'Once upon a time in mid-winter, when the snowflakes were falling from the sky like down, a queen was sitting and sewing at a window ...'
The tales gathered by the Grimm brothers are at once familiar, fantastic, homely, and frightening. They seem to belong to no time, or to some distant feudal age of fairytale imagining. Grand palaces, humble cottages, and the forest full of menace are their settings; and they are peopled by kings and princesses, witches and robbers, millers and golden birds, stepmothers and talking frogs.
Regarded from their inception both as uncosy nursery stories and as raw material for the folklorist the tales were in fact compositions, collected from literate tellers and shaped into a distinctive kind of literature. This translation mirrors the apparent artlessness of the Grimms, and fully represents the range of less well-known fables, morality tales, and comic stories as well as the classic tales. It takes the stories back to their roots in German Romanticism and includes variant stories and tales that were deemed unsuitable for children. In her fascinating introduction, Joyce Crick explores their origins, and their literary evolution at the hands of the Grimms.
This is Book 2 in the Oxford World's Classics Hardback Collection Series. See all Oxford World's Classics Hardback Collection books here.
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The Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, were German professors whose collections of folk tales and fairy tales have been loved for generations. Loek Koopmans is the author and illustrator of children's books Any Room For Me?, The Pancake That Ran Away, The Little Christmas Tree and Three Wise Men (all Floris Books).
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