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The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales | 
 enlarge | Authors: Brothers Grimm, Josef Scharl
Creators: Padraic Colum, Joseph Campbell
Publisher: Pantheon
Category: Book
List Price: $18.00
Buy Used: $6.00
You Save: $12.00 (67%)
New (33) Used (40) Collectible (3) from $6.00
Rating:  22 reviews
Sales Rank: 15178
Media: Paperback
Reading Level: Ages 9-12
Pages: 880
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.1
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 5.8 x 1.7
ISBN: 0394709306
Dewey Decimal Number: 398.210943
EAN: 9780394709307
ASIN: 0394709306
Publication Date: September 12, 1972
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: softcover,clean pages,,no marks, , -FREE USPS CONFIRMATION NUMBER
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Product Description
For almost two centuries, the stories of magic and myth gathered by the Brothers Grimm have been part of the way children—and adults—learn about the vagaries of the real world. Cinderella, Rapunzel, Snow-White, Haensel and Gretel, Little Red-Cap (a.k.a. Little Red Riding Hood), and Briar-Rose (a.k.a. Sleeping Beauty) are only a few of more than 200 enchanting characters included here. Lyrically translated and beautifully illustrated, the tales are presented just as Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm originally set them down: bold, primal, just frightening enough, and endlessly engaging.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 17 more reviews...
 Bed Time Stories To Curl Your Hair May 10, 2005
Gary F. Taylor (Biloxi, MS USA)
78 out of 79 found this review helpful
Born in the late 1700s in Hanau, Germany, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were noted scholars celebrated for the documentation of German folklore--and most particularly for the documentation of folk tales that had been previously passed from generation to generation by oral tradition.
The Brothers Grimm began to publish these tales 1812 under the title Children's and Household Tales, a collection which went a then unheard of six editions during their lifetimes and a posthumous edition shortly after their deaths. In its final form, the collection contained two hundred folk tales and ten "Children's Legends," and they would have a tremendous impact on both European and American popular culture.
It is here that we find such figures as Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretle, Tom Thumb, Rapunzel, and the Bremen Town Musicians--to name but a few. But be forewarned: these are not the tales as presented in such venues as The Little Golden Book series or on the big screen by Walt Disney. True enough, there is magic, wonder, and a world in which good triumphs... but there is also savage retribution, revenge, brutality, torture, and the occasional flourish of anti-semetism as well.
"Cinderella" offers a good example of the violence one often finds in these stories. Modern versions typically punish the wicked step-sisters with comic humiliation, but in the original tale their eyes are picked out by birds--and this is actually one of the less extreme retributions offered. The evil queen in the classic "Snow White" is forced to dance at Snow White's wedding... in red-hot iron shoes until she dies. Perhaps most disconcerting is the fate of the wicked servant in "The Goose Girl," who is thrown naked into a barrel driven through with spikes that is dragged by horses through the town!
Although children typically adore such gruesome details, modern parents will likely be less enthusiastic--and I myself wouldn't recommend The Brothers Grimm as bedtime story material for the very young and impressionable. They are perhaps best left to older children, especially if their taste leans to the Gothic. That said, however, the Pantheon edition is quite good, for it offers both the original German texts and English translations; it would make an excellent gift for a young language student. And the stories themselves, so often dark and brooding, deserve to be read for the long shadow they have cast re literary tradition.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer
A Treasure for Pleasure & Scholarly Readers Alike April 10, 2000
56 out of 57 found this review helpful
Even if your not a scholar, this tremendous read-aloud reaches all the way back to the voices of the oral tradition, whose rich language and images will transport you to a magical state of being. The Frog King begins "In olden times when wishing still helped one, there lived a king whose daughters were all beautiful, but the youngest was so beautiful that the sun itself, which has seen so much, was astonished whenever it shone in her face." Try that at dusk or by candle light, and see if an awed hush doesn't fall over your listener(s)! For those with a more serious bent, this is perhaps the most accurate English translation of the Grimm's recordings of the oral tales. The complete collection lets you compare the patterns and rhythms of language and story line. The introduction by Padraic Colum and end commentary by Joseph Campbell (some 30 pages) are an added treasure. This version is frequently used by Waldorf teachers, and is "must have" for all primary teachers and families with children.
 The Grim Side Of The Brothers Grimm June 5, 2000
Loren D. Morrison (Los Angeles County, U.S.A.)
55 out of 76 found this review helpful
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were what we would call today, recorders of folklore. They traveled throughout Germany, listening to, and putting into writing, well over two hundred folk tales which we now call fairy tales.These tales, as originally written, seem to be some sort of morality plays filled with revenge and retribution. A case in point is "Cinderella," which concludes with birds pecking out the eyes of Cinderella's step-sisters as punishment for their evil ways. In many of these tales, fraud and misdeed are touted as acceptable ways to get ahead. This is particularly true when the hero of the tale is taking advantage of the rather naive everyman who is a staple of many of these stories. A case of this is "The Little Tailor" who parlays the killing of seven flies into marriage to a princess who is forced into marrying him against her will. Many of these stories have been revised elsewhere for the consumption of children and have thus been made both suitable and entertaining. Some, however, tend to be dropped from the modern repertoire because no amount of revision can make them suitable reading. An example of this genre is "The Jew Among Thorns." In this tale, the Jew ends up being hanged as a thief after being tricked, harassed, and cheated by a larcenous dwarf. The moral, if you can call it that, seems to be that the very fact of being a Jew is justification enough for hanging. The Brothers Grimm were just chroniclers of what they heard, but what they heard seems to have been on the grim side. The up side of their fairy tales is they have given us a wonderful array of characters who reappear in literature, on the stage, in Disney movies, and in opera. Some notable examples are: Tom Thumb, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, and, of course, Cinderella. I'm afraid that I cannot recommend Grimm's Fairy Tales as appropriate reading for children because they present violence, dishonesty, and frequently, murder, as admirable traits. Having said this, however, I must admit that recommending revisions over original versions does go against the grain for me.
 Sometimes monotonous, usually disturbing, yet fun June 21, 1999
38 out of 53 found this review helpful
I just finished reading this book a couple days ago, and I found it to be quite entertaining. However, many of the storylines in the different tales are quite similiar and so reading this book can feel a bit monotonous at times. In some cases, the storylines can completely veer off from where you think they're headed and can end with totally different characters and environments than were present in the first half of the tale. The writing can seem unfocused, unsolid, and inconsistent (within each separate tale, that is). Also, I personally found most of the characters to be, in a certain aspect, quite annoying, because at least half of the major characters in this book at some point or another in each tale acts almost completely without any rationality. My favorite example of this is in the first couple short paragraphs of the story "Sweetheart Roland", in which an evil witch has two daughters, one bad and biological, and the other foster and good. The bad sister tells her mother that she wants the good sister's apron, and so the mother basically says "well then, I'll go chop off your sister's head while she's asleep tonight and you shall have the apron tomorrow morning." Similiar types of behavior by the characters in these stories is the norm. I personally would hesitate to read these stories to children, because themes of inter-family homicide (usually by parents against children), torture, and cannibalism are prevalent in this book. But as adult entertainment, they're quite fun to read, in a way similiar to The Adventures of Sinbad.
A Good Pony for the Language-Learner July 31, 2001
Roderick Saxey II (Oxford, England)
35 out of 43 found this review helpful
The nice thing about the Pantheon edition is that the translation tends to be quite literal, so it's a very good one for someone learning German to use side-by-side with the original. (Plus the stories are great!) Oh, and by the way: The Brothers Grimm were not folklorists, but linguists (besides making a huuuge German dictionary, they were the ones showed that German, English, Dutch, etc. are related to Greek and Latin). The reason they collected folktales is because they were looking for dialect-specimens and this is an old linguists' trick--you get a much purer version of speech in the (linguistically) relaxed folktales than you do in interviews.
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