Fairy Tales: Grimm Horror Tales

When I was younger, my mother refused to read me Grimm fairy tales because, she said, they gave me nightmares. 

I don't doubt her. For Mother's Day or her birthday, my mother received a set of the The Juniper Tree and Other Tales from Grimm translated by Lore Segal and Randall Jarrell, illustrated by Maurice Sendak. The set sat on her writing desk in the living room. Whenever I passed the desk and saw the set, I shivered. 

The tales are truly dark--and a lesson in how folklore does not necessarily offer moral tales of courage and wit and goodness overcoming all. From that set, in the first tale, "Three Feathers" the princely brother who wins the kingdom is an idiot (simpleton is the term used) who does little more than go where directed. His beastly consort is a toad who turns into a lovely princess. 

The final tale, which gives its name to the set, involves a murderous stepmother who (I'm not making up any of the following) chops off her stepson's head, then ties his head back on his body, so his stepsister, her daughter, will think she killed him. The stepmother then chops up the boy and feeds him in stew to his biological father. The daughter collects the bones and buries them. A bird shows up and flies around town, basically reporting on the event to the townspeople. It finally returns to the house, rewards the father and daughter and kills the stepmother with a millstone.

So the villainess gets it in the end. However, the tale contains zero moral reflection. The father, daughter, and restored son don't rejoice or issue regrets. They express neither sadness nor pleasure in the stepmother's end. They go inside and eat! 

So--horror movie worthy. Tons of people bite the dust but in the end, the resolution applauds revenge and restitution rather than any "legal" or "moral" wrap-up. 

I recommend the above anthology, in part because the translations are excellent--they move at a good clip, avoid the later moral additions (the Grimm brothers felt bad because parents rather than scholars were buying their collections--the editions got increasingly "clean" with each edit), and have a storytelling cadence. 

I also recommend them because although I'm not a huge fan of Sendak's illustrations, I think they perfectly fit the surreal, half-dream state of the tales. 

I may have avoided Grimm tales as a child--and they still aren't my favorites--but they do deserve a read by fairy tale lovers. I'm not one to think they are the only acceptable versions. I feel absolutely no need to place fairy tales in some kind of hierarchy where Disney is excised while Perrault is allowed or vice versa. I want it all! 

Including Grimm.