[Also known as: Children's and Household Tales]
Started: July 23, 2018 (Although I didn't really begin tackling it as a reading project until July 18, 2021)
Finished: September 2, 2021
My History With The Brothers Grimm
Our house had a collection of Grimm Brothers Fairy Tales when I was a child. It was so many years ago that I couldn't possibly tell you what edition it was. It was hard cover, and on the cover there was a picture of a big castle, and knights, princesses, dragons, and other fantastic creatures.
I never made any attempt to read it from cover to cover, but I would occasionally pick it up and read a story at random. I used to do this especially when I was bored on a summer afternoon. (People who had their childhoods before the Internet will be able to identify with this.) I particularly remember taking this book with me to pass the time when we had to spend the day at our grandparents' house. I would flip through the book until I found a story title that looked interesting. I would always start the story in a skeptical mind. (The beginning of each story was always so dry that I thought the whole story would be boring.) But then I would always be pleasantly surprised at how fun the story was once you got into it. (*1)
I don't think I ever read the whole book. (Although this is so far back in childhood it's impossible for me to remember accurately.) And besides which, I don't think it was a complete and unabridged version (although again, it's all a bit foggy.)
Why I Wanted to Read the complete Brothers Grimm
So, I've had it in my head for years now that I wanted to read the complete and unabridged Brothers Grimm. The reasons are several:
* Pure childhood nostalgia, and the desire to return to my reading from a simpler time.
* The desire to finish what I started as a child.
* Literary snobbery. My desire to read yet another classic of the Western Literary Canon, and complete one more step in my never-ending quest to become well-read. After all, Auden said that these stories part of the foundation of Western literature.
* Also a desire to immerse myself in fantasy--to spend time reading about fairies, princesses, princes, knights, dragons, dwarves, elves, witches and giants. (*2)
* And, related to the above point, a desire to learn more about the history of the fantasy genre. I was curious to learn more about how dwarves, elves, goblins, et cetera, were portrayed in the days before Tolkien. (Pre-Tolkien fantasy being something I'm always curious about--see HERE and HERE.)
* My interest in the Brothers Grimm increased when I began to encounter references to them in some of my other reading. They were not just fictitious names like Homer, Aesop, Scheherazade, or Mother Goose--they were real people who had real biographies. Jacob Grimm, for example, popped up as one of the political figures in Revolutions of 1848 by Priscilla Robertson. Also Jacob Grimm's linguistic work--specifically his research into the the origins of Indo-European languages, has popped up in some of the linguistic books I've been reading (HERE and HERE, for example, and in some of the others too, but I can't remember which ones off-hand.)
[As you can see, of the two brothers, Jacob was the more famous, and he had both a career in politics and linguistics. Unfortunately I've lost the link, but I once saw a lecture on the Grimm Brothers on Youtube in which the professor said that Jacob Grimm was the Noam Chomsky of his day in the sense that he impressed his contemporaries by having both a successful political and linguistic career. (Although I don't think Jacob Grimm was nearly as radical as Chomsky).]
As a child, I always thought the Grimm Brothers were fictional--like Mother Goose. Having them pop up in my reading reminded me that they existed in a historical context, and I began to want to learn more about them.
That, plus the Grimm Brothers lived and worked in the 19th Century, and I had once considered 19th Century Europe to be my area of historical interest. So reading through The Grimm Brothers' Fairy Tales would be yet another insight into the historical time - period I was interested in.
Getting Started
As I said, finding and reading a complete Brothers Grimm volume has been on my reading list for years now. So why has it taken me so long to finally get around to it?
Well, partly because I'm such a slow reader. I only make it through a handful of books a year, and there are tons of books that have been on my TBR (to be read) list for years now.
And partly because it can be difficult to track down a complete and unabridged copy of The Brothers Grimm. Abridged or selected versions of The Brothers Grimm are out there in plenty, but complete and unabridged versions are harder to get your hands on. (Or at least that's been my experience. Granted my perspective may be skewed from having lived abroad for so long, so go into your local bookstore and let me know what you find.) I certainly don't remember seeing any copies in Japan, at least not in English.
In Cambodia, at an English bookstore, I once bought a copy of the Brothers Grimm which I saw on the shelves, only to get it home and realize it wasn't the complete version. (You've got to be careful--a lot of these editions don't actually say anywhere that they are only selected stories. It was only once I compared it with the full list of Grimm's stories that I realized it was incomplete.)
I suppose all this begs the question...
What Exactly is the Complete Brothers Grimm?
The question of "the complete Brothers Grimm" is complicated by the fact that there actually isn't one single version. The Grimm Brothers published 7 different editions during their lives.
I think most people consider the Complete Brothers Grimm to be their final and largest edition which contains 200 tales and 10 legends (so, 210 stories essentially.)
But although the final version is the largest edition, there are some stories from earlier editions that got left out of the 7th and final edition. (Wikipedia has a list HERE of the stories that were in earlier editions, but were removed from the final edition for one reason or another.) (*3) , (*4)
But generally the 210 stories of the 7th edition are considered the complete Brothers Grimm. So if you can find an edition that has all 200 tales and all 10 legends, then you've got the unabridged collection. (*5)
What I Read
The version I finally got my hands on (in a bookstore here in Saigon) is The Complete Illustrated Fairy Tales of The Brother Grimm published by Wordsworth Editions in 1997 (type reset in 2007). It's the same version pictured at the top of this post.
As I mentioned in a previous post, Wordsworth Editions of the classics are, for whatever reason, very popular in Saigon, so a lot of my reading the past few years have been Wordsworth books. As I also mentioned in that same post, Wordsworth Editions tend to be no-frills, and also tend to use the oldest public domain translation.
This edition of the Brothers Grimm doesn't contain a publisher's introduction, or any explanatory notes. It doesn't even tell me who the translator is. However by doing a bit of digging around online, I've discovered that the Wordsworth edition is the 1884 Translation by Margaret Hunt (W). This is no doubt the oldest cheapest translation that Wordsworth could get their hands on. But it also appears to be the most famous translation, so I guess I can't complain too much.
The Brothers Grimm 7th edition was originally published in two volumes (W) and Margaret Hunt's 1884 translation was also originally in two volumes (W), but the Wordsworth edition I bought is only one volume with 845 pages. [Looking at Amazon.com, it looks like almost all the volumes sold nowadays are one volume. I wonder, did something about bookbinding change since the 19th century?]
According to Wikipedia, the original 1884 Margaret Hunt translation contained an introduction by Andrew Lang, which is not in my edition. (It's online HERE and it looks like quite a long introduction--I've not read it because I hate reading long things online (*6)).
Margaret Hunt's 1884 edition also contained Jacob Grimm's notes, which my Wordsworth edition does not have. Although these are also online--at least partially. (Wikisource has Jacob Grimm's notes for Volume 1 HERE, but doesn't seem to have them for volume 2 as of this writing. Although they're probably online somewhere on the Internet, huh? I've not read the Wikisource edition of Jacob Grimm's notes for the same reason I skipped Andrew Lang's introduction--I view my leisure reading time as time away from the computer screen.)
So, to summarize:
After completing the Wordsworth Edition of Margaret Hunt's translation of the Brother's Grimm...
I have read:
* The complete 200 tales and 10 legends from the Brothers Grimm's Final Edition
I have not read:
* The earlier (rawer) versions of some of these same stories that were in earlier editions
* Jacob Grimm's scholarly notes that accompanied the stories
* Andrew Lang's original introduction to Margaret Hunt's translation
* Any other stories that the Grimm Brother's wrote about elsewhere--for example, their collection of German Legends. (*7)
But, I'm still going to call this as me having now read the complete Brothers Grimm. I've read all the stories they published in their final edition--I'm counting this one as done. I'm now officially checking "Read the Complete and Unabridged Brothers Grimm" off of my reading list.
So, as I mentioned in my started post, my original plan was to work my way through the complete Brothers Grimm as part of my Storytime ESL Listening Project.
For each story, I re-wrote the story myself in language that I hoped would be accessible to a pre-intermediate ESL student. (I did my best.) And then read that script into the camera to create Youtube videos, and also used that script to create a list of vocabulary words for quizlet.
I started with a brief biography of the Brothers Grimm (which I researched and wrote myself), and then I wanted to continue by systematically working through with the Brothers Grimm stories in order. ("In order" meaning in the ordering of the stories in the final edition of The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales.)
* 1. The Frog Prince
* 2. A Cat and a Mouse Living Together
* 3. Lady Mary's Child
* 4. The Boy Who Wanted to Learn How to Shudder
* 5. The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids
* 2. A Cat and a Mouse Living Together
* 3. Lady Mary's Child
* 4. The Boy Who Wanted to Learn How to Shudder
* 5. The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids
As you can see, I managed to work my way through the first 6 stories in order--with two additions. Story 57 The Golden Bird was the first story I did. It was before I had bought my physical copy of The Brothers Grimm and so I was using the copy off of Project Gutenberg HERE. It turns out the copy on Project Gutenberg wasn't a complete version, but only selected stories which were out of order. For story 92 The King of the Golden Mountain, I deliberately jumped out of order because I was looking for a really interesting story to do for my Story-Listening - lesson on the Delta.
These stories took me forever to make. Mostly it was my own fault. What began as a simple idea to read the Grimm Brothers aloud into the camera became more and more complex as I kept adding stuff in. (Multiple videos in multiple different styles--normal speed, slow speed, and storytelling version--quizlet quizzes for the vocabulary (*8), and comprehension questions with model answers.)
I finally stopped doing them when I transferred departments to teacher training, and I no longer had a group of students to make these lessons for.
I initially thought I would continue through The Brothers Grimm stories anyway, just for the sake of making a complete archive online which could be useful for other teachers and students. But making these lessons took up so much time that it was difficult to maintain the motivation without students of my own.
Plus, as luck would have it, the next story in order would have been story 7--The Good Bargain (W), which, as it turns out, was blatantly anti-Semitic. (Wow, that didn't take long, huh? Only story number 7, and already I'm encountering anti-Semitic material.) So that took the wind out of my sails. I debated what to do. The most sensible option seemed to be to just skip over it completely and go on to story 8. But what fun was it to do a complete re-telling of The Brothers Grimm that wasn't complete? Could I edit around the anti-Semitic parts, or change the ethnicities of the characters? Or would that be white-washing history? And so, while I debated the idea in my mind, the project stalled even further.
Eventually, after enough months had gone by, I finally admitted to myself that I was not going to finish my project of re-telling all of The Brothers Grimm. But I still wanted to check the book off of my reading list.
My reading list was pretty backed up with other stuff by this time. But eventually I picked up The Brothers Grimm on July 18, 2021, and read it over the course of a month and a half.
Background Information on The Brothers Grimm
I did some research when I was writing the biography of The Brothers Grimm 3 years ago--I watched a bunch of lectures on Youtube, and read a bunch of websites and ended up uncovering some interesting information. (*9) Unfortunately at the time I neglected to keep track of all the URL addresses, so now I can't really site my sources. (*10) But I'll try to summarize what I've learned
You're probably familiar with the legend of The Brothers Grimm--as the story is often told, The Brothers Grimm wanted to preserve as many of the village folktales as they could, so they set out on a project to compile as many stories as they could from all over Germany.
This is the image that The Brothers Grimm themselves wanted to portray, but it turns that they misrepresented things. Many of their stories came from either books in the library, or a lot of the stories actually came from just one woman, who happened to be a friend of theirs. It appears that they even fudged some of their scholarly notes to hide the fact that many of these stories didn't actually come from the villages (*11)
The Grimm Brothers also had a nationalistic agenda, and they wanted their story collection to reflect a certain romantic view of German folktales. To this end, they rewrote the stories over the years to make them more literary. They also toned down some themes that they didn't like. Over the years, they decided that motherhood was sacred, so evil mothers became evil stepmothers. (In the original Snow White and Hansel and Gretel, for example, it was an evil mother, and not a step-mother.)
The Grimm Brothers also over the years took out stories that they didn't think reflected their ideal of German Romanticism. In general the trend was to add stories in with each new addition, but they also quietly took some stories out over the years. (This is why, as I mentioned above, there are several stories omitted from the final edition.)
So this is not exactly the pure work of scholarship the Grimm Brothers presented it as. There was definitely some manipulation going on.
Another thing I learned was that when the first edition of this book was released, the public wasn't quite sure what to make of it. They weren't sure if it was a storybook to be read for entertainment, or a work of scholarship to be studied. It was also unclear if this was meant as a book for children or not. And so the first edition of The Brothers Grimm apparently sold poorly. But eventually a smaller book of selected stories--a sort of greatest hits--was released to the public, and that sold quite well. The Grimm Brothers eventually got their book illustrated, and the illustrations also helped to make it a popular seller, and associate it more with children. And the desire to appeal to children was yet another reason the Grimm's Brothers stories were re-written.
However, interestingly enough, the trend was not to tone down the violence. In fact, the violence actually increased in the re-writings. (Both Wikipedia and In Our Time make this point--the sexual innuendos were written out over the years, but the violence actually increased.)
My Review
Alright, so, after all that, let's talk about the reading experience.
The first thing to note is that this is a big book. 845 pages. So it takes a while to work through.
As for the stories, as I have previously mentioned, it's 210 stories (200 tales, 10 legends.) But this numbering is actually slightly deceiving, because quite often multiple stories will be categorized under the same number. (e.g. story #38, The Wedding of Mrs Fox is actually two different stories. Story #39 The Elves is actually 3 different stories).
Now, of all these stories, there are, I believe, 11 stories that everyone, but everyone, already knows: The Frog Prince, Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, The Shoemaker and the Elves, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Tom Thumb (*12), The Brave Little Taylor, Rapunzel, and Rumpelstiltskin.
Now, if you're thinking "Wait, what about Jack and the Beanstalk? What about The 3 Little Pigs? What about Goldilocks and the 3 Bears? What about....? What about....? What about....?" Well, all those other famous fairy tales are from different sources. The really famous Grimm Fairy Tales are less in number than you might expect. (*13)
In addition to these 11 uber-famous stories, there are other stories that are relatively famous--stories that possibly you may have read in a children's story collection when you were younger, or you may not have, depending on what books you happened to stumble across. In this category I would include stories like: The Wolf and the Seven Little Kids, Town Musicians of Bremen, The Fisherman and his Wife, The Magic Porridge Pot, etc. I would number these secondary stories at somewhere around an addition 10-15, depending on the reader. No more than 20. (*14)
So, that means that out of these 210 stories, there are probably 180 or so that you've never heard of before. So it is certainly not the case that you already know all these stories. For most normal people, there's a lot of new stories to read in this collection.
Now, within those 180 or so stories you've never heard of, there are about 50 really good ones--stories that are really charming, imaginative and put a big smile on your face as you read them.
And then that still leaves 130 or so stories that are, for one reason or another, not terribly good. (*15)
I hate to say it, but I found this book a bit of a chore to read cover-to-cover.
This is yet another time where my completist tendencies have done me no favors. I probably would have been much happier reading a collection of the 50 best Brothers Grimm stories rather slogging through the whole unabridged version.
The other issue is that fairy tale collections like this aren't meant to be read straight through as you would read a novel. You're supposed to keep this book permanently on your shelves, pick it up every now and again when you're in the mood, flip to a random story, and just enjoy the story by itself. Reading through them all at once is bound to kill the charm. You become very sick of the conventions very quickly.
So, I don't think I would recommend anyone else read through this book cover to cover. (I thought about subtitling this review: "I read The Unabridged Brothers Grimm so you don't have to.)
It's difficult to give a thorough review of a short story collection without reviewing every single story in the collection. And I've already decided I'm not going to do that. In fact, I made myself a little rule before I started writing this review--I'm not going to talk about individual stories. (Even though there are a lot of interesting little stories in this collection--for good reasons and bad reasons.) I'm only going to try to talk about them in general.
The narrative quality of these stories differs widely. Some of them are very well told, with a lot of description and narrative flourishes. And some of them are very badly told. (Apparently Wilhelm Grimm rewrote a lot of the stories in the 7th edition to make them more literary, but he must not have gotten around to all of them. Or, who knows, maybe sometimes it's the translators fault. It's always hard to say with a translated book.)
My complaints about the narrator are:
* The narrator will often forget to clarify the relationships between characters, and then only drop it in at the end of the story. Like, at the end of a story, we might find out that the mother was actually a step-mother.
* Things quite often happen with not explanation. A character will suddenly change into a bird with no explanation in the text. Or a prince will suddenly forget who his lover is with no explanation.
* A number of these stories are told in just a bare-bones style, which make it difficult to get very involved in the story.
* Some of the more bizarre stories are told like they were written by a 5 year old on a sugar-high. They jump randomly from one point to another with no rhyme or reason. (I was reminded a few times of Axe Cop--a comic book written by a 5 year old (W)--as I read this collection.)
The most tiresome thing about these stories, however, is how repetitive they are.
They are repetitive in the broad strokes: lots of evil stepmothers, lots of princesses that need to be married, lots of clever tailors.
But the stories are also very repetitive in a lot of oddly specific details.
There are, I don't know, like 6 stories in which the prince forgets about the princess he is in love with, and decides to marry another woman instead. And the princess shows up at the engagement party wearing a beautiful dress that she got out of a magic nut. And the bride-to-be really wants the dress, so the princess makes a deal that the bride that she can have the dress if the princess can spend one night with the prince. So they agree, but then in the night when the princess tries to remind the prince about their love, the prince sleeps through the night. And this same thing happens again the second night. But the 3rd night, the princess finds out that the prince is being given a sleeping draught, and she convinces him to pour out his drink, and he does, and she tells him everything, and then he remembers and he marries her.
That same story popped up many times. And that's just one example. There are a lot of other very specific stories that are repeated stories throughout this volume.
So, here is where we get to the question mentioned above, the question that confused the original audience for this book: Is this a collection of stories for entertainment, or a work of scholarship? If it's a work of scholarship, then it makes sense that variations of the same story are repeated again and again. You can easily imagine how these stories must have changed over time when they were being told and retold in the villages. No wonder the Grimm Brothers were able to collect several different versions of the same story. And as faithful scholars, they recorded all the variations.
(Um... I guess for the moment just forget about all the unscholarly things they did, like revising and rewriting the stories, or lying in their notes about where the stories came from.)
But as a collection of stories to be read for entertainment, it was just way too repetitive for me. (But once again, that's my fault for trying to plow through all these stories straight through as if I was reading a novel.)
Other Observations
* The stories vary a lot in length. Some of them are really short--several of them are only one paragraph long. (A number of these short stories have a kind of Aesop's Fables feel to them.) Other stories are longer stories--the longest ones usually being about 10 pages or so.
I hate to complain about everything, but... I found the varying length of the stories to be a bit jarring when reading straight through. Sometimes there would be 3 short stories in a row, followed by a longer story. And I felt like I was just getting into the rhythm of reading short stories, and groaned when I got to a longer one.
* A lot of these stories have Christian themes to them. (Saint Peter, Mary, Adam and Eve, etc, often appear as characters.) The Christianity in question in these stories is always of a Catholic bent, which surprised me. (19th Century Germany was Protestant, right?)
* I've been calling this collection "The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales" throughout this review, because that's what it is commonly known as nowadays. But I should note, that's not the original name the Grimm Brothers themselves used. It was original called "Children's and Household Tales". And indeed, many of the stories in this collection are not really what we would think of as "fairy tales" nowadays. (There's a few scary stories in this collection, for example.) It's better to think of this as a collection of folktales.
* My translation (Margaret Hunt, 1884), shows a fondness for using King James English (e.g. "thee", "thou" , "knowst", etc). It's not entirely consistent, but that's definitely the preferred style. But why? The Grimm Brothers were writing in the 19th Century. Margaret Hunt translated them in the 19th Century. Why use English from the 16th Century? Does it have something to do with the style of German that the Grimm Brothers used?
* So, I've mentioned that there are 200 stories and 10 legends in this collection. Which, of course, begs the question: What is the difference between a story and a legend?
The answer is: I don't know. The legends seemed to be religiously themed, but then several of the normal 200 stories were also religiously themed. So I don't know.
I've checked Wikipedia. I've Googled it. I can't find what the difference is. Somebody let me know if the comments if you know.
(*1) Looking back on it now, I don't remember any individual stories from childhood, aside from a couple.
I remember reading Snow-White and Rose Red, and finding it interesting that there was a second Snow White story. The continuity of this story was impossible to match up with the more famous Snow White story, but as a child I thought this was a re-imagining of the character. (Much the way famous cartoon characters often show up in different continuities.) It wasn't until a few years ago, when I was randomly looking stuff up on Wikipedia one afternoon, and I looked this story up, and was disappointed to find out that it had no connection at all to the other Snow White story. In fact, according to Wikipedia, the name isn't even the same in the original German.
I should perhaps clear up that reading that collection was not my only exposure to the Brothers Grimm, of course. Their famous stories (Cinderella, Snow White, etc) are part of the air we breathe. Like everyone else born after 1937, I am more familiar with the Disney version of these stories than the original folktales. But we did study the original folktales in school.
For example, I remember an elementary school teacher reading the original Grimm Brothers' Cinderella to us, and I remember (1) being very surprised at how different it was to the Disney version, (2) being surprised at the macabre ending in the original which the stepsisters had their eyes pecked out by birds. (Actually I shouldn't say "original", should I? Because Cinderella has a long history before the Brothers Grimm. But you know what I mean.)
I also remember doing a whole unit on Folktales and Fairytales in 6th grade. (My 6th grade story, The True Story of Little Red Riding Hood, was part of that unit.)
(*2) I should make clear that these were my expectations before I read The Brothers Grimm, not the actual content of the Grimm Brothers' Fairy Tales. As it turns out, there are no knights in The Brothers Grimm fairy tales. (I guess the chivalric romances must have been in a separate tradition.) Nor are there any goblins. When an evil little creature is needed for the story, it is usually an evil dwarf. (Which is odd, because I think goblins showed up in a lot of other fairy tale collections from the time.) Dragons pop up in only a couple stories. And oddly enough, no fairies. Plenty of enchantresses and witches, but no fairies. (I would call "fairy tales" a misnomer for this collection--and it kind of is--except that the Grimm Brothers themselves didn't call it fairy tales. They called it Children's and Household Tales.)
Caveat: I didn't actually take notes when I was reading, so these assertions are all based on my memory after having finished all 210 stories. Let me know if I'm forgetting some appearance of a fairy or a goblin.
(*3) I wonder... do you suppose that somewhere out there exists a comprehensive Brothers Grimm collection, which contains all 210 stories from the final edition, plus the 30 stories that were in earlier editions but omitted from the final edition? Let me Google this a second.... and.... Yes, found one on Amazon! The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm All-New Third Edition
Now, in the new, expanded third edition, renowned scholar and folklorist Jack Zipes has translated all 250 tales collected and published by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, plus twenty-nine rare tales omitted from the original German edition, as well as narratives uncovered in the brothers’ letters and papers.
This isn't the version I read. (I read an unabridged copy of the 7th edition) but I guess this is what you'd have to order if you really wanted the ultra-complete edition. (Although, based on that description, it doesn't sound like it includes Jacob Grimm's notes, so maybe it isn't completely complete after all.)
[By the way, that title, The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm All-New Third Edition , is confusing, no? Because the Brothers Grimm published several editions within their lifetime. So is this a translation of the Brothers Grimm's 3rd edition? Or is this the 3rd edition of the publisher's version of The Complete Fairy Tales? I assume the latter, but it's potentially confusing.]
(*4) Also, the Grimm Brothers revised and rewrote these stories over the years. So some people prefer to go to the original first edition (on Amazon HERE) in order to read these stories in their rawest form.
(*5) Sometimes you'll see people talking about 211 final stories. This is because the Grimm Brothers had one story they labelled as 151a. If you count 151 and 151a as variants of the same story, then it's 210. If you count them as two different stories, then its 211.
(*6) Although as someone who routinely writes long things and posts them online, I know that's hypocritical. But there you are.
(*7) When I was searching for Grimm Brothers Fairy tales, the very first result that came up listed The Pied Piper as one of the top 10 most famous Grimm Brothers tales.
Well, a little bit of searching around on Wikipedia later, and it turns out, this is one of the stories in German Legends, also by the Grimm Brothers. So it is one of their stories, kind of, but it's not included in the Grimm's Brothers Fairy Tales.
As you can see, sorting out what is and is not a canonical Grimm's Brothers Fairy Tale can get a bit confusing.
(*8) Quizlet quizzes that I spent ages making, and which absolutely none of my students did. Another hard lesson learned in the life of a teacher.
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| https://quizlet.com/404566022/info |
(*9) Most of this extra information I didn't use in my actual lesson, because it turns out the reality behind the Brothers Grimm is somewhat different than the myth, and I didn't want to confuse my students, so I just went with the myth in my lesson.
(*10) But I can recommend this video (The Grimm Brothers: About The Grimm Brothers) and the In Our Time episode on The Brothers Grimm. Actually the In Our Time episode on the Brothers Grimm wasn't up on Youtube when I was doing my research 3 years ago. But I've listened to it recently and it is good.
(*11) For an interesting discussion about how appropriate or inappropriate this deception was, see the In Our Time episode.
(*12) There are actually 2 different stories about Tom Thumb. Story #37 Tom Thumb and story #45 Tom Thumb as Journeyman. These stories have the same set-up (a boy as big as a thumb) but are actually different stories and different characters--see Wikipedia HERE. Also the Tom Thumb stories that appear in the Brothers Grimm are different than the legends of Tom Thumb told in English folk tales--see Wikipedia HERE.
(*13) In addition, there are a couple more really famous fairy tales that were in previous editions, but removed from the 7th edition--Puss in Boots and The Princess and the Pea. But both of these stories pre-date the Brothers Grimm and were (I believe) famous even before the Grimm Brothers wrote about them. So I don't think it's because of the Brothers Grimm that we know about these stories today. Also, as previously mentioned in footnote (*7), The Pied Piper of Hamelin is something the Grimm Brothers wrote about elsewhere, but not in their famous fairy tale collection.
(*14) I'm fairly confident in my choices here, but it may be interesting to compare notes and see if we're all on the same page.
What do you think of my selection of 11 stories that absolutely everyone knows. Am I missing any? (That list again, for your reference, is: The Frog Prince, Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, The Shoemaker and the Elves, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Tom Thumb, The Brave Little Taylor, Rapunzel, and Rumpelstiltskin )
My Wordsworth copy on the back-cover also lists The Goose-Girl as one of the well-known tales. Wikipedia also lists The Goose-Girl as one of the most famous Grimm Brothers stories.
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| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_Grimm |
I don't really remember The Goose-Girl as being that famous myself. Although upon reading it, I felt like maybe I did have vague childhood memories of seeing some sort of movie or TV special about a girl talking to horse head on the wall. But I've searched Youtube and Google and can't seem to find anything. Does anyone else remember any dramatizations of The Goose-Girl?
(*15) So, obviously those numbers are just out of my hat just now. I didn't actually keep a tally as I was reading. But reflecting back on the reading experience, it feels like it was about that ratio.
July 18, 2021 The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales p.1-42
July 25, 2021 The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales p.42-336
August 1, 2021 The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales p.336-532
August 8, 2021 The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales p.532-570
August 15, 2021 The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales p.570-640
August 22, 2021 The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales p.640-694
August 29, 2021 The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales p.694-802
September 5, 2021 The Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales p.802-845
September 12, 2021--some thoughts on the Librovox recording
Video Review (Playlist HERE)
As I mentioned in the video, I neglected to save the URLs for all the videos I watched when researching this book. But I remember two of them that are worth watching:
The Brothers Grimm (In Our Time): https://youtu.be/6cZiRwgwIi8
The Grimm Brothers: About The Grimm Brothers: https://youtu.be/x_hXhnjRXpY
I blanked out in the video when I was attempting to list the 11 Brothers Grimm stories that I believe everyone knows, but that list is: The Frog Prince, Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, The Shoemaker and the Elves, Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Tom Thumb, The Brave Little Taylor, Rapunzel, and Rumpelstiltskin.
In the video, I talked about a comic book written by a 5 year old, which I called "Dinosaur Cop", but I got the name wrong. It's called "Axe Cop": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axe_Cop
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