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jakub_vul 's review for:
The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm
by Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm
I realize that it’s kind of silly to “review” what are essentially written down versions of stories told for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years. But I just want to address this - should you read this book, and if so, how should you read it?
I'm glad this translation of the first edition exists. I think it is great as a reference, as a morbid curiosity, and/or as something to be read in short spurts over many years. I would not recommend that you try, as I did, to sit down and read it like a book. If you do, you’ll probably quickly appreciate why it was so heavily edited by the Grimm brothers.
First and foremost, though there are 470-odd pages of text and illustrations, there are far fewer stories than that. Fairy tales generally share so many themes and so much structure that there’s actually an index used to catalogue them, the “ATU Index”. So, for example, Cinderella: That’s type 510A, the Persecuted Heroine. There are at least 3 variations of that story in this book, on pages 69, 216, 233. Of course you don’t know that until you start reading and you realize “Hey I’ve read this story already…”
As you make your way through this book, you start seeing the same premises, characters, plots and even phrases repeated from story to story. Moreover, the stories themselves are sometimes incredibly repetitive. Some of them seem entirely composed around repetition. This makes sense when you think about an oral tradition often told to children, who seem to have the ability to hear the same story told over and over.
I read somewhere that fairy tale characters are often depicted as silhouettes (in drawings, theatre, etc) because the characters are so two-dimensional. This fits perfectly - these stories contain characters that aren’t even good or bad in any way that we understand in the modern world, they just do things. Often good things happen to people who are simply beautiful, actions we would call "evil" go unpunished or are even rewarded, and very often people do things with no apparent motivation at all.
Similarly, often things just happen. Someone dies with no explanation, a beggar appears and offers a magic item with preposterous powers, an authority figure makes an insane and illogical demand of a child.
So, in summary, incredibly repetitious stories with two-dimensional characters and insane plots that often have no apparent point to them whatsoever. About halfway through I got really tired of it. The last quarter of the book I speed-read. But even that I can’t recommend, because when you’re scanning over the large bits of text that you’ve already seen three times before, you’re apt to miss a magic cloak or an enchanted toad or something. So, if it interests you, commit to read a story a week or something. If you try reading it like a normal book, you’ll realize why it went through seven editions.
I'm glad this translation of the first edition exists. I think it is great as a reference, as a morbid curiosity, and/or as something to be read in short spurts over many years. I would not recommend that you try, as I did, to sit down and read it like a book. If you do, you’ll probably quickly appreciate why it was so heavily edited by the Grimm brothers.
First and foremost, though there are 470-odd pages of text and illustrations, there are far fewer stories than that. Fairy tales generally share so many themes and so much structure that there’s actually an index used to catalogue them, the “ATU Index”. So, for example, Cinderella: That’s type 510A, the Persecuted Heroine. There are at least 3 variations of that story in this book, on pages 69, 216, 233. Of course you don’t know that until you start reading and you realize “Hey I’ve read this story already…”
As you make your way through this book, you start seeing the same premises, characters, plots and even phrases repeated from story to story. Moreover, the stories themselves are sometimes incredibly repetitive. Some of them seem entirely composed around repetition. This makes sense when you think about an oral tradition often told to children, who seem to have the ability to hear the same story told over and over.
I read somewhere that fairy tale characters are often depicted as silhouettes (in drawings, theatre, etc) because the characters are so two-dimensional. This fits perfectly - these stories contain characters that aren’t even good or bad in any way that we understand in the modern world, they just do things. Often good things happen to people who are simply beautiful, actions we would call "evil" go unpunished or are even rewarded, and very often people do things with no apparent motivation at all.
Similarly, often things just happen. Someone dies with no explanation, a beggar appears and offers a magic item with preposterous powers, an authority figure makes an insane and illogical demand of a child.
So, in summary, incredibly repetitious stories with two-dimensional characters and insane plots that often have no apparent point to them whatsoever. About halfway through I got really tired of it. The last quarter of the book I speed-read. But even that I can’t recommend, because when you’re scanning over the large bits of text that you’ve already seen three times before, you’re apt to miss a magic cloak or an enchanted toad or something. So, if it interests you, commit to read a story a week or something. If you try reading it like a normal book, you’ll realize why it went through seven editions.