Grimms' Fairy Tales by JLC and WC Grimm (2004)

This is an archaeological dig, and that surprised me. I had assumed that editing work would have been done with 'popular' editions of the Grimms' scholarly work. But no, an extraordinary thing has happened - our culture has embraced in its mainstream of literature a profoundly academic work of investigation. Folk tales, it seems to me, at their best, become annealed or distilled in the telling. That appears to be borne out here with the tales we all know - Rapunzel or Hansel and Gretel or Rumpelstiltskin or others. But yet others here show clearly that the Grimms probably only heard one version of an obscure tale, or heard a couple of versions clearly emanating from the same original source, but very different, and sandwiched them together awkwardly. So there are lesser-known tales here which frankly read like surrealistic crazedness, or have the oddest elements in them like lumps of foreign rock in a glacier moraine. The thing about these examples is that they are not annealed or distilled. They read badly. They haven't been put through the mill of telling. In the end, they're unsatisfying, and that's why they have remained "unknown". The primary audience, children, are notorious for their love of explanation and detail; these tales would raise questions in their extraordinary partialness, for which storytellers would invent answers: the tale would grow and silken-up with use. None of this bittyness is that objectionable in scholarship, though the cobbling together that I think I can sense in a couple of them is a bit suspect without annotation; the strange thing is that our tradition has absorbed these unsatisfying things inside a canonical populist version. So we're left with a book which contains a few things we all know and many which we've never heard, in a zillion different editions.