Book description
WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JACK ZIPES
Wolves and grandmothers, ugly sisters, a house made of bread, a
goose made of gold...the folk tales collected by the Grimm brothers
created an astonishingly influential imaginative world. However, this
is also a world where a woman serves her stepson up in a stew, a man
marries a snake, a princess sleeps with a frog, and an evil queen
dances to death in a pair of burning shoes. Violent, funny,
disturbing, wise and sometimes beautiful, these stories have intrigued
children, adults, scholars, psychologists and artists for centuries.
The only complete edition available of the most famous collection of
fairy tales ever published, this collection features the 279 stories
in an acclaimed, modern, unexpurgated translation.
Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786-1859) were born in
Hanau, Germany. They published the first of their many collections of
fairy tales in 1812. The story that they wandered about Germany
collecting their tales from the lips of peasants is a fairy tale itself.
In fact, they invited educated middle class women into their home to
tell them the stories they had heard from their servants. The point of
their collection of folklore was to study the German language and they
also did important work on the German dictionary. The stories were
revised to be more appropriate for children in 1819 and were published
under the title
Children's and Household Tales.
By the beginning of the twentieth century
Children's and Household
Tales
was second only to the Bible in the German bestseller lists.
