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This article discusses the English translations of twelve of Grimms’ fairy tales included in the hitherto forgotten edition published by Darton and Co. in 1851. The titles and tales are identified with their German originals, and the defects of the translation are examined. The German base text was one of the Grimm editions published between 1837 and 1850. Other items not by the Grimms in the edition are commented on. Identification of the tale entitled ‘Sycorine and Argilas’ is unknown. The anonymous translator was inexperienced, without access to a reliable dictionary, and was, probably, female.
Since the beginning of the nineteenth century folklorists, and the general public in their wake, have assumed the orality of fairy tales. This book takes an extreme position in that debate: as far as Tales of magic is concerned, the initial transmission proceded exclusively through prints. It displays the conception, ancestry and offspring of the Golden Bird dwells on the construction of the story type, the way the story found its way into the Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Kinder- und Hausmärchen. In the book Magician and His Pupil in which superficially magic is conquered by magic, moreover provides a counterbalance to the, at least within Europe, much more widespread warning about the dangers of occult knowledge. The possibility of a connection between Jack and the Beanstalk and a shamanistic World Tree had occurred because of the Dutch story of a Great Ship with a mast reaching into a never-never land. The Sky High Tree offers not only an example of a post-Grimm fairy tale recorded from oral presentations, it also serves the purpose of tackling the question of the age of fairy tales from a slightly different angle. The book also discusses the main problems of fairy tale research: variation, orality and, in the story's reincarnation as The Healing Fruits, the concept of the conglomerate tale. A historical approach to fairy tales has profound consequences for the organisation of one of folklore's main methodological tools, the tale-type index.
This essay examines how Alice Thompson‘s novel, The Falconer (2008), creates a richly allusive Gothic weave by analysing its symbolic languages of myth, nature, and monstrosity, and how it reimagines and reinterprets other modes and texts associated with the Gothic, namely Du Maurier‘s Rebecca and the Bluebeard fairy tale, as well as Scottish ballad tradition and popular fairy belief. Mirroring the trope of metamorphosis which thematically and stylistically informs the novel, the essay also explores how these allusively poetic uses of Gothic become politicised in the portrayal of German Nazism and of traumatic historical memory.
One of the seeds that germinated into this book was planted at the end of the 1980s. After finishing my research on five hundred years of witchcraft accusations in a small province of the Netherlands, I finally found the time to read Manfred Grätz’s thesis, Das Märchen in der deutschen Aufklärung (The Fairy Tale in the German Enlightenment), about the reception of
narrative, which is thus circuitous. A traditional Bildungsroman usually works within the realistic illusion which it creates and sustains but twentieth-century women writers ‘have eschewed its realism using a variety of non-realist genres such as the gothic and the grotesque, the utopian, and the dystopian, the fantastic, the fable and the fairy-tale’ (Joannou 200). In Atkinson’s version of the genre in
after the original Hungarian, Dégh confessed that the stories she had collected seemed ‘even more influenced by literary fairy tales than I suggested or could document in this book’. The Kakasd corpus as a whole, although part of an oral practice, could only have ‘persisted because of printed materials’. 13 ‘Aunt Zsuzsa’ was nevertheless an accomplished (and later
Bible) with a Zaubermärchen and to consider every ‘magical’ story within same category. As was mentioned in the discussion of the Magician and His Pupil, genuine magic books were considered to be dangerous. It was not just that the spirits and demons were difficult to control; the owner of a magic book had forfeited his soul. In the nineteenth-century version of the fairy tale, on the other hand, the
death. Furthermore, like the Grey Wolf, Baba Yaga is never rattled by violence or brutality, either her own or that of others, inflicting no moral judgements on human behaviour with the exception of the behaviours that break her own unique code of ethics. And yet, despite her ferocious demeanour, Baba Yaga often assists the hero or heroine in their quest, as the Grey Wolf does for Ivan Tsarevich. Fairy tales or folktales featuring Baba Yaga and the Grey Wolf were popular, and continue to be so, in Russian culture. Alexander Afanas’ev, who collected
A Russian fairy tale The ballet The Firebird , with music by Igor Stravinsky, was first performed in Paris in 1910. At the time the fairy tale components of its scenario were all thought to be truly and typically Russian: the hero Prince Ivan, the firebird herself, the deathless wizard king Koshchay, the garden with the dancing princesses, and the magic feather. While the
Magic flight stories The practice of recording stories related orally started with the brothers Grimm. They were also among the first to annotate their texts, pointing to parallels and predecessors of a particular tale. Fairy tale collecting and research owes its very existence to them. In assessing their texts, however, it makes a difference what kind of authenticity is