The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales (alkuperäinen julkaisuvuosi 1812; vuoden 1976 painos)

211 wicked stories that are purely awesome.

I was very surprised at the content. Mostly, the good guys won, but not always. The organization was great. Similar stories are found together and that makes it easier to navigate. I was surprised at how many stories with clear religious messages were there, though it does make sense when you think of the time that it was written in. Also, there were many tales that surprised me. From every other character being named Hans to dresses coming from walnuts, it was hard to guess what would come next.

I was surprised to find a new favourite fairytale. While I still adore Anderson's The Snow Queen, Grimm's The Juniper now has a place in my heart. I love how similar it is to Snow White and how newer adaptations have taken elements from it, but them how drastically different it is.

I never knew that it was the Grimm Brothers who wrote the story about the couple who did it greet their old father with respect and made him eat out of a little plate until they found their son whittling a little wooden plate so that they may eat out of it when they grew old. I've heard many people recount it but I never knew where it came from until I read this. ( )

With love from Mummy and Daddy Xmas 1959, I was three and the words and pictures have never left me. A rock on which the rest of my life was built. The book records a moment in time and place, defined by stories, marked on every page by the history of the world, cousin to other stories in other places all over the world and full of the expectancy of the ever changing future. ( )

Wow. I knew the original Grimm stories were dark, and nothing like Disney, but I didn't realize how gratuitously bloody and cruel they would be. Listening to the audiobook before going to sleep a few days on a trip was...interesting. ( )

The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm with illustrations from Arthur Rackham is indeed, as the Rock Point series says, a timeless classic.

This is specifically a review of the Rock Point edition in their Timeless Classics series. It uses the 1897 Margaret Hunt translation as its source and the Rackham illustrations from a 1909 edition. Reviewing the tales themselves doesn't make a lot of sense here, we have all read at least some of them, whether in this form of one of the many variations. The introduction in this volume does a nice job of introducing the tales and gives a very brief overview of what exactly these stories represent both culturally and historically. If you want to learn about all of the questions and issues around them you will not want a collection of the tales for that, you will want a book devoted to the topic, though a collection like this one will be necessary to fully understand those issues.

This edition is packaged wonderfully and will serve as both a nice addition to a library as well as a book you can read from, ideally to your children, then pass down to them when the time comes. The addition of the illustrations in beautiful plates adds to both the pleasure of reading and the pride of ownership.

There are some writers that deserve a "complete works of" volume in most libraries and the Brothers Grimm are among those writers. This particular edition will serve that function very well.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )

Read this book with my nine year daughter during the COVID-19 quarantine in Sao Paulo. We read one tale per day and some of our favourites were 'Clever Grethel' and 'The Fisherman and His Wife'. Found myself repeating to my daughter that it was written in different times because of the portrayal of women. ( )