who is forced to give up his dependent attachment to the mother and free himself of his oral fixation (p. 170). Oral needs could also be said to figure in The Poor Boy in the Grave, where a starving orphan boy, beaten and abused by his master, betrayed by the judge who might have protected him, gorges himself on stolen honey and wine in a last desperate effort to gratify his hunger before dying. The fire that destroys the home of the cruel master is no consolation to the reader of this bitter tale, which could have been taken from a real-life account in the newspaper, in the Grimms’ time or our own. Although a psychoanalytic interpretation in terms of children’s oral needs and fears could be worked out, it would serve only to minimize the real-life horror depicted here.

In The Juniper Tree, one of the most celebrated and moving tales, a little boy is killed by his stepmother, who tries to blame the crime on her daughter and then cooks the boy in a stew and feeds it to his father. The motif of the child fed to the father has a past in Greek mythology and could also be analyzed in psychoanalytic ways, like Hansel and Grethel, in terms of the child’s fears of its own unconscious cannibalistic impulses. But despite the fantastic ending, in which the mother is killed and the child resurrected, the acutely observed details of the mother’s behavior and feeling—her momentary remorse, her attempt to blame the daughter—give it a chilling realism and suggest the horror of adult malice rather than childish fantasy. Bettelheim does not comment on this story, perhaps because it fits less well his paradigm of the tales as representations of children’s unconscious conflicts and their resolution. His optimistic view works better with the more positive tales than with the darkest and most tragic ones, just as classical psychoanalytic theory works better with children’s typical sexual and aggressive fantasies than with instances of actual abuse. The tales, like all genuine works of art, are rooted in reality as well as in fantasy, and the reality of life among an impoverished peasantry meant that children were abandoned, abused, and murdered, even more frequently than in our own time and place.

Bettelheim scarcely mentions another disturbing aspect of the tales, evoked in the prefaces by the romantic idealization of the pure German folk and the concern with screening out foreign influences. This vocabulary suggests the racist strain in German nationalism, later to become murderous obsession. Of the three tales with Jewish characters in the Grimms’ collection, two—The Jew Among Thorns (included in this selection) and The Good Bargain (not included here)—are frankly anti-Semitic. In the third tale (also not included here), The Bright Sun Brings It to Light, a man who murders a Jew is actually brought to justice.

Sad to say, Nazi ideologues enshrined the Kinder- und Hausmärchen as virtually a sacred text, a special expression of the spirit of the Volk, as Maria Tatar points out, and even came up with a reading of Little Red Riding Hood as an allegory of the menace to the German people from the Jewish wolf (The Hard Facts, p. 41). The Grimms, long dead by then, were obviously not responsible for this interpretation, but they undoubtedly did real harm by including the two anti-Semitic stories in their collection and even, as Ruth Bottigheimer notes, in Grimms’ Bad Girls and Bold Boys (p. 140), reprinting them in a short edition for children. Thus the tales should not be idealized. They do enrich the mental lives of children, as Bettelheim shows, yet some of them evoke not universal psychological conflicts but dangerous prejudices in the culture from which they came.

There is a whiff of perverse cruelty in many tales, not only in the frightening ordeals undergone by heroes and heroines, but also in the inventively sadistic punishments meted out to villains, who have to dance in red-hot shoes, get their eyes pecked out by birds, are rolled down hills in barrels studded inside with nails, or are thrown into vats containing boiling oil, poisonous snakes, or both. Adults tend to be more unnerved than children by these elements of the German Gothic imagination; at one public reading an audience of children found The Juniper Tree not horrifying but hilarious (Tatar, p. 21). In any case the grisly cruelty in the tales comes out of the same amoral source that generates their vital narrative energy and imaginative richness, and the pleasure they afford is not entirely innocent. The sense of an unacknowledged darkness beneath the surface is part of what makes them both disturbing and compelling.

This mysterious and somewhat perverse vitality may also prevent the tales from truly fulfilling the function of moral instruction, for either good or ill. They have been used for that purpose in the German school curriculum, and William Bennett, the conservative moralist, has included several of them in his Book of Virtues: A Treasury of Great Moral Stories (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993), a volume of improving literature for children. There is, of course, absolutely nothing wrong with this, but it probably doesn’t work. To be sure, virtue is presented movingly in the tales, as in Star Dollars, where in an act of radical Christian charity a little girl gives her last rag of clothing to another child in the snowy forest, or in the self-sacrificing love of the many siblings who try to rescue each other from harm. In more typical examples, virtue is rewarded with wealth and position, as in the best middle-class Protestant morality. Kindness to beggars, for example, pays off, these unattractive characters usually turning out to be wealthy and powerful beings under enchantment who reward good behavior handsomely.

But it is not clear that children actually respond to this pattern as the moralist might hope, as suggested by the unpredictable laughter at The Juniper Tree. By the same token, the tales may not really function, as Jack Zipes fears, to perpetuate an unjust social order by instilling bourgeois virtues of industry, obedience, and submission to patriarchal authority. There is great variety among the tales and a great range of meanings and morals; some apparently have no moral at all beyond a good laugh. Among the 200 in the Grimms’ final edition, there are romantic stories of love, enchantment, and rescue, but also tall tales, animal fables, crime stories, funny stories about spectacularly stupid people, and bawdy fabliaux like The Wedding of Mrs. Fox, in which all but the youngest child will sense a dirty joke. In many cases the hero wins out through the virtues of courage and perseverance, but in others cunning and deceit carry the day.

The tales embody and gratify many desires, some of them contradictory: desires to have terrifying adventures, to know the cruelty of the world, to survive danger through one’s own cleverness and beauty, to see one’s enemies harshly punished, and finally to be recognized as king or queen and paired forever with a royal mate. Yet human beings also desire suffering, as history demonstrates all too well, if only to feel more intensely. Indeed, we want experience, although some varieties—such as the horrors of war, torture, and rape, the grisly murders and mutilations that both terrify and fascinate—are best had vicariously, as in reading The Feather Bird and The Robber Bridegroom. Here the moral lessons, if there are any, tend to be overshadowed for the reader by the sensational violence of the content. Taken together, the tales seem animated by a kind of anarchic energy that finally overwhelms moral and social lessons.

The patriarchal pattern is often undercut in the same way. In The Shoes Which Were Danced to Pieces, for example, the twelve princesses who defy their father by slipping out of their locked bedroom every night are finally reined in by an old soldier, who follows them to their underground dance hall and is rewarded by the king with the hand of the eldest princess; thus the authority of the father-king is reestablished. But the most memorable elements of the story are the thrilling secret staircase under the bed, the underground lake and castle, and the trees with leaves of silver, gold, and diamond. The brilliant fantasy world of the rebellious girls is far more important to the reader than the actions of the king or the old soldier.

Another rebellious princess, in King Thrush-Beard, mocks all her suitors until her father forces her to marry a beggar and work as a serving maid. But in the end things turn out well for the choosy girl, who discovers that her beggar husband is actually a king. The Jungfrau Maleen, in the tale of that name, refuses the marriage arranged by her father, who walls her up in a tower. After digging her way out with a bread knife, the determined Maleen tracks down her true love and wins him back from a counterfeit bride, who loses her head for her evil deeds. Even Rapunzel, the quintessential imprisoned maiden, manages to find a lover and get him into her tower at night by using her hair as a ladder, then survives for years in a desert as the single mother of twins. It is not the prince who rescues her, but she who saves him, by curing his blindness with her tears.

There are many examples of clever, active, and even heroic young women. In The Robber Bridegroom, the heroine tricks a cannibalistic murderer and brings him to justice, and in The Feather Bird another heroine rescues herself and her two sisters from a wizard who is really a serial sex killer. In a number of moving tales, a sister protects or rescues her brothers, as in The Six Swans, The Seven Crows, and The Twelve Brothers, where the sister offers her life for those of her brothers.

Peasant women are often presented as bold and cunning. In The Peasant’s Wise Daughter, the girl gives her father practical advice, rescues him from prison, figures out a riddle, marries the king, saves a poor man from the king’s cruelty, escapes a death sentence, and finally brings her difficult husband to heel. Clever Grethel, in the story of that name, eats and drinks the food and wine she had prepared for her master’s dinner party, then covers up her misdeed by sending him off in pursuit of his guests armed with a carving knife. In Old Hildebrand, a wife conspires with her lover, the village parson, to get rid of her gullible husband by sending him on a pilgrimage.

Even though there are not really enough adventurous heroines to go around, the female reader can easily identify across the barrier of gender with the male hero, as in reading a novel. If this were not possible, women would be barred from access to more than half the world’s great literature. In reading stories such as The Golden Bird, the girl imagines herself into the skin of the adventurous male protagonist rather than withholding her interest until a princess with whom to identify appears on the scene.

There are numerous contemporary attempts to write fairy tales with correct messages, some of them charming and successful. But many suffer from the imaginative flatness produced by good intentions; they have no subtext, only a text, and the provocative richness and ambiguity of the Grimm stories is lost. Those who want to subvert the originals often fail to notice the extent to which they subvert themselves. Little Red Riding Hood, for instance, contains an explicit moral—don’t stray from the straight path, don’t talk to strange wolves—that has been applied in a variety of contexts by parents, teachers, mythologists, feminists, even Nazis. In all cases it is clearly a parable about how to avoid danger by following the instructions of those in authority. Yet does it really work that way? The most exciting part of the story, the bit children like to hear over and over, is the sly dialogue between wolf and girl, culminating in the terrifying moment when the hairy beast leaps out of bed and grabs her. Referring to the Perrault version, in which Petit Chaperon Rouge actually undresses and gets into bed with the wolf, the American writer Djuna Barnes (1892-1982) commented, Children know something they can’t tell; they like Red Riding Hood and the wolf in bed! (quoted in Bettelheim, p. 176).

In such richly symbolic material, imagination and desire seize what they will, in spite of social and moral lessons. Above all, the imagination responds to the sense of another dimension of experience. Most of the tales, even those set in the real world of farm or village, open up suddenly into a magical space of adventure. This may happen through the encounter with a powerful being (a witch, a giant, a talking animal) or through some apparently ordinary object (a comb, a mirror, a hat) that is suddenly revealed to have unexpected powers. Through such beings or objects the hero or heroine gains entrance to another world existing within that of ordinary reality, a magical space like the lake and castle under the bed in The Shoes Which Were Danced to Pieces or the cavern inside the mountain in Old Rinkrank.

These enchanted places suggest the freedom of the imagination itself, existing within the real world of history, class conflict, and politics and yet always escaping it, claiming some degree of autonomy. The reader of the tales, child or adult, gains access to this other dimension, the realm of structured fantasy that is the source of literature and art, where the creative power of the mind itself offers at least partial freedom from the real world of conflict and oppression, and even the hope of one day transforming it.

Elizabeth Dalton is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Barnard College. She is the author of Unconscious Structure in The Idiot (Princeton University Press, 1979), a psychoanalytic study of Dostoevsky’s novel, and has published fiction and criticism in The New Yorker, Partisan Review, Commentary, and The New York Times Book Review.

The Frog Prince

¹

007

I n the olden time, when wishing was having, there lived a King, whose daughters were all beautiful; but the youngest was so exceedingly beautiful that the Sun himself, although he saw her very often, was surprised whenever she came out into the sunshine.

Near the castle of this King, lay a large and gloomy forest, and in the midst stood an old lime-tree, beneath whose branches flowed a tranquil brook; whenever it was very hot, the King’s youngest daughter ran off into this wood, and sat down on the bank of the cool stream; and, when she felt dull, would often divert herself by throwing a golden ball up in the air and catching it. And this was her favourite amusement.

Now, one day it so happened, that this golden ball, when the King’s daughter threw it into the air, did not fall down into her hand, but on the grass; and then it rolled past her into a little fountain. The King’s daughter followed the ball with her eyes, but it disappeared beneath the water, which was so deep that no one could see to the bottom. Then she began to lament, and to cry louder and louder; and, as she cried, a voice called out, Why weepest thou, O King’s daughter! thy tears would melt even a stone to pity. And she looked around to the spot whence the voice came, and saw a Frog stretching his thick ugly head out of the water. Ah! you old water-paddler, said she, was it you that spoke? I am weeping for my golden ball which has slipped away from me into the water.

Be quiet, and do not cry, answered the Frog; I can give thee good advice. But what wilt thou give me if I fetch thy plaything up again?

What will you have, dear Frog? said she. My dresses, my pearls and jewels, or the golden crown which I wear?

The Frog answered, Dresses, or jewels, or golden crowns, are not for me; but if thou wilt love me, and let me be thy companion and playfellow, and sit at thy table, and eat from thy little golden plate, and drink out of thy cup, and sleep in thy little bed,—if thou wilt promise me all these, then will I dive down and fetch up thy golden ball.

Oh, I will promise you all, said she, if you will only get me my ball. But she thought to herself, What is the silly Frog chattering about? Let him remain in the water with his equals; he cannot mix in society. But the Frog, as soon as he had received her promise, drew his head under the water and dived down. Presently he swam up again with the ball in his mouth, and threw it on the grass. The King’s daughter was full of joy when she again saw her beautiful plaything; and taking it up, she ran off immediately. Stop! stop! cried the Frog; take me with thee. I cannot run as thou canst. But all his croaking was useless; although it was loud enough, the King’s daughter did not hear it, but, hastening home, soon forgot the poor Frog, who was obliged to leap back into the fountain.

The next day, when the King’s daughter was sitting at table with her father and all his courtiers, and was eating from her own little golden plate, something was heard coming up the marble stairs, splish-splash, splish-splash; and when it arrived at the top, it knocked at the door, and a voice said, Open the door, thou youngest daughter of the King! So she rose and went to see who it was that called her; but when she had opened the door, she perceived the Frog before her; then she shut the door with great vehemence, and sat down at the table, looking very pale. But the King perceived that her heart was beating violently, and asked her whether it was a giant who had come to fetch her away who stood at the door. Oh no! answered she; it is no giant, but an ugly Frog.

What does the Frog want with you? said the King.

Oh, dear father, when I was sitting yesterday playing by the brook, my golden ball fell into the water, and this Frog fetched it up again because I cried so much: but first, I must tell you, he pressed me so much that I promised him that he should be my companion. I never thought that he could come out of the water, but somehow he has jumped out, and now he wants to come in here.

At that moment there was another knock, and a voice said,

"King’s daughter youngest,

Open the door.

Hast thou forgotten

Thy promises made

By the banks of the streamlet,

Beneath the beech-shade!

King’s daughter, youngest,

Open the door."

Then the King said, What you have promised, that you must perform; go and let him in. So the King’s daughter went and opened the door, and the Frog hopped in after her right up to her chair: and as soon as she was seated, the Frog said, Take me up; but she hesitated so long, that at last the King ordered her to obey. And as soon as the Frog sat on the chair he jumped on to the table and said, Now push thy plate near me, that we may eat together. And she did so, but, as every one saw, very unwillingly. The Frog seemed to relish his dinner much, but every bit that the King’s daughter ate nearly choked her, till at last the Frog said, I have satisfied my hunger and feel very tired; wilt thou carry me up-stairs now into thy chamber, and make thy bed ready that we may sleep together? At this speech the King’s daughter began to cry, for she was afraid of the cold Frog, and dared not touch him; and besides, he actually wanted to sleep in her own beautiful, clean bed.

But her tears only made the King very angry, and he said, He who helped you in the time of your trouble must not now be despised. So she took the Frog up with two fingers and put him in a corner of her chamber. But, as she lay in her bed, he crept up to it and said, I am so very tired that I shall sleep well; do take me up or I will tell thy father. This speech put the King’s daughter in a terrible passion, and, catching the Frog up, she threw him with all her strength against the wall, saying, Now, will you be quiet, you ugly Frog!

But as he fell he was changed from a frog into a handsome Prince with beautiful eyes, who after a little while became, with her father’s consent, her dear companion and betrothed. Then he told her how he had been transformed by an evil witch, and that no one but herself would have had the power to take him out of the fountain; and that on the morrow they would go together into his own kingdom. Then they went to sleep.

The next morning, as soon as the sun rose, a carriage, drawn by eight white horses, with ostrich feathers on their heads, and golden bridles, drove up to the door of the palace, and behind the carriage stood the trusty Henry, the servant of the young Prince. When his master was changed into a frog, trusty Henry had grieved so much that he had bound three iron bands round his heart, for fear it would break with grief and sorrow. But now that the carriage was ready to carry the young Prince to his own country, the faithful Henry helped in the bride and bridegroom, and placed himself on the seat behind, full of joy at his master’s release. They had not proceeded far when the Prince heard a crack as if something had broken behind the carriage; so he put his head out of the window and asked Henry what was broken, and Henry answered It was not the carriage, my master, but a band which I bound round my heart when it was in such grief because you were changed into a frog.

Twice afterwards on the journey there was the same noise, and each time the Prince thought that it was some part of the carriage that had given way; but it was only the breaking of the bands which bound the heart of the trusty Henry, who was now free and happy.

A Tale of One Who Traveled to Learn What Shivering Meant

008

A father had two sons, the elder of whom was forward and clever enough to do almost any thing; but the younger was so stupid that he could learn nothing, and when the people saw him they said, Will thy father still keep thee as a burden to him? So if any thing was to be done, the elder had at all times to do it; but sometimes the father would call him to fetch something in the dead of night, and perhaps the way led through the churchyard or by a dismal place, and then he used to answer, No, father, I cannot go there, I am afraid, for he was a coward. Or sometimes, of an evening, tales were told by the fireside which made one shudder, and the listeners exclaimed, Oh, it makes us shiver! In a corner, meanwhile, sat the younger son listening, but he could not comprehend what was said, and he thought, They say continually, ‘Oh, it makes us shiver, it makes us shiver!’ but perhaps shivering is an art which I cannot comprehend. One day, however, his father said to him, Do you hear, you there in the corner? You are growing stout and big; you must learn some trade to get your living by. Do you see how your brother works? But as for you, you are not worth malt and hops.

Ah, father! answered he, I would willingly learn something. What shall I begin? I want to know what shivering means, for of that I can understand nothing.

The elder brother laughed when he heard this speech, and thought to himself, Ah! my brother is such a simpleton that he cannot earn his own living. He who would be a woodcutter must stoop betimes. But the father sighed and said, What shivering means you may learn soon enough, but you will never get your bread by that.

Soon after the parish sextonb came in for a gossip, so the father told him his troubles, and how that his younger son was such a simpleton that he knew nothing, and could learn nothing. Just fancy, when I asked him how he intended to earn his bread, he desired to learn what shivering meant. Oh, if that be all, answered the sexton, he can learn that soon enough with me; just send him to my place, and I will soon teach him. The father was very glad, because he thought that it would do the boy good; so the sexton took him home to ring the bells. About two days afterwards he called him up at midnight to go into the church tower to toll the bell. You shall soon learn what shivering means, thought the sexton, and getting up he went out. As soon as the boy reached the belfry, and turned himself round to seize the rope, he saw upon the stairs, near the sounding hole, a white figure. Who’s there? he called out; but the figure gave no answer, and neither stirred nor spoke. Answer, said the boy, or make haste off; you have no business here to-night. But the sexton did not stir, so that the boy might think that it was a ghost.

The boy called out a second time, What are you doing here? Speak, if you are an honest fellow, or else I will throw you down stairs.

The sexton said to himself, That is not a bad thought, but he remained quiet as if he were a stone. Then the boy called out for the third time, but it produced no effect; so, making a spring, he threw the ghost down the stairs, so that it rolled ten steps and then lay motionless in a corner. Thereupon he rang the bell, and then going home he lay down without saying a word, and fell fast asleep. The sexton’s wife waited some time for her husband, but he did not come; so at last she became anxious, woke the boy, and asked him if he knew where her husband was, who had gone before him to the tower.

No, answered the boy; but there was some one standing on the steps, who would not give any answer, nor go away, so I took him for a thief and threw him downstairs. Go now, and see where he is; perhaps it may be he, but I should be sorry for it. The wife ran off, and found her husband lying in a corner, groaning, with one of his ribs broken.

She took him up and ran with loud outcries to the boy’s father, and told him, Your son has brought a great misfortune on us; he has thrown my husband down and broken his bones. Take the good-for-nothing fellow from our house.

The terrified father came in haste and scolded the boy. What do these wicked tricks mean? They will only bring misfortune upon you.

Father, answered the lad, hear me! I am quite innocent. He stood there at midnight, like one who had done some evil; I did not know who it was, and cried three times, ‘Speak, or be off!’

Ah! said the father, every thing goes badly with you. Get out of my sight; I do not wish to see you again.

Yes, father, willingly; wait but one day, then will I go out and learn what shivering means. I now understand one business which will support me.

Learn what you will, replied the father; all is the same to me. Here are fifty dollars; go forth with them into the world, and tell no man whence you came, or who your father is, for I am ashamed of you.

"Yes, father, as you wish; if you desire nothing else, I shall esteem that very lightly."

As soon as day broke, the youth put his fifty dollars into a knapsack, and went out upon the high road, saying continually, Oh, if I could but shiver!

Presently a man came up, who heard the boy talking to himself; and as they were just passing the place where the gallows stood, the man said, Do you see? There is the tree where seven fellows have married the hempen maid, and now swing to and fro. Sit yourself down there and wait till midnight, and then you will know what it is to shiver.

Oh! if that be all, answered the boy, I can very easily do that. But if I learn so speedily what shivering is, then you shall have my fifty dollars if you come again in the morning.

Then the boy went to the gallows, sat down, and waited for evening; and, as he felt cold, he made a fire. But about midnight the wind blew so sharp that, in spite of the fire, he could not keep himself warm. The wind blew the bodies against one another, so that they swung backwards and forwards, and he thought, If I am cold here below by the fire, how must they freeze and tremble above! So his compassion was excited, and contriving a ladder, he mounted, and unloosening them one after another,

Reviews for Grimm's Fairy Tales (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

[drardavis · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Although this was one part of a two book set, there was a great contrast to Andersen’s Fairy Tales. At times it seemed as if this were the Cliff Notes of fairy tales, rather than what I would have expected from the Ugly Duckling, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel and others. I suppose that over time the details of these stories have been embellished by others all the way up to Walt Disney. The lesser known tales have the usual heads chopped off, people transformed into animals, parents abandoning their children, wicked stepmothers, and so on. A surprising number of these tales repeat themselves. For example, several evil characters are cut open and filled with stones, then sown up again. Quite disappointing. You should read the revised versions.

[ma_washigeri · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

With love from Mummy and Daddy Xmas 1959, I was three and the words and pictures have never left me. A rock on which the rest of my life was built. The book records a moment in time and place, defined by stories, marked on every page by the history of the world, cousin to other stories in other places all over the world and full of the expectancy of the ever changing future.

[pomo58 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm with illustrations from Arthur Rackham is indeed, as the Rock Point series says, a timeless classic.This is specifically a review of the Rock Point edition in their Timeless Classics series. It uses the 1897 Margaret Hunt translation as its source and the Rackham illustrations from a 1909 edition. Reviewing the tales themselves doesn't make a lot of sense here, we have all read at least some of them, whether in this form of one of the many variations. The introduction in this volume does a nice job of introducing the tales and gives a very brief overview of what exactly these stories represent both culturally and historically. If you want to learn about all of the questions and issues around them you will not want a collection of the tales for that, you will want a book devoted to the topic, though a collection like this one will be necessary to fully understand those issues.This edition is packaged wonderfully and will serve as both a nice addition to a library as well as a book you can read from, ideally to your children, then pass down to them when the time comes. The addition of the illustrations in beautiful plates adds to both the pleasure of reading and the pride of ownership.There are some writers that deserve a "complete works of" volume in most libraries and the Brothers Grimm are among those writers. This particular edition will serve that function very well.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.

[linyarai · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

So many stories in this version! Quite a few I'd read before, but most were new to me. Read the ebook version, seemed to never end.

[danielstj · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

These were hit and miss tales. Yet, there was so much to gain from reading some of the better ones that it augmented the rating significantly. These are classics, through and throughout, and they touch on the simpler, more moralistic sense of storytelling and manage to convey so much with so little. Overall, it was well worth reading and I feel I am all the better for it.4 stars!

[nx74defiant · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The original versions not Disneyfied. Lots of deaths. Tricksters. Fools. Kindness rewarded. Cleverness rewarded. Some have morals. Some are just for fun to laugh at the foolishness.

[decaturmamaof2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I loved these tales (in German) when I was a child. Now I'm reading this book to our almost 5-year-old and he loves the stories also. I'm realizing how odd some of them seem in translation, and there sure are a great deal of religious references. But the main stories (Ashputtle, The Bremen Musicians, etc. ) are still classics!

[antao-3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

(Original Review, 2005-11-16)In Genesis there is suddenly this sentence/observation about giants walking the Earth in them days... I always see those elderly male Jews in Babylon, staring glumly at some campfire, thinking about the good old days and thinking up revengeful plans to smite the enemy. They tell the stories of their tribes but there is that one quite senile idiot always going on about 'them giants' - so in the end they say, "Okay, we WILL put them in. Now shut up already!" I can see myself being the Giant Guy (if more all over the place) and I'm not sure the good campfire folks here need the distraction... I don't know if it is only about 'folk tales' per se, but I am with most people on the campfire and howling wolves. For me the atmospherics are very, very important. Our culture no longer has much in the way of campfires and wolves so our writers have had to incorporate them, figuratively, into the fictions themselves. The rest is literary history.I don't see fairytales simply as children's stories; that's a relatively recent- and, of late, receding- viewpoint. There is a vast quantity of material around beyond Grimm and Andersen and little of it aimed at children. Perrault or Marie Catherine d'Aulnoy were writing for the amusement of adults, and the Arabian Nights were not exactly suitable bedtime reading for under-5's, while Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen achieved almost occult-like effects in her wondrous tales, which float somewhere between Baghdad and Copenhagen.Fairytales are most powerful when they access the taboo, the suppressed, or the deepest fears and desires within us. And they do so often. Your "children's rituals" and "simple messages" are really only the tip of the iceberg. For that matter, “The talented Mr. Ripley” (LINK) fulfills a similar role - a very wicked and challenging little tale full of deliciously gratuitous moments, the enjoyment of which made me at least think long and hard about my own morality.I was raised on the standard stuff: Grimm and Andersen mostly. There is obviously darkness there - and taboos, yes. (It's interesting that in the stories where children are imperiled the original versions had 'mother' and the later versions 'stepmothers'.) The ones I and probably most children end(ed) up with are the simpler, safer ones though, don't you think? I love Angela Carter's “Bloody Chamber” but most kids will be more likely to see Disney as the centre of the fairytale universe - which truly is a disservice to fairytales, of course.I am no longer that interested in stories where the characters are merely there to move things alone. Like standard puppets that can be used and reused for all kinds of similar types of stories. As I mentioned elsewhere, that goes for all kinds of stories, including movies. What I find fascinating about the early stories passed along (mutating on the way) is more that they give us some kinds of fleeting glimpse of the origin story of stories. Because most of the early part of that origins stories is/was in an oral form we can never really know how stories began and evolved. There are no helpful fossils - or not enough to have more than (slightly) informed theories.Did stories start as parts of religious/ceremonial chants? Were they like cave paintings: meant to magically influence the outcome of the hunt? Where did fiction start to make an entrance, if the earliest stories were mostly a sort of remembering (the deeds and wisdom of) dead tribe members? All endlessly fascinating to me - and no more than useless musings in the end.Back to fairytales for a moment. They may no longer really work for me as entertainment but the reason they don't is in a way part of their strength. That they are predictable is partly why they work so well as stories. They warn us about the evils of the world but they are also almost like a church service: a repeated ritual to explain the world. They bring order to what basically is a chaotic system. Which is of course also why they are so enduringly popular with children, who like rituals and the idea of safety-through-repetition. I like my stories, like “Grimms Märchen,” more complex but it is easy to see how stories that carve simple messages out of the complex narrative of the world will be as enduring as the world. In that way they are exactly like religion (for me at least). The Grimms, despite their initial attempt to be "invisible" curators of folklore, began increasingly to modify and colour the tales they transcribed. Italo Calvino discusses this phenomenon at length in the introduction to Italian Fables, his own attempt to replicate the Grimms' work in Italy.

[raykhenberg · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Absolutely horrible. I would have been more entertained reading a dictionary. I found myself yelling at this book in my head asking why in the world anyone considers these stories good. I am convinced that all the high ratings people are giving this book are based on the Disney stories that were loosely based on the pure garbage contained within this book.

I don't care if it's "good for its time" or "loses something in translation". Unless it was translated by house cat with slightly below average intelligence or written at a time when people considered gouging their own eyes out a leisure activity there is no reason for it to be this bad.

Do not read this crap to your children, they will become entitled racists who play the lottery.

[tonifgmamtc · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This collection is a load of interesting little stories. These originals are way more twisted than fairytales of my childhood. In these versions, the repercussions are more bloody and less forgiving.

[filialibri-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Diese und weitere Rezensionen findet ihr auf meinem Blog Anima Libri - Buchseele

Märchen, Märchen, Märchen… Ich sollte dringend mal die Kategorie/Genre-Darstellung auf dem Blog reparieren und passend einrichten, sodass man einen besseren Überblick über all die wunderschönen Märchenbücher bekommt, die ich in letzter Zeit so rezensiert habe…

Da wären „Grimms Märchen“ von Phillip Pullman, „Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm“ und „Die Märchen von Hans Christian Andersen“ aus dem Taschen Verlag, „Grimms Märchen ohne Worte“ von Frank Flöthmann und „1001 Nacht – Tausendundeine Nacht“ oder auch Hörbücher wie „Es war einmal und wenn sie nicht“ oder „Es war einmal: Autoren auf Grimms Spuren“.

Zugegebenermaßen, meine Märchensammlung ist derzeit auffällig Grimm-lastig und mit diesem Buch kommt noch eine weitere Ausgabe der Grimmschen Märchen hinzu: Die „Kinder- und Hausmärchen“ der Brüder Grimm aus der Reclam Bibliothek sieht nicht nur wirklich gut aus, sie ist auch tatsächlich einmal eine vollständige Ausgabe aller dieser Märchen.

Ja, ich besitze bereits eine vollständige Ausgabe der Grimmschen Märchen, eine wunderschöne dreibändige Ausgabe, die allerdings auch schon ein paar Jährchen auf dem Buckel hat und sich nur bedingt zum „einfach mal drinrumlesen“ eignet. Daher habe ich mich wirklich gefreut, als ich diese Ausgabe gefunden habe, denn die wurde wirklich sehr gekonnt zusammengestellt und besonders der Punkt „weitgehend an der originalen Sprachlichkeit orientiert“ hat es mir angetan.

So sind die Märchen in dieser Sammlung zwar z.B. grammatikalisch auf dem neusten Stand und auch sprachlich nicht mehr im „Originalzustand“ aber sehr nah dran. So kommt der ursprüngliche „Zauber“ der Grimmschen Märchen nach wie vor rüber, während sich die Märchen trotzdem etwas angenehmer und flüssiger lesen lassen als in der Originalversion.

Alles in allem ist „Kinder- und Hausmärchen“ der Brüder Grimm aus der Reclam Bibliothek eine Ausgabe dieser Märchensammlung, mit der man kaum etwas falsch machen kann. Die Umsetzung ist sehr gut gelungen und inhaltlich bin ich ja sowieso ein riesiger Fan dieser Märchen. Von daher definitiv eine dicke, dicke Empfehlung für dieses Buch.

[mgeorge2755 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Classic stories. It is interesting how these stories have been altered through the years. Another reminder that life isn't always a "happy ending."

[cporte8 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The one thing I would change about this book is to add more color to the illustrations in the stories. This way it would be more appealing to the students than just a black and white illustration.

[bookswithbite · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Ever since I was a little girl, fairy tales have always made a way into my heart. I will never forget staying up late reading stories about Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and The Little Mermaid. The more I read these fairytales the more I wanted. Then I found my way to the fae. Another realm of stories I fell into. Then I learned about The Brother’s Grimm. I was immediately consumed with learning about all these stories and fascinated that even existed. I wanted the beginning. I wanted the truth of how and where this stories began. So I began searching for the perfect book to open that door. I found it in my local indie bookstore. I ask if they have a collection of the “real” Grimm’s brothers stories. They said yes and brought me this beauty…Can I talk about how BEAUTIFUL this book is? Cause it truly is. Leatherbound, eerie and smelling wonderfully (yes I sniffed the book). It has gold pages laced with the real stories of Cinderella, Rapunzel, etc. I have it sitting by my bedside in which I read a story each night. And each story has brought me so much satisfaction.The stories themselves aren’t anything new. Most of us all heard of the Grimm’s stories either by movies (Disney has turned many Grimm’s stories into movies) or tv shows. I personally love reading the real thing. I feel like I stepped into a whole other world when I open this book. And maybe there is hope that something, maybe something strange will happen…you know, just like in stories. (WINK, WINK)If you are a fairytale lover like me and enjoy reading, go pick up this beauty. I can’t even begin to tell you how much I adore this book. I’m not even half-way through it (as I’m reading it slowly) but it is truly a wonderful collections of stories. I will warn you that these stories don’t all have happy endings. These stories were meant for children as lessons for life. Some end in happy endings while others not so much. With each story, I think about the life lesson that the Brothers Grimm are portraying. The way the capture it so beautifully in just a mere couples of pages always leaves me in awe.

[courtney_chance-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

These are Stories I have read and loved as a child and Adult.

[fearless2012 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

There are alot of good fairy tales, but alot depends on the editor or the edition, and going for "The Complete" isn't always the best choice. Repeating a story simply because it was told in the past isn't always a good idea-- it's a bit like turning on the TV and watching something simply because it's being aired. After a certain point, editing is required, whether you admit it or not, after all, there are infinite possible variations to every story, some of which have even made it into writing. So calling any collection "The Complete" is an illusion, and a damaging one, I think. If they simply mean that it's a translation of the "original"-- in terms of the written word-- Brothers Grimm collection of the 1810s, they could simply indicate that in some way. Perhaps-- 'Grimm's Fairy Tales-- Children's and Household Tales', or something like that. I suppose that even of this type of translation there are different versions, and the edition I have (Arthur Rackham as [mediocre] illustrator), doesn't have an introduction (which can be good as well as bad), and doesn't really explain the name-jokes when they come up-- "Fair Katrinelje and Pif-Paf-Poltrie"..... I mean, if you're not going to do something like that well, then maybe you shouldn't include it at all.... should you stuff it in there, just because you have this illusion that there can ever be a "complete" book of fairy tales? In the end this is to me more like a mine from which good stories can be picked, rather than a really good version in itself; my favorite collection of Grimm's Fairy Tales at this point is a google book's version with Edna Henry Lee Turpin as editor, from about a hundred years ago, although there are probably also other good versions, actually meant to be read by, I don't know, children and householders. (I don't want to get into specifics, but if you glance at the list of stories, even, you'll find at least one that clearly you wouldn't read to people of today.... which is why it only makes sense to edit it, as any story-teller modifies what he or she receives from the past....) In the end, the *average* quality of *all* these stories is simply that-- average. It could be better, although it could be worse, too. That's my take. (8/10)

[breksarah · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Classic book of many traditional fairy tales and more. I would use this for upper level elementary students when discussing how the same story can be told in different ways.This is really a great read for third grade on up.

[bnielsen_30 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Indeholder "Katten og musen", "Eventyret om en, der drog ud for at lære frygt at kende", "Den tro Johannes", "De tolv brødre", "Pak", "De tre små mænd i skoven", "De tre spindersker", "Hans og Grete", "Fiskeren og hans kone", "Den tapre lille skrædder", "Askepot", "Gåden", "Mor Hulda", "Rødhætte", "De Bremer stadsmusikanter", "Djævelens tre guldhår", "Lusen og loppen", "Den kloge Hans", "Den kloge Else", "Bord dæk dig", "Tommeliden", "Tornerose", "Kong Drosselskæg", "Snehvide", "Ranselen, hatten og hornet", "Rumleskaft", "Guldfuglen", "Hunden og spurven", "Kongen af det gyldne bjerg", "Det lille æsel", "Ferdinand Tro og Ferdinand Utro", "Jernovnen", "Enøje, Toøje og Treøje", "De seks tjenere", "Jernhans", "På rejse", "Historien om en roe", "Den stærke Hans", "Bonden i himlen", "De to brødre", "Den lille bonde", "Guldgåsen", "Historien om seks, der kommer gennem verden", "Nelliken", "Den kloge Grete", "Bedstefaderen og sønnesønnen", "Bror Lystig", "Lykkehans", "Den fattige og den rige mand", "Den kloge bondepige", "Djævelens snavsede bror", "Bjørneskindsmanden", "De klge folk", "Den fattige møllerdreng og katten", "De to vandringsmænd", "Det blå lys", "Kongesønnen, der ikke var bange for noget", "De tre håndværkssvende", "Salatæslet", "Levetiden", "Bonden og djævelen", "Alfernes gave", "Haren og pindsvinet", "Ten, skytte og synål", "Marsvinet"."Katten og musen" handler om ???"Eventyret om en, der drog ud for at lære frygt at kende" handler om ???"Den tro Johannes" handler om ???"De tolv brødre" handler om ???"Pak" handler om ???"De tre små mænd i skoven" handler om ???"De tre spindersker" handler om ???"Hans og Grete" handler om ???"Fiskeren og hans kone" handler om ???"Den tapre lille skrædder" handler om ???"Askepot" handler om ???"Gåden" handler om ???"Mor Hulda" handler om ???"Rødhætte" handler om ???"De Bremer stadsmusikanter" handler om ???"Djævelens tre guldhår" handler om ???"Lusen og loppen" handler om ???"Den kloge Hans" handler om ???"Den kloge Else" handler om ???"Bord dæk dig" handler om ???"Tommeliden" handler om ???"Tornerose" handler om ???"Kong Drosselskæg" handler om ???"Snehvide" handler om ???"Ranselen, hatten og hornet" handler om ???"Rumleskaft" handler om ???"Guldfuglen" handler om ???"Hunden og spurven" handler om ???"Kongen af det gyldne bjerg" handler om ???"Det lille æsel" handler om ???"Ferdinand Tro og Ferdinand Utro" handler om ???"Jernovnen" handler om ???"Enøje, Toøje og Treøje" handler om ???"De seks tjenere" handler om ???"Jernhans" handler om ???"På rejse" handler om ???"Historien om en roe" handler om ???"Den stærke Hans" handler om ???"Bonden i himlen" handler om ???"De to brødre" handler om ???"Den lille bonde" handler om ???"Guldgåsen" handler om ???"Historien om seks, der kommer gennem verden" handler om ???"Nelliken" handler om ???"Den kloge Grete" handler om ???"Bedstefaderen og sønnesønnen" handler om ???"Bror Lystig" handler om ???"Lykkehans" handler om ???"Den fattige og den rige mand" handler om ???"Den kloge bondepige" handler om ???"Djævelens snavsede bror" handler om ???"Bjørneskindsmanden" handler om ???"De klge folk" handler om ???"Den fattige møllerdreng og katten" handler om ???"De to vandringsmænd" handler om ???"Det blå lys" handler om ???"Kongesønnen, der ikke var bange for noget" handler om ???"De tre håndværkssvende" handler om ???"Salatæslet" handler om ???"Levetiden" handler om ???"Bonden og djævelen" handler om ???"Alfernes gave" handler om ???"Haren og pindsvinet" handler om ???"Ten, skytte og synål" handler om ???"Marsvinet" handler om ???

[thewallflower-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It's hard to read and repetitive. Every story is a variation of Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, or Sleeping Beauty. There's lots of long paragraphs, little dialogue, and the narrative does little to evoke imagination. Everything happens in sets of threes, and I know nothing is going to happen the first two times, so I would just skip to the third.Every story is the same. Someone goes out into the world to seek fortune, marry someone, or defeat evil. He/she collects some magic artifacts. Something happens based on wordplay or puns. Then he's told not to do something, and inevitably, he does it. Because where would the plot be if anyone actually followed directions? Otherwise we wouldn't have "Gremlins". Go see the Disney versions.

[gold_gato-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

These are the unabridged tales of the Brothers Grimm, which means death and envy and not-nice endings. These are old German tales, which can bring back rather Teutonic visions of paganism and malicious parents. One can understand the superstition of the Germanic population and how many of these tales originated during the Thirty Years' War, when entire families and villages vanished in flames. I suppose if I had to survive during those times, my mind would have created wondrous stories that focused on retribution and survival. While the Grimms collected these tales in the 19th Century, the horrors of the previous centuries come through loud and clear.

There are many patterns throughout the stories with the numbers 3 and 7 being very popular. Three sons venture into the world, seven brothers are turned into swans, three puzzles must be solved by the potential groom, seven years must be served under the Devil...and so forth and so on. Wives and mothers do not come out well here, either being selfish or witches or both. Hansel and Gretel still resonates, more so after reading the original version (as in, parents not wanting the kids).

I took my time reading this over several months, so I could enjoy each story. There are many favorites but the one I enjoyed the most was the shortest:MISFORTUNE, which quickly tells the tale of a man who couldn't win, even as he was being saved (crushed by a wall).

When misfortune pursues any one, it will find him out into whatever corner he may creep, or however far he may flee over the world.

Book Season = Autumn (season of the witch)

[weeta-3 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I read this over and over again as a kid (obviously not the "kindle" edition, but it was one big volume.)

[cjyurkanin · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

What a great thing to reread all these old tales again, most of them as if for the first time! I'd forgotten how much simpler and purer many of these are than their Disney versions (although I do appreciate those also) such as Rumpelstiltskin and how explicitly Christian many of them are such as Our Lady's Child, my favorite, from which Tomie Depaola's classic "Clown of God" obviously draws from. I think the translation is one of the most readable I've seen, keeping a touch of old world flavor without sounding too foreign to modern ears. Great collection.

[gundulabaehre · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a reprint of Friedrich Panzer's 1913 publication of the first edition of the fairy tale collection of the Brothers Grimm (from 1813). Although his introduction is quite dated, the real find are the fairy tales themselves, as many of the tales are slightly different from the later editions (most modern editions of the tales are of the seventh or final edition from 1857). For example, in the 1813 version of Rapunzel Rapunzel is sent into the wilderness by Mrs. Gothel (the fairy) because she is obviously pregnant, a fact that is not mentioned in the 1857 version of the tale. And in the original tale of Snow White, the heroine was pursued by her jealous mother, only later was the jealous mother turned into an evil stepmother. While I would probably not recommend this edition for casual reading, as even some of the language and orthography are somewhat old-fashioned, it is a very interesting and enlightening addition to the bookshelf of anyone interested in the genesis and development of Grimms' fairy tales. It is, however, in German, and I do not know if an English translation of the 1813 edition even exists.

[ashleyhill2012 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This fairytale was about a brother and sister named, Hansel and Gretel, who are lured into the woods by their evil stepmom. They can't find their way back home and come upon a gingerbread candy house. They begin to eat the house and then get invited in by a witch who tried to fatten them up to eat them in a stew. They trick the witch, kill her, and then find their way home to their father with riches. The theme of this story could be triumph and perseverance. This story is kind of scary to teach as a lesson but I think it is a great book to have in the classroom for special story days to read about fairytales and the different types of them.

[sebastianhagelstein · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is an extensive collection of 210 stories, fairy tales, and legends written by the Grimm Brothers and is 845 pages long. It includes a few of their more famous stories, like Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel, and Cindarella, along with many that are not as well known.It's interesting to see how the versions of their famous stories in this book differ from the popular versions that are usually told.

[mbrittain_8 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is a reread for me, as I read a volume of these when I was nine or ten. What always resonates for me is the violence that was in these stories and how lessons were always to be learned for the reader/listener. Stories of comeuppance and knowing ones’ place in society are in many of the tales, but so are stories of “happily ever after.” For me, it’s the sheer volume of stories that is intriguing. It’s easy to pick a favorite story for however one might be feeling at the time and get a lift or feeling of vengeful satisfaction in the misfortunes of the bad characters that remind us of terrible bosses or the guy who cut us off in traffic.

[thebooknerd · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Every book nerd should have a copy of the Grimms' tales. If you haven't delved any further than Disney, you should definitely get a copy of the complete tales right away.

[comfypants · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I guess I'm glad I read it, but it was a chore. For every good story, there are twenty near-unreadable messes.

[smg6sreeswemyss · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The brothers grimm book of fairytales is not for the lighthearted. Its scary and has many dark themes yet somehow on a cold winters night im always drawn in.

[bookangel_a · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I've read a few Grimm's Fairy Tales over the years, while growing up, etc. But I'm glad I finally made the time to read the complete, original collection.These fairy tales are very short, and best read in small doses. I read one or two tales every day. It was interesting to see the original version of popular classics like Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, etc, and how much has been changed over the years.I had heard that these tales were darker than the modern versions, and they are, just a little bit. I would not recommend reading these to VERY young children - they might find some parts a little scary. For instance, sometimes young people get eaten, killed, and occasionally a head is chopped off. Generally speaking, things work out for the best in the end, though, and there is usually a lesson to be learned. Older children should have no problem reading this.I would recommend this book if you have any interest in fairy tales, modern or ancient.