Grimm's Grimmest [Hardcover]

Wilhelm Grimm (Author), Jacob Grimm (Author), Tracy Arah Dockray (Illustrator), Maria Tatar (Introduction), Maria Tatar (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 11, 2005

Murder, kidnapping, cruel and unusual punishment, violent revengethese are not the bedtime stories mummy used to read. Newly reissued with a fresh cover, Grimm's Grimmest presents nineteen original, unsanitized, wholly unholy tales as they were first collected by the Brothers Grimm circa 1822all fiendishly illustrated. The tales harken back to a time when travelers risked roasting or worse, and bad manners yielded frightful consequences. An insightful introduction makes sense of the mayhem, shedding light on how the Grimm brothers went from macabre to mainstream in fairly short order. From the true horror of Aschenputtel (the original Cinderella story) to Rapunzel's dark secret, Grimm's Grimmest features the authentic stories born long ago in the land of the Black Forest, at a time when fairy tales never ended happily ever after.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

A scholar of fairy tales, Maria Tatar, provides a fascinating introduction about the history and meaning of the stories assembled by the Brothers Grimm. She writes, for example, "We now know that the stories collected in the nineteenth-century folktale anthologies ...had their origins in an irreverent peasant culture that arose in conscious opposition to the feudal state's ruling class. By overdoing it in the realm of storytelling, these narrators were able to alleviate--if only temporarily--some of the tedium that marked the daily life of their audience ... [These tales] can be seen as the ancestors of our urban legends about vanishing hitchhikers and cats accidentally caught in the dryer or as the preliterate equivalents of tabloid tales describing headless bodies found in topless bars. But in many ways, it is the horror film to which the matter and manner of these folktales has most conspicuously migrated. Like horror films, folktales trade in the sensational--breaking taboos and enacting the forbidden with uninhibited energy."

The text of the 19 tales in this collection is based on the 1822 edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Nursery and Household Tales) by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm--before the tales were expurgated and rewritten to make them more "suitable" for children. It's bound in a handsome faux-antique format, and lavishly illustrated by Tracy Arah Dockray (15 full-page color paintings, and a black-and-white drawing on nearly every page). Most of the tales will be unfamiliar to American and English readers, who may be surprised by the graphic descriptions of incest, murder, mutilation, and cannibalism. Chronicle Books has done us a service in helping restore to our adult culture these vivid, evocative folktales. --Fiona Webster --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: German --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: Chronicle Books (August 11, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811850463
• ISBN-13: 978-0811850469
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 7.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #845,405 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Grimm's Grimmest -- horrific, but enlightening, April 2, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Grimm's Grimmest (Paperback)

I must confess to ambivalent feelings about this book. The stories are sordid accounts of hideous people committing unspeakable acts with the basest of motives. Hannibal Lecter could step into the pages of one of these stories without even a change in costume. The idea that anyone, anywhere, any time, could have considered these tales appropriate for children boggles the mind.

Then why would anyone want to read them? Well, the archetypal human concerns woven into these macabre tales still pong home with disconcerting clarity, just as they did in feudal Germany hundreds of years ago. Loveless existence, infertility, betrayal, greed, jealously, incest, poverty, disaster; the stories read like a laundry list of the most tragic bits of the human experience and, sadly, the subject matter hasn't changed much, only the manner of expression.

The book opens with a comprehensive introduction by Maria Tatar, which provides an excellent frame of reference for what could otherwise be merely a jumble of surreal images. In the early 1800's two brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, collected and retold old German folktales. Discovering a lucrative market for children's morality stories, they created successive revisions targeted especially for children. Sexual content was suppressed, but violence was not. Whether by popular demand of due to quirks of their own, the Grimms in some cases even escalated the violent images.

Viewing the original folktales as allegorical teaching tools, designed to help adults cope with life problems, it all begins to make sense. Each story contains at least one rather heavy-handed lesson -- morality written large: "Greed will get you in the end." "Disobedient children are likely to die a hideous death." "Don't bemoan your childlessness or you may give birth to a hedgehog."

I was intrigued by the little secondary assumptions that are included in the stories and give clues to the cultural orientation. Oddly enough, there are a number of strong, independent female characters. Where did they come from? Children are expendable, not entitled to love, and the challenge seems to have been how to get as much work and as little aggravation from them as possible. For women, marriage was a huge, inescapable gamble. One must marry, but the bridegroom was as likely to turn out to be a cannibal as a prince.

Read these stories like a book of puzzles, looking for the main morality lesson and digging out the secondary assumptions, and they act as a mirror held up to our own society. What has changed? What is the same? What is better, what is worse? Horrific they may be, but vastly enlightening as well.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Grimmer than what I heard as a kid, May 19, 2003

By 

Lynne Shaney "sandrag" (Minneapolis MN USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Grimm's Grimmest (Paperback)

Liked the illustrations to this volume of the darker tales, especially Juniper Tree, which was an amazing story that makes you realize just how awful the stepmothers of fairy tales are. Some of the stories are familiar but quite a few were new to me, so this was something of an adventure.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful and fascinating read, August 30, 2003

By 

JoJo Lesher (Brighton, MI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Grimm's Grimmest (Paperback)

I received this book as a Christmas present last year, and it has quickly become one of my all-time favorites. Okay, yes, the stories are pretty darn gory, with decapitations and/or mutilations playing a prominent role in quite a few of them, not to mention the incest and cannibalism and so forth, so you need to keep this book away from the kiddies. That aside, it's a wonderful and fascinating collection of tales. The illustrations are very nice, and there's a lot of them. Plus there's a great introduction at the beginning that gives the reader more of a background story on the Grimms and their work. Overall, a fantastic book.