I received an electronic copy of this book from the publisher, for review consideration.
The venerable Jack Zipes, one of the shiniest scholars in fairy tale studies, has brought us a lovely treat, which is a new translation of the first edition of the Grimm Fairy Tales, decorated with wonderfully creepy illustrations by Andrea Dezsö. This edition includes stories that were later excised for reasons of provenance (Bluebeard was too French to keep in subsequent editions), incompleteness, repetitiveness, or family-unfriendly values. The Grimms make the following case for the inclusion of the sex-and-devils stories:
Objections have been raised . . . because this or that might be embarrassing and would be unsuitable for children or offensive (when the tales might touch on certain situations and relations — even the mentioning of the bad things that the devil does) and that parents might not want to put the book into the hands of children. That concern might be legitimate in certain cases, and then one can easily make selections. . . . Whoever is afraid to put plants outside because they might be too delicate and could be harmed and would rather water them inside cannot demand to put an end to the rain and the dew. Everything that is natural can also become beneficial.
An excellent argument, I think, against cases of parents trying to have books removed from school libraries on the basis that their child isn’t old enough for them. And in fact, there isn’t much here that I would hesitate to give a kid. Where there are implications of sexy times (for instance, in the Rapunzel story, when she asks the witch why her clothes have gotten so tight, and the witch deduces that she’s been visited by a man), they’re fairly mild and easily ignored by a child whose main focus is on finding out what happens next.
This early edition of the stories offers plenty of familiarity — a girl can get tired of reading about the endless successes of third sons and daughters (who seem to win everything whether they’re nice or nasty to animals, old men, and children) — and plenty of small weirdnesses that got edited out of future editions. For instance, girls in these stories are always reassuring their menfolk by settling them down to be loused. Gross, Germany. And of course, the weirdness that remained in future editions was still present early on, as in this story about a dog and a sausage:
Not far from their home, the sausage had encountered a dog. Now this dog had considered the sausage free game and had grabbed him and swallowed him down. The little bird arrived and accused the dog of highway robbery, but it was of no use, for the dog maintained he had found forged letters on the sausage, and therefore, the sausage had had to pay for this with his life.
Yes, yep, seems reasonable. This tracks with what I know of eighteenth-century German legal proceedings.
This edition of the stories has never been published in English before, which explains why I, who consider myself reasonably well-versed in fairy tales, have never before encountered the ORIGINAL AND AWESOME manner in which original Snow White was eventually awakened from her apple-induced slumber. Let me tell you how it went down. Here is Snow White in the forest, fast asleep in her glass coffin. The prince comes along, falls in love with her beautiful corpse, and is evidently so mopey about it that the dwarves feel sorry for him and let him take her and the coffin away, back to his palace. Once he has her there, he becomes increasingly attached to his dead coffin maiden, to the point that he gets sad if he’s not in the same room as her, and he can’t even eat dinner unless he’s standing right next to her. What this says about the mental state of the heir to the kingdom, the story does not speculate.
Hang on, I can’t do justice to what happens next. I’m just going to quote it for you.
However, the servants, who had to carry the coffin from place to place in the castle all the time, became angry about this, and at one time a servant opened the coffin, lifted Little Snow White into the air, and said: “Why must we be plagued with so much work all because of a dead maiden?” On saying this he shoved Little Snow White’s back with his hand, and out popped the nasty piece of apple that had been stuck in Little Snow White’s throat, and she was once again alive.
Stupid kiss version of the story: Done. Previously acceptable version where the apple falls out when they stumble over a tree root as they’re carrying the coffin away: Done. This version forever.
Andrea Dezsö’s illustrations are the perfect accompaniment to the complete and unapologetic strangeness of these stories. Dezsö isn’t fussed about including images of the most famous stories, so while you do get some pictures of the stories you remember from Andrew Lang, there are also beautifully creepy pictures to go along with the stories of soldiers murdering unicorns for fun and profit.
It’s an excellent little book. If not a replacement for whatever illustrated fairy tale collection you had as a child, it’s certainly a valuable addition to the library of a fairy-tale-loving child or adult.