A review by delz
The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth

4.0

The interesting thing about The Turnip Princess isn’t necessarily the individual stories, but all the stories collected by Frank Xaver Von Schönwerth. He interviewed people in Bavaria between 1857 & 1859, writing down 500 stories. The stories were put in a municipal archive and forgotten until 2009, when Erika Eichenseer found them and put them together in this collection. There are recurring themes, like the prince gets the girl or there’s lots of rescuing. Unlike Grimm the bad people aren’t always punished. There seems to be something very special about the number 3 and Hans must have been a very common name for that time & region. There is a commentary for all of the stories. It’s located in the back of the book and I found it to be extremely helpful when I couldn’t quite get the meaning behind the message. Grimm fairytales could be quite scary, where these had a ribald humor, making them a little more adult. They also included lots of twisted deaths, murders and thieves. This book is a nice look into stories once told orally from the region of Bavaria.