Grimm Tales: For Young and Old (Penguin Clothbound Classics)

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Fairy tales remind me of that game telephone. The one where a person starts off saying something and as that phrase gets passed from person to person it changes until when the final person says it out loud it is nothing like the original. I feel that this happens quite often with fairy tales. There are so many variations for each tale with every author or storyteller throwing in their own twist. I came to this edition of Grimm purely as an accompaniment to Shaun Tan's The Singing Bones a wonderful book of sculptures that illustrate these tales. I must admit to initially being more inspired by the illustrated history of Grimm fairy tales than the fairy tales themselves. However, Philip Pullman has done a nice job collating and "sprucing up" 50 of these stories.

It's getting the rating it does because these were advertised as "retellings," when they are really no such thing, and Pullman isn't really clear why he selected the ones he did. In my opinion his commentary didn't really add much, and in one case, it was just weird: he detailed a Jungian analysis of a fairy tale that sounded quite interesting, before dismissing it as "twaddle" and saying it's just a coincidence that this fairy tale fits a formula and it's better without thinking about all that stuff anyway. I was like, "O...kay?" I know hardly anything about Jung so I don't really feel fit to say if it's twaddle or not, but finding patterns and going through the psychology of things is, to me, actually fun. To dismiss psychological analysis or symbolic imagery of fairy tales because "they're fairy tales" seems like things are kind of being sold short. Four months went by, and all the twigs on all the trees in the forest grew stronger and pressed themselves together, and the birds sang so loud that the woods resounded, and the blossom fell from the trees. I like the psychological flatness” of the Grimm characters, “the fact that they’re more like masks than individuals.”These two brothers are solely responsible for most of the world knowing a number of fairy tales. Their names: Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, two Germans. They were neither the first nor the last to collect stories, slightly adapt and publish them as a collection. However, for some reason, their changes managed to enchant people and before long, theirs were THE Hausmärchen to have and know. These Grimm Tales, adapted for the stage by Philip Wilson from Philip Pullman's version of the original tales, were first performed as immersive storytelling experiences underneath Shoreditch Town Hall, London, in 2014, and Bargehouse on the South Bank in 2015. They also offer plentiful opportunities for youth theatres, schools and amateur companies looking for a vivid new version of the classic fairytales. When Merrill mentions "Grimm", he needs to say no more: we all know what he means. For most western readers and writers in the past two hundred years, the Kinder- und Hausmärchen( Children's and Household Tales) of the Brothers Grimm has been the fountain and origin of the western fairy tale, the greatest collection, the most widely distributed in the largest number of languages, the home of all we feel to be unique in that kind of story.

Like many prophets—and we’ve seen several in our own times who say, “Come up on the top of the mountain; the flying saucers are coming on Tuesday and then we’ll all go and we’ll all be taken up to Venus and we’ll all live happily every after,” and they all go up to the top of the mountain and the flying saucers don’t come, so on Wednesday they kind of trudge down rather disconsolately: “Well, we got the timing wrong. It’s next October”—Jesus was in that unfortunate position. The crucifixion saved him from that. He never had to deal with the fact that the kingdom of God wasn’t ever going to come. His disciples, of course, had to deal with it, and little by little they had to realize that it’s a metaphorical thing. Well, that’s not what Jesus meant. I’m fairly sure he meant it literally. But he must have been the most fascinating man. That matters a great deal, because tellers vary in their talents, their techniques, their attitudes to the process. The Grimms were highly impressed by the ability of one of their sources, Dorothea Viehmann, to tell a tale a second time in the same words as she'd used before, making it easy to transcribe; and the tales that come from her are typically structured with marvellous care and precision. I was equally impressed when working on her tales for this book. There is no psychology in a fairy tale. The characters have little interior life; their motives are clear and obvious. If people are good, they are good, and if bad, they’re bad. Even when the princess in ‘The Three Snake Leaves’ inexplicably and ungratefully turns against her husband, we know about it from the moment it happens. Nothing of that sort is concealed. The tremors and mysteries of human awareness, the whispers of memory, the promptings of half-understood regret or doubt or desire that are so much part of the subject matter of the modern novel are absent entirely. One might almost say that the characters in a fairy tale are not actually conscious. Now, as an adult, it’s wonderful to be able to get reacquainted with the stories, and to read some I’d never heard of before. In this new translation and version, Philip Pullman has selected 50 of the stories and presents them once again. He doesn’t embellish much, but tries to find the best version of each tale from the many editions the Grimm brothers published. At the end of each story, Pullman gives bibliographical references for similar stories that appear in sources like Mother Goose, Italo Calvino, and the Arabian Nights, among others. When available, Pullman also tells us where the brothers first heard the tale, and from whom. It’s a fantastic starting point for those looking for references to related sources. Aunque el libro está escrito en Inglés, aquí van mis notas en español. Yo había leído uno que otro cuento (Caperucita Roja, Hansel y Gretel, La Cenicienta, Rumpelstilskin, por ejemplo) cuando niño, en español la mayoría, pero no había leído un compendio de cuentos de los hermanos Grimm, escrito por Philip Pullman. Es posible que haya visto películas o adaptaciones hechas desde el cine o desde otros autores. Este libro de Philip Pullman trae 53 cuentos que fueron publicados inicialmente en 1812. Hubo segunda y más ediciones, y el contenido de los cuentos fue cambiando edición tras edición.

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I was so excited when I saw this. I love fairy tales (especially fairy tale retellings!!), and I am a fan of Philip Pullman's work, so I thought that this would be totally awesome. But, please, hold on: this is not quite right; this is not just so. It’s clever, yes, but cleverness is not what I want. The author has taken the tales at face value, part of an oral tradition, subject to change, variation and retelling over time. The Grimms were guilty, if that is the word, of their own adaptations, which took a more gentrified form in their later collections. Now Pullman has his spin, his retelling. Mother Jones: The Grimm stories have been told and retold for generations. What made you want to return to the originals? Now I open my copy at his introduction. Here I see one passage, heavily underlined, an expression of my papal imprimatur. Pullman says he is not interested in the “ponderous interpretations” to which the tales have been subjected. He is not interested in the “…Freudian, Jungian, Christian, Marxist, structuralist, post-structuralist, feminist, post-modernist and every other kind of tendency.” PP: I kind of believed in them as well. [ Laughs.] No, there was a different quality to the biblical ones: They were really true. Jesus really was there and David really did go down to the riverbed and choose some stones.