The Annotated Brothers Grimm

The Annotated Brothers Grimm

The fairy tales collected in Germany almost two centuries ago by the Brothers Grimm continue to have a powerful hold on our culture. Adapted, revised, rescripted, and bowdlerized, they greet us at the movies as Pretty Woman or Working Girl, at the opera as Hansel and Gretel or La Cenerentola, in advertisements for everything from Chanel to chocolate, and in visual media as often as in print. Oddly, the afterlife of the Grimms’ Children’s Stories and Household Tales has been more vital and robust than collections of native lore.

With so many different versions of the Grimms’ tales available, why add another volume to make the selection process even more daunting? This volume takes us back to the authoritative versions of the Grimms’ stories, the versions that were published in 1857 for the seventh and final edition of the tales. It offers a selection of newly translated tales, a sample of the 210 tales collected, following the order in which they appeared in print. Most readers who pick up hefty volumes containing the entire collection quickly lose interest in the tales, for many of the anecdotes, legends, chronicles, and narratives feel dated and irrelevant to modern audiences. The tales collected here represent, for the most part, tales that contain magic—magic both as a device and as an effect on the reader. These are the tales that continue to enchant and entrance, the stories that invite us to engage with characters, events, and conflicts that still matter to us today.

But this collection also goes beyond “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Rapunzel,” and “Snow White.” It brings us a cast of characters that includes boys as well as girls, a multitude of heroes who are less dragon slayers and giant killers than sly simpletons and innocent tricksters who manage, against the odds, to win a princess and a kingdom. And it attempts to redress the gender imbalance in volumes that offer a sampling, often heavily weighted toward female protagonists, of the Grimms’ tales.

These days, parents searching for bedtime reading come across such titles as One-Minute Fairy Tales or Time for Bed, Oliver! In our haste to use stories as devices for getting children to go to sleep, we forget that the tales are meant to provide opportunities for dialogue and discussion. They create a quiet space at the end of the day, one that frees us and our children from the rapid pace of a culture that relentlessly bombards us with new images and sensations. And they allow us, by proxy, to digest the events that have taken place in the course of the day. These are stories meant to slow us down, and the commentary and illustrations should invite readers to ponder different ways of reading what takes place in the tales.

When the Grimms launched their collecting efforts, they had other scholars in mind as their audience. Over the years, they discovered that children were taking possession of the book, and they made the collection more child friendly. Still, many stories remained that are not appropriate for children’s ears. For adults curious about those tales, Part IV of this book provides some sense of the cultural differences between the Grimms’ era and our own.

Edition, edited with a new preface and notes by Maria Tatar. Copyright © 2012 by Maria Tatar.
With the permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.”