| Title | : | Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm (Dover Childrens Classics) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0486210804 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780486210803 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 304 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 1812 |
Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm (Dover Childrens Classics) Reviews
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So many different stories of the brothers Grimm, really enjoyed reading them.
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Coursera - Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World
Finished 1/2 the stories.
My essay:
The Clever Shall Inherit?
Throughout one’s reading of Grimm’s Household Tales, several familiar faces appear. However, these tales are interspersed between oddities like Clever Grethel, Cat and Mouse in Partnership, and The Three Spinsters. What do we make of these? They definitely do not sing the familiar praises to those who work hard, or those who wait patiently for their prince to come, nor do they give sound warning such as “Don’t talk to strangers.” Let us examine a few odd tales.
Clever Grethel “gave herself great airs, and thought herself very fine indeed” (9). We are told that this is not a hard-working, humble person, and we naturally don’t want to be like her. Yet, she is the one who outsmarts her masters.
Cat and Mouse in Partnership teaches that although opposites attract, it’d be best to settle down with one similar to yourself, otherwise your differences might lead to an untimely end. But, as the tale-teller concludes, “that is the way of the world” (39).
The Three Spinsters highlights a girl who “was too lazy and would not spin,” which was a necessity for women of the times to do (82). The hard workers are described as having deformed features, while the lazy girl doesn’t work, lies about accomplishments, gets the prince, and never has to lift a finger again.
All three of the victorious characters (Grethel, Cat, and the lazy girl) used cunning and wit to get their desires. Many different angles could be examined, but the approach I am choosing to highlight is this: Sometimes, those who do evil are just as successful as those who do good.
Why does our culture shield the hard truths from the youth, but those who lived hundreds of years ago didn’t? I would argue that the hard tales are just as necessary to building character as the pleasant ones. -
I am taking an online class through Coursera titled FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION: THE HUMAN MIND, THE MODERN WORLD. Grimm's tales are the first selection in the class, and Project Gutenberg has put the entire book online for free, with the wonderful illustrations by Walter Crane.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/19068/...
I'm enjoying the online discussion forums, since we have hundreds of people from all over the world enrolled in this course. While I would not have chosen the Grimm tales as part of the class, I've learned a great deal! I didn't know that the brothers were part of the Gottingen Seven, professors who protested in 1837 when the King annulled the constitution of Hanover. They lost their jobs; the wikipedia article has a great picture of the bronze monument to these seven men.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6t...
The tales are the original, darker versions upon which the musical INTO THE WOODS is based. I found myself drawn to the less familiar stories, such as "The Queen Bee", in which a younger brother defends ants, ducks, and bees and is rewarded with their help. In fact, my overall impression is that the tales show a much closer connection between humans and the animal world--whether farm animals or wild.
I highly recommend Coursera--the professors are from around the world, and it's all free! Over 200 classes are offered in science, math, computers, history, philosophy, and literature. -
It has been fascinating.
At first the stories made absolutely no sense to me. There were no morals. They would have a slow start, a nonsense of a middle, and an abrupt and usually violent end. I thought to myself: These are not stories for children! But as I read on I realized that I have been reading it wrong. They are meant for children. I have read them as a child. Except they were called
Thakrumar Jhuli in this part of the world. I remembered I used to enjoy them, but it has been so long that I had forgotten.
So I continued reading with the specs of a young child and I loved the stories. I started seeing the symbolism. I started understanding why the stories were so violent. I started realizing why these stories seemed abrupt and random and seemed to make no sense.
But then I am a grown up now, too. So the "meaning" of the stories that swooshed over my head when I was younger, or something that I may have understood subconsciously was now much clearer. The standards of the times that the stories were written were so absolute and different that you have to wonder about the change in society. The stories are little life lessons where in many cases men are rewarded for their canny and bold manipulation (The Knapsack, The Hat, and the Horn; Six Soldiers of Fortune; and so on) while women are rewarded for their duty, obedience, and industriousness (Aschenputtel, Six Swans, and so on). And many contain no happily ever after at all. A moral isn't being presented here, the idea of good and evil, social and gender roles, etc are being presented.
If they were written in the modern times many would probably label them sexist and carry out petitions to get them out of the library. But that has been the way of the world for many centuries before where biological inequality was the same as social inequality. I don't think the concept of 'childhood innocence' even existed in those times.
I could go on, but I'll end the review with my favorite story from the book, which would I feel would sum up Brothers Grimm nicely. A cat and a mouse formed a partnership to save up for the winter. But the cat ends up stealing from the storage and when the mouse finds out, instead of justice being served, the cat ends up eating the mouse too. And the story ends there, as most of the Brothers Grimm stories do. "And that is the way of the world"
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Read as a part of Coursera:
Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World
My essay:
The morale presented in The Frog Prince seems questionable at first glance. Unlike most Grimm Brothers stories such as Sleeping Beauty or Aschenputtel were virtue was rewarded, the Princess in this story broke her promise to the frog and even threw him against the wall, yet was rewarded with a "prince with beautiful kind eyes". Yet I contend that there is moral, except that is hidden in perspective.
I believe that when the frog asks the princess to "let [him] sit by thee at table, and eat from thy plate, and drink from thy cup, and sleep in thy little bed" that would actually be a form of marriage engagement, for who else would let a stranger sit by her table or eat from her plate? And the young princess has consented to this engagement just so she can get her ball back again, the ball being a catch-all for anything of much importance to her, which points to the fact that she had no real choice in the engagement. "I will promise it all, whatever you want, if you will only get me my ball again."
She attempts to back off from her promise, and it was only when the King, her father, forces her to fulfull her promise does she grudgingly do so. The entire set up of the story, thus, was an analogy of an arranged marriage brokered by the father where the daughter does not find the husband attractive.
The perspective I spoke about earlier comes from the fact that when one sees the events from the young girl's eyes, one understands why she would behave unwillingly. No one wants to share bed with an ugly frog. Yet, she is forced to do so by the father, and eventually finds over the course of time that the frog was actually a prince.
And they lived happily ever after. -
As, it seems, for many others, I read this book for an online course in Fantasy and Science Fiction literature. Although I've read Grimm's fairy tales before, as a child, it was always the "sanitized" version that had been modified to be children's literature instead of the original adult tales. Fascinating differences and a completely different perspective. Interesting introduction to this course.
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Read this for the assignment on my Fantasy and Science Fiction course in Coursera. This book contains most of the familiar Grimm Brothers' fairy tales, and I also had been familiar with some of them. There is a similar pattern which occurred through the stories, and it is a repetition of an act or things, which is quite annoying for me and could be boring at times. The stories are dealing with themes like greed, ignorance, generosity, etc. and they do have some moral lessons in them.
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Reread some of this for a Fantasy lit course on Coursera that I'm auditing and my childhood bad opinion about the Grimm Brothers was confirmed. Most of the time, the moral of the stories are that if you are witty and cunning you will succeed in the end.
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I absolutely adored these stories as a child, despite the fact that their endings left much to be desired.
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If it wasn't for the Grimm's collection of fairy tales Disney would be short quite a few princesses. Of course, if you only know the "Disneyized" version you are in for quite a surprise.
Reading the collection of tales really allowed me to see the similarities in themes among many of the stories. Many of the stories, such as "Clever Else" and "Fred and Kate", really seemed to be variations of the same tale. In the tale "Roland" it was interesting to see the idea of the evil step-mother's death brought about by dancing developed much more than the cursory mention at the conclusion of the much better known "Snow White."
The translation reads well, though I can't comment on how accurate the translations may be. The two stories I compared to other known translations ("Asctenputtel" and "The Twelve Brothers") contained only small variations, typically in the more lyrical segments. The illustrations are a very nice complement to the stories and displayed very well in the Kindle edition of this text.
Though it always nice to revisit a favorite story I highly recommend reading the book in its entirety to get a feel for the fairy tales that are such a staple in our modern culture. -
Yeah, like the darker aspect of the fairy tales, some of them were pretty good. Common themes in the stories were Violence, deceit, cannibalism, greed, just to name a few. Not meant for children? Disagree, I think children are over protected and not given an accurate view of the way the world works. While cannibalism isn't popular in today's societal norms, violence, deceit, and greed are. I think these are things children should be aware of, the good guy does not always win and the sanitized, watered down Disney happily ever after version doesn't teach children anything.
While I wouldn't recommend reading this book from cover to cover as I did, the stories get a bit old and monotonous, they are definitely worth the read. I say read them with your children, discuss the moral implications of the stories. They really aren't any worse than the movies they are watching or the video games they are playing. Besides, they might actually learn something and enjoy it. Where I can see 10 year old boys scoffing at the Disney version of these stories, they might enjoy the Grimm version and it could encourage them to read, something I feel the youth of today doesn't do enough of. -
I have read this book for the Fantasy and SF course at Coursera, not only because it was a requirement for the course, but also -- by extension -- because I, someone who profoundly hates fairy tales, decided to give them a second chance.
And what a huge disappointment and a load of unimaginative, repetitive, redundant, ungainly crap it's turned out to be! Most of these stories seem to be made up on the spot, by people who are awful at it. The rest are their rip-offs with cosmetic alterations (oh, oh, so the evil stepmother wasn't drowned in a pool, she was roasted alive, and they lived happily ever after, and never had any need for cured meat).
The only story that is worthy of anything more than four-letter words is 'Clever Grethel'. The tiny Blackadder-esque adventure is worth checking out. The rest is shite. -
Pretty much what I expected, with a few fun turns. Darker than the tales we are told as children. People are more evil than you think, and usually because they are starving, including a great willingness to kill their children for practically any reason. Cleverness is valued over goodness, but keeping promises is paramount. How's that for a nutshell?
I finally read this because it was the first week's assignment for the Coursera science fiction and fantasy class that I'm taking. -
Of the hundreds of stories collected by the Grimms between 1806 and 1850, only a handful remain in the mainstream two hundred years on. Some have attributed this to the disappearance of the oral story telling tradition in Europe, as society became industrialised. Were it not for the Grimms’ extensive written records, perhaps much of their catalogue would now be lost forever. So what has survived and why?
A review of ten random English-language fairytale collections indicates today's top Grimm stories are: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Rapunzel, Little Red Cap, The Frog Prince, Hansel and Gretel, and Rumpelstilskin. Why have these "überstories" persisted? A superficial analysis of the Crane translation provides some clues: unlike anecdotes such as Lucky Hans, überstories enjoy several things in common: a heroine, rewards for the good (and dire punishments for the bad), a plethora of things repeated three times, a smattering of magic or at the very least a talking animal, and, only after tremendous adversity, a happy ending. The existence of a similar tale by Perrault or others and/or an evil stepmother also helped ensure persistence.
Some tales that have fallen by the wayside, such as The Raven, also exhibit these features however. So what else mattered? Perhaps the knife that pared away the forgettable from the enduring was the quality of the prose--who could resist the description of the King’s daughter in The Frog Prince: “…the youngest was so beautiful that the sun himself, who had seen so much, wondered each time he shone over her…” So why were some stories better formulated than others?
Maybe the hidden filter was the predominant audience of the oral stories in a patriarchal society: women stayed at home while men worked in the fields. Considering that the überstories involve heroines who achieve a better life, perhaps powerless girls asked for their favourite tales to be repeated over and over, and fantasised about impossible possibilities. Such infinite iterations might have honed the telling and selection of stories we know and love today. -
An enjoyable assortment of the Grimms' fairy tales with really wonderful illustrations. If you've never read the Grimms, their stories are often shockingly violent. The heavily bowdlerized form in which they are currently found in today's culture are faint shadows of their vicious antecedents. For example: Cinderella's (Aschenputtel's) stepsisters hack pieces off of their feet to try to fit the slipper, and are given away by the blood flowing out of the shoe. Try reading that one to your kid before you put him to bed.
While you should maybe exercise discretion before giving these to children, I do recommend more intellectually mature kids and adults read these stories. They cut a little closer to the quick; the writing has few if any frills, and the punching prose gives the tales a sense of fierce vivaciousness. The Grimms themselves assembled the stories from existent German folk tales, and in reading these you get a sense of the primeval, of a time when life was nastier, brutish-er, and shorter. I am reminded a bit of Le Morte d'Arthur, in whose reading I was struck by the casual way in which characters appear and die.
Some of the stories are of low quality: pedantic, or silly, or pointlessly depressing (man, "The Death of the Hen" was a downer). They are outnumbered by the great ones: "Aschenputtel," "The Gallant Tailor," "The Frog Prince," and my personal favorite, "Cat and Mouse in Partnership," which gives Kafka's "A Little Fable" a real run for its money.
I also want to reiterate how terrific the illustrations are in the Cranes' edition of the Grimms. They are really rich in style and detail and help absorb the reader into the fairy tale world. -
I am actually reading this book off of a web site, since I cannot find a copy of it and the website contains more of the brothers grimm stories than this book does. The website is here:
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~spok/grimmtmp/ and the stories are public domain.
I love the classical renditions of Grimms fairy tales. I was raised on the watered down Disney versions, which are nice in their own right, but I have always wanted to see these. They are much more violent and (most) get their point across quite neatly.
So far, I have read:
"The Frog King" which is odd because the frog changes into a prince in quite a different way that I am used to
"Our Lady's Child" which I found to be sort of a strange way to tell the old so-long-as-you-tell-the-truth-in-the-end tale, because the way the brothers Grimm told it, it seemed that the girl was being rewarded in the end for all of her lying
"The Good Bargain" - you just have to read it for yourself
"Brother and Sister" which I nearly didn't understand at all
"The Riddle"
"Mother Holle" - one of my favorite childhood stories that I had forgotten about
"The Girl Without Hands" which is one of the strangest stories I've ever heard
"Clever Elsie"
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"Clever Hans"
There are tons more left too! :) -
Children's and Household Tales (Kinder und Hausmärchen) by the Brothers Grimm contains a treasury of fairy tales with titles familiar to many the world over. For instance, we have Aschenputtel (Cinderella), Little Red Cap (Little Red Riding Hood), Schneewittchen (Snow White), Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, and Rumpelstilzchen (Rumpelstiltskin) to name just a few. That said, the versions adapted by Disney for their animated children's movies are strikingly different from the original tales as recounted by the Grimm Brothers. There is simply no comparison; the Disney versions have been watered down and altered. The original tales are bold, and sometimes outright bloody and cruel. They are gritty and unapologetic about it. And there are many more tales to explore beyond those that were popularized by Disney.
These tales are timeless. They speak to our psyches even now. They tap into archetypal images and motifs that have just as much relevance today as they did when they were collected/written back in the early 19th century. A must read for any connoisseur of fantastical literature. -
I read this by audiobook over 4 months, listening to 1 or 2 or 3 stories a day. Kelly Lintz does a brilliant job of the audio, which was provided free in my Audible membership. The translation is also brilliant. The audible edition is terribly chapterized. And though I love the Grimm collection generally, I don't love how they bunch similar stories together. Great for research or casual reading, but not as fun to read in a linear way. There are some fables, religious tales, and legends as well as fairy tales. All told, they are like what we called "kitchen tales" growing up: moralistic or funny or both, sometimes saucy, sometimes frowning at the world, always a bit of fun and lots of light.
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Despite being a short and easy read I found myself labouring through this particular book. Funny because I'm not even sure where it came from or why I chose to have it in my possession. I can be rather superficial when it comes to choosing books, especially children's books. The children's books that I do find myself purchasing usually have incredible illustrations or they hold a certain nostalgic value to them. This book possesses neither of those qualities, and despite being retold, the stories themselves possess a rather dull and old fashioned voice. It's a pity I guess....
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I read this for the Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World course at cousera.org
Best word for it is interesting. It is not the original version of the fairytales, but it is not the pretty version Disney gives us today either. Studing it was very cool. Just don't fool yourself, although interesting, it doesn't stop being weird. -
I had to read this book for a Fantasy and SciFi class I'm taking at Coursera. I was dreading it at first but actually it flew by. It is funny how many modern book and movie storylines can still be traced to these old tales.
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What fun to revisit these old childhood tales! I'd never read the Lucy Crane translation before and it was interesting to read different versions of some of the stories than the more familiar versions.
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Was good! Essay done, on to the next!
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Currently reading for Coursera- Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind , Our Modern World.
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I am reading this for a class offered by Coursera!
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Read for Coursera: Fantasy and Science Fiction: The Human Mind, Our Modern World.
https://www.coursera.org/course/fanta... -
A collection of folk tales gathered by the Grimm brothers.
Since it is a collection of tales gathered over time, you’ll find some are extremely similar throughout the entire story, and others have almost identical endings (like putting someone inside a barrel lined with nails and rolling them down a street or over a waterfall.)
Yep, these are the DARK fairy tales that were sanitized decades ago for modern retelling or turning into movies. But they’re a good read into the foundations of modern story structure.
I’m not sure if it’s a mistranslation or something was lost along the way, but some of the stories are also particularly pointless or plotless. Or perhaps I’m way too literal and just missed the symbolism. Either way, it’s a good thing to read (and my version was free from Amazon.) -
Some grim tales if you are evil or ugly. Good comes to those who are crafty, handsome and beautiful. Life was simple then? Nice art work by Walter Crane, from the 1882 edition.
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For a long time I've wanted to read the real Grimm's stories. Not those smoothed Disney versions. I've heard that the stories are quite cruel and I must admit that some of them are not really suitable for kids, at least not for very young children. I'm not sure if they were even meant to be for children in Grimm's own time, either.
Most of the stories are still suitable for reading and the education in them, although a little bit old fashioned, are still good. There were yet a lot of potential material in the stories to transfer into smoothed Disney versions, even some of the cruelest stories.
While reading the stories, I made some observations. Here's a list what I found out:
Many of the stories are very cruel. But although there is killing and decapitations and violence in them, most of the times they end happily.
But all stories doesn't end happily.
But the chickens come always home to roost (if I got it right ;) I'm trying to say that evil never wins)
The stories are full of repetitions.
Many stories ends like with a bump. It's like something would be missing. Or maybe it's because there's so much repetition and then, suddenly, it ends.
There's a lot of pointless information in the stories. The story might start with telling us about a miller and first you think that the miller is the main character, but suddenly you'll find out that the story is telling about the miller's son and after all, he became the real hero.
The stories also repeat a lot of themselves. There's a lot of same themes, occasions and characters. It's like many of them would be each others variants with a few different details.
There's a lot of big castles with a hundreds of rooms, but there's always the one room which is forbidden to enter (and of course nobody doesn't obey the rule and with a bad consequences).
Obedience, kindness, diligence, honesty and Christianity are the virtues and with them you'll get far.
There's a very odd combination of animals and wares and they are very human like.
Number three is very important! There's everything in three times, sister, tasks etc.
There's a lot of kings and his daughters and sons, but nobody speaks of queens, unless they are evil. There aren't many mothers either.
Most of the men just takes their wives, most of the time it's the first beautiful girl they'll meet and if they just can't take the girl, they'll have to conduct some tasks which girl's father has given to them and if they could perform the tasks, they could have the girl as their wife.
There were a lot of weddings.
And there were a lot of travelling.
God is present in many stories but there's still some ”pagan” parts, too. Spells, prophets, witches, magic.
Emotions are very black-and-white and volatile.
There's always three siblings and the youngest one is always the most kind, clever, special or most dump, but after all, always the hero. The older siblings are always mean.
There's a lot of half siblings and they are either mean or discriminated.
Many of the stories are very male chauvinist, they diminishes and subordinates women, but still, there are some very clever and cunning girls too. Most of the times the good girls are very beautiful and the bad girls are ugly.
The kings are most of the time very unjust. They believe the first witnesses blindly and hands out impossible tasks for innocents or suitors. You could survive with these tasks with the good deeds you have done before or just with a pure luck. Kings and others are also very eager to break their promises.
The stories aren't always very fair.
The odd observation was that, why deeply in love partners doesn't recognise each others after a long separation and when they finally meet. Or then only other one recognises the other.
There was a one surprising discovery, when they claimed in one story that monkeys were born from humans.
There were a lot of observations and odd things in the stories, especially when you think about them nowadays. Times has changed and it's obvious that Grimm's stories aren't from this time.
Stories were very interesting and it was nice to read them. I do understand how they can make a whole thesis etc. from the subject. There's still much things to ponder about and to study from the stories and more the time passes, more exotic they will become.
I would recommend parent's to read the stories first by themselves before reading them to children. You can also remould the stories easily or just left something out from them. -
"Fairy tales" is this magical word that has this beautiful, colorful, dreamy, hopeful sweet taste, it can be actually quite the opposite. And this is very very very obvious in Grimm brothers' fairy tales.
Amusing? Sure, they are pretty amusing, with manny shocking, violent scenes. I'll try not to focus on one story in my review, I'd rather talk about the general themes that can be found in almost all the stories: (some of those themes are general in all fairy tales, though)
1) The "bad guy" is always a woman! it is the wicked witch or the evil stepmother or the jealous friend; even in Harsel and Gretel, when the father actually agreed -unwillingly- to kill his own children, helped the stepmother to fulfill her plan, and then he felt regret, but then when the plan did fail he actually helped her again to help her in her wicked plan, but he is not viewed as evil or bad though, only the bad stepmother is! but he is just a poor man!!! And allover the book it is very hard to find a male "bad guy"!
2) The good girl must be beautiful, the ugly girl is -of course- a wicked, bad, evil soul!
3) All the characters are generally shallow, mono-dimensional, and distrustful.
4) you would not find any kind of ideological conflicts, all conflicts are about money, beauty, women, food, or good marriage connections. As if people are just animals living for nothing but these!
5) Some virtues are interpreted in the most awkward way! for example the virtue of obedience, in the story called "the three little men" the beautiful nice good girl was rewarded because she obeyed three strangers (men) she met for the very first time in her life when they ordered her to sweep their floor, while the evil bad (of course ugly!) girl was punished because she refused to sweep the floor for three strangers she meets for the first time. Obedience is a good virtue indeed but not in the absolute kind of way! and not when strangers ask me to sweep for them while they look perfectly healthy and capable of doing the job themselves.
6) Marriages are all about beauty and money, even if your partner shows unwillingness (like the white snake story), forget about dignity, personality, way of thinking ... etc.
7) In the very rare situations where ugly people are not actually wicked, they can not have any kind of rights or feelings, and are to be humiliated as much as anyone wishes!
8) Kings are always beloved, good and kind (and naive)!
9) Taking part in a crime or a bad deed doesn't make you bad!
10) anything is compromisable!
11) life is not fair! (its allover the book, but let's just mention the white snake story, where killing ants and ravens was something not good but killing the poor horse that actually helped the servant was OK, because he already helped the servant but the ants and ravens are yet to help!)
12) When you are grieved, you should wander for tens of years and wait for a miracle, or look for magic, but do not think or try yourself!
13) shocking bloody scenes.
14) If you want anyone to make anything completely stupid, just ask him for 3 times using the same words and everything, he'll be convinced, or if there is something you want to do just wait till the 3rd time, always the third time!
Enjoyed the Book? Yup! Liked it? Absolutely no! the book is full with all horrible thoughts and meanings you can ever think of! specially when it is meant to be for a child! -
Ehdottomia suosikkejani olivat sadut Elinikä ja Talonpoika taivaassa.
