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Title: Grimm's Grimmest by Jacob Grimm, Maria Tatar, Tracy Arah Dockray, Wilhelm Grimm, Wihelm K. Grimm ISBN: 0-8118-1675-3 Publisher: Chronicle Books Pub. Date: October, 1997 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.93 (15 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Grimm's Grimmest -- horrific, but enlightening
Comment: I must confess to ambivalent feelings about this book. The stories are sordid accounts of hideous people committing unspeakable acts with the basest of motives. Hannibal Lecter could step into the pages of one of these stories without even a change in costume. The idea that anyone, anywhere, any time, could have considered these tales appropriate for children boggles the mind.
Then why would anyone want to read them? Well, the archetypal human concerns woven into these macabre tales still pong home with disconcerting clarity, just as they did in feudal Germany hundreds of years ago. Loveless existence, infertility, betrayal, greed, jealously, incest, poverty, disaster; the stories read like a laundry list of the most tragic bits of the human experience and, sadly, the subject matter hasn't changed much, only the manner of expression.
The book opens with a comprehensive introduction by Maria Tatar, which provides an excellent frame of reference for what could otherwise be merely a jumble of surreal images. In the early 1800's two brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, collected and retold old German folktales. Discovering a lucrative market for children's morality stories, they created successive revisions targeted especially for children. Sexual content was suppressed, but violence was not. Whether by popular demand of due to quirks of their own, the Grimms in some cases even escalated the violent images.
Viewing the original folktales as allegorical teaching tools, designed to help adults cope with life problems, it all begins to make sense. Each story contains at least one rather heavy-handed lesson -- morality written large: "Greed will get you in the end." "Disobedient children are likely to die a hideous death." "Don't bemoan your childlessness or you may give birth to a hedgehog."
I was intrigued by the little secondary assumptions that are included in the stories and give clues to the cultural orientation. Oddly enough, there are a number of strong, independent female characters. Where did they come from? Children are expendable, not entitled to love, and the challenge seems to have been how to get as much work and as little aggravation from them as possible. For women, marriage was a huge, inescapable gamble. One must marry, but the bridegroom was as likely to turn out to be a cannibal as a prince.
Read these stories like a book of puzzles, looking for the main morality lesson and digging out the secondary assumptions, and they act as a mirror held up to our own society. What has changed? What is the same? What is better, what is worse? Horrific they may be, but vastly enlightening as well.
Rating: 4
Summary: Wow
Comment: This book contains the collection of the Grimm's brothers original fairy tales, and mostly gruesome in nature, involving cannibal and gruesome acts. Fairy tales for adults and not for children's bedtime stories. It fills out the missing parts of the stories you read when you were a kid and fairytales genre lovers would denitely love to have their hands on this book.
Rating: 5
Summary: A wonderful and fascinating read
Comment: I received this book as a Christmas present last year, and it has quickly become one of my all-time favorites. Okay, yes, the stories are pretty darn gory, with decapitations and/or mutilations playing a prominent role in quite a few of them, not to mention the incest and cannibalism and so forth, so you need to keep this book away from the kiddies. That aside, it's a wonderful and fascinating collection of tales. The illustrations are very nice, and there's a lot of them. Plus there's a great introduction at the beginning that gives the reader more of a background story on the Grimms and their work. Overall, a fantastic book.
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Title: The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm All-New Third Edition by Johnny Gruelle, Jack Zipes ISBN: 0553382160 Publisher: Bantam Pub. Date: 01 January, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales by Maria Tatar ISBN: 0393051633 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: 14 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $35.00 |
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Title: Little Red Riding Hood Uncloaked: Sex, Morality, and the Evolution of a Fairy Tale by Catherine Orenstein ISBN: 0465041256 Publisher: Basic Books Pub. Date: 02 July, 2002 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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Title: The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales by Maria Tatar ISBN: 0691114692 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 06 May, 2003 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales by The Brothers Grimm ISBN: 0394709306 Publisher: Pantheon Books Pub. Date: 12 September, 1976 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
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