The Original Folk & Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition
- Aug 22, 2022
- 2 min read
★★★☆☆
Here’s where it all began. The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm presents all 156 stories from the two Children’s and Household Tales volumes the Grimms originally published in 1812 and 1815. Also contained are an extensive introduction and substantive notes, bookending the star attraction with the faint whiff of academia. Those parts may undoubtedly be skipped by many readers—the former as I recall (I began reading this nearly three years ago), was rather dry; the latter of some interest—but then I wonder who the average reader is for this hefty tome that clocks in at nearly 600 pages of unusually small print?
When I say, “Here’s where it all began,” I mean this: These are the first versions of these stories Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published under their own name. That doesn’t make them the original versions of these stories, of course, as they were collected from all over Germany and beyond, altered or edited to suit the brothers’ purposes, and presented rather encyclopedically. But these were the first versions of these stories many people had ever read, and, in this collection at least, the first time they’ve been translated into English. Many will be completely unknown to readers, while those that are known—“The Frog King,” “Rapunzel,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Cinderella,” “Puss in Boots,” “Rumpelstiltskin,” “Snow White” (all from the first volume, by the way), and more—are quite different from the versions familiar today. The result is a mixed bag of repetition, inanity, hilarity, and curiosity. Often, at the end of a story (always the silly ones, of which there were plenty), I’d laugh at its ridiculous ending, reread it aloud to my wife (she humors me so), and then we’d share a laugh together. And that’s probably more than enough to demand or expect from a book of 200-year-old-plus folk and fairy tales.
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