Anyone who’s taken a course on the history of folkloristics should be familiar with the importance of the Romantic Movement in Europe, which provided the backdrop for Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s monumental tale collection. Jack Zipes’s new translation of the first edition of their tales, complete with the Grimms’ preface and scholarly notes to each volume, illuminates the fit between the texts and context of this important moment in disciplinary history.
Previously, I’d been in the habit of recommending Zipes’s translation of the 1857 edition of the tales, The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (Bantam Books, 3rd edition, 2002). The introductory material is excellent, and in it, he gives readers some tantalizing glimpses of the contrasts between early versions of the tales (from 1812 or the even earlier Ölenburg manuscript) and the final 1857 versions of the tales. The marvelous thing about this new translation is that readers can finally compare for themselves full texts of the 1812 tales with the 1857 tales. Zipes provides a few examples, drawn from “The Frog King” and “Rapunzel” in his introduction to the new translation, which primes readers to look for other discrepancies themselves. Also significant is Zipes’s note on translation, informing readers that he endeavored to capture the “frank and blunt” qualities of the German dialects that the tales first appeared in, without resorting to hackneyed American dialect use. My sense is that Zipes succeeded in conveying the raw, understated, and sometimes painfully innocent tone of the tales.
Many of the tales that the Grimms omitted in the later edition of their collection (and which were subsequently left out of most English translations) are known to folklorists, but there are still a few surprises. Most of us know of grisly shorts like “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering” but it’s quite striking to see it printed alongside “Cinderella.” Stories with similar themes, like “The Stolen Pennies” (a child’s ghost haunts the room where pennies intended for a beggar were stashed away), pepper this book, demonstrating how religious folk beliefs figured significantly into tale-telling traditions of the time. Economic themes also make an appearance, with “Nasty Flax Spinning” featuring a king who bullies his daughters into nonstop spinning. In a solution reminiscent of that in “The Three Spinners” (found in the 1857 edition), the queen finds three ugly spinsters who convince the king that spinning made them ugly (with one of them claiming her large lower lip came from licking the thread, the next getting her huge finger from turning the thread, and the final one attributing her flat foot to stamping). The king relents and commands his wife and daughters never to spin again, but, pessimistically, I wonder how much the king cares about their well-being and how much he cares about the investment in future marriages that daughters who are easy on the eyes represent.
Comparing the 1812 versions and later versions of the same tales is one intriguing exercise to perform with this book. In “The Wild Man” (which would become “Iron Hans” in later editions), we first encounter the wild man not at the bottom of a deep pool, but ravaging the “gardens and wheat fields of the peasants” (444). A clever old huntsman pulls a move reminiscent of Gilgamesh and plies the wild man with alcohol until he’s drunk enough to be captured. As with “Iron Hans,” the wild man is actually a king under a spell, but the hero of “The Wild Man” is a lord’s son, not a king’s son. It’s intriguing to speculate on what would ensorcell a king, driving him mad and prompting him to destroy the property of everyone around him. Perhaps this tale, like so many others, contains subtle commentary on the impact of wars and other political events upon the lives of the taletellers (and indeed, on the tale collectors, given the Grimms’ many encounters with the fallout from the Napoleonic wars).
As another example of the delights in this book, those who have read the third edition of Zipes’s Complete Fairy Tales may have encountered “Prince Swan” at the back of the book under omitted tales, yet it’s a refreshingly novel version of the search for the lost bridegroom, complete with golden tokens to lure the intended husband away from his existing wife. I wonder if perhaps this tale was expurgated from later edition because of its uncritical if temporary acceptance of non-monogamy. As Zipes points out in his introduction, the Grimms made multiple changes for ideological and artistic reasons, such as making the biological mothers in “Little Snow White” and “Hansel and Gretel” into stepmothers. Similarly, Zipes asserts that the 1812 version of “Rapunzel” is “a very short provocative tale in which the young girl gets pregnant. The 1819 version is longer, much more sentimental, and without a hint of pregnancy” (xxxvii).
It’s one thing to read Zipes’s erudite commentary on the tales, and quite another to discover these differences for oneself in the reading experience, and thus I encourage folklorists, fairy-tale scholars, and lay readers alike to peruse the pages of the first edition of the Grimms’ tales. The illustrations by Andrea Dezsö—stark, simple, and beautiful—are an additional treat.
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[Review length: 863 words • Review posted on September 8, 2015]