GENRE: Nonfiction
MY GRADE: A
SYNOPSIS: One Fairy Story Too Many unmasks one of the most successfully perpetuated literary frauds in centuries. When the brothers Grimm presented their now beloved fairy tales to the world, they claimed to have tapped an oral tradition of folk story-telling in Germany. Supposedly, the tales were written down as the Grimms heard them told by peasants and other simple, uneducated folk.
But John Ellis argues in this book that the tales have little to do with German folklore-and that the brothers clearly knew it. Ellis shows that the Grimms deliberately made false claims for their tales and suppressed the evidence of their actual origin. In fact, their sources in many cases were not even German-the celebrated Märchenfrau of Niederzwehren was educated, middle-class, and French. Moreover the Grimms, while claiming to be utterly true to their sources, altered the tales radically before publication, changing their plots, characters, style, and moral tone, and continued to make revisions throughout the seven editions.
Woven like a secondary plot through Ellis's account is the strange history surrounding the evidence the he uses. That the Grimms had committed a fraud should have been clear to Grimm scholars from easily available evidence years ago. But the irresistible fairy tale of the two brothers going among the simple folk, carefully gathering their tales, had so beguiled even the most knowledgeable that they could not face the reality that the brothers had deliberately deceived their public. German scholars, Ellis shows, were especially reluctant to question the authenticity of what had become a national monument. This book, then, seriously calls into question the long-held notion that the Grimms are the fathers of folklore research.
One Fairy Story Too Many is a provocative, highly readable account of the text and history of a work that has achieved enormous importance in Western culture. Quotations from German sources are given in both English and German, and sample texts of three famous tales-The Frog Prince, Sleeping Beauty, and Hansel and Gretel-are provided in their original form and as later versions reworked by the Grimms.
SYNOPSIS: One Fairy Story Too Many unmasks one of the most successfully perpetuated literary frauds in centuries. When the brothers Grimm presented their now beloved fairy tales to the world, they claimed to have tapped an oral tradition of folk story-telling in Germany. Supposedly, the tales were written down as the Grimms heard them told by peasants and other simple, uneducated folk.
But John Ellis argues in this book that the tales have little to do with German folklore-and that the brothers clearly knew it. Ellis shows that the Grimms deliberately made false claims for their tales and suppressed the evidence of their actual origin. In fact, their sources in many cases were not even German-the celebrated Märchenfrau of Niederzwehren was educated, middle-class, and French. Moreover the Grimms, while claiming to be utterly true to their sources, altered the tales radically before publication, changing their plots, characters, style, and moral tone, and continued to make revisions throughout the seven editions.
Woven like a secondary plot through Ellis's account is the strange history surrounding the evidence the he uses. That the Grimms had committed a fraud should have been clear to Grimm scholars from easily available evidence years ago. But the irresistible fairy tale of the two brothers going among the simple folk, carefully gathering their tales, had so beguiled even the most knowledgeable that they could not face the reality that the brothers had deliberately deceived their public. German scholars, Ellis shows, were especially reluctant to question the authenticity of what had become a national monument. This book, then, seriously calls into question the long-held notion that the Grimms are the fathers of folklore research.
One Fairy Story Too Many is a provocative, highly readable account of the text and history of a work that has achieved enormous importance in Western culture. Quotations from German sources are given in both English and German, and sample texts of three famous tales-The Frog Prince, Sleeping Beauty, and Hansel and Gretel-are provided in their original form and as later versions reworked by the Grimms.
MY THOUGHTS: This is pretty short, 209 pages. The first 110 pages discuss where the author thinks the stories really came from. A lot of those pages include German and English excerpts, comparisons and discussions of certain stories and how those stories were changing slightly as each new edition was published. Pages 111-194 contain manuscripts from 1810, two years before the first volume of their book was published, and different versions/reworkings, in German and English, for Hansel and Gretel, Sleeping Beauty, and The Frog King, that were put in different editions, showing how the stories kept changing over the years.
The author, and apparently some who came before him, thinks the stories originated with the Grimms themselves and a group of women, some sisters, one the future wife of Wilhelm Grimm, Dortchen Wild, and their elderly housekeeper they had growing up, "old Marie" and a woman named Dorothea Viehmann, who's of French descent and who may have provided her take on Frenchmen Charles Perrault's tales published over 100 years before. Neither brother ever said who, exactly, the peasants were who supposedly told them all of these tales. If these tales were indeed told to them and written down, as they claim, there wouldn't be a reason to keep tampering with them. You'd write down what they said verbatim and keep it that way. They appear to have kept reworking their own stories or those told to them by the group of women, until they liked the new versions. I believe there's a good chance that's what they did but I don't understand why they'd lie about the origin and pretend the stories came from others when they could have just taken credit for them themselves.
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