Grimm's fairy tales
Grimm's Fairy Tales is a work by Brothers Grimm now brought to you in this new edition of the timeless classic.
Stats for nerds
7recommend
29mentions
27people
2011–2026years
24% recommend72% neutral3% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Very likely yes. I was very familiar with this story, and other "Arabian" tales, well before Disney made the original animated version.
We also had Grimm's fairy tales, which I loved reading, and nowadays am reading to my daughter, to her delight. Yes, with beheadings and child-eating monsters and witches.
- Grimm's Fairy Tales also have had an important impact on your culture.
No one is asking you to believe in anything, but it's self-limiting to refuse to engage with works of historical/cultural importance.
- At the end of the essay, the author (David Mason) quotes the beginning of Cinderella. I agree with Mason about the beauty of the terse prose here:
> So much is conveyed here about character, time and the natural world, because Cinderella’s piety is natural piety, respect for nature more than conventional Christian belief.
It's something that modern fantasy usually doesn't capture, by being too modern, and by being far too verbose. The latter is one aspect in which Tolkien's Simarillion feels better than his "The Lord of the Rings": The Simarillion leaves all the details out, it has little direct speech, and only mentions what's important. Its style is not as raw and authentic as in Grimm's fairy tales, or as in actual historical legends like King Arthur, but it gets close as times, mainly by avoiding the verbosity that is so common in all modern literature.
- My favorite book about the Brothers Grimm is "Fairy Tales: A New History" by Ruth B. Bottigheimer.
She argues persuasively that the conventional origin normally told about the Grimm's fairy tales—-that they were recited by old peasant women remembering the ancient oral folktales of the Germanic people—-is not really true.
In fact the tales mainly came from middle class storytellers. And the two most important sources of the Grimm's tales were two Italian literary story collections from the Renaissance by Giovanni Straparola and Giambattista Basile.
It upended a lot of what I thought I knew about the origins of fairy tales.
- Vasistha’s Yoga - highly useful for understanding and transcending psychological conditioning, using mind to master mind.
Early books: Arrow to the Sun and Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Hans Christian Andersen and The Hobbit - all very stimulating to imagination.
- Charles Perrault (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Perrault) and Grimm's fairy tales (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimms%27_Fairy_Tales) are better read anyway.
