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bloodygranuaileAfter last year’s adventures in reading Capital Volume 1, which was very serious and dense and which broke down to still reading like 100 pages a month, I decided to take it easy with my yearlong read for 2023 and started working my way through a nice fancy-looking copy of Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales, the sort with gold-edged pages and a ribbon and whatnot.
Most of these stories are very short, some no more than a few sentences, and even the longest barely clock in at like ten pages. The book is not divided into sections or anything but the stories are clearly clustered by theme or version, so we kick off with a few different tellings of The Frog Prince, and then there are no more Frog Princes for the rest of the volume. I thought this was great because it made it easy to compare versions side-by-side, although from a strictly “reading for pleasure” perspective it gets a bit repetitive. You can tell the stories are all from in and around Germany because like 90% of the human characters with names are named Hans. Most of the characters don’t have names, though, being instead named by their station in life or species or something, thus saving us from too many Hanses. Some of the stories are structured like what we think of as normal fairy tale stories, with a beginning and a middle and an end that all follow from each other, and others are essentially just wild claims of random things happening. Some are religious or maybe sort of have a moral if you squint, and others do not have any discernible lessons or even themes. It’s a fascinating grab bag of talking animals, clever tailors, beautiful princesses, and whatnot. Overall I’m glad I read it despite the uneven quality of the actual content.
Most of these stories are very short, some no more than a few sentences, and even the longest barely clock in at like ten pages. The book is not divided into sections or anything but the stories are clearly clustered by theme or version, so we kick off with a few different tellings of The Frog Prince, and then there are no more Frog Princes for the rest of the volume. I thought this was great because it made it easy to compare versions side-by-side, although from a strictly “reading for pleasure” perspective it gets a bit repetitive. You can tell the stories are all from in and around Germany because like 90% of the human characters with names are named Hans. Most of the characters don’t have names, though, being instead named by their station in life or species or something, thus saving us from too many Hanses. Some of the stories are structured like what we think of as normal fairy tale stories, with a beginning and a middle and an end that all follow from each other, and others are essentially just wild claims of random things happening. Some are religious or maybe sort of have a moral if you squint, and others do not have any discernible lessons or even themes. It’s a fascinating grab bag of talking animals, clever tailors, beautiful princesses, and whatnot. Overall I’m glad I read it despite the uneven quality of the actual content.