Fairy Tales and Folklore

[angilasman]

Over the past year or so I've ended up with a growing collection of books collecting fairy tales and folklore: 10 of the Andrew Lang Fairy Books from the late 19th and early 20th century (which collect tales from all over the world, starting with the more traditional ones but getting more and more obscure as the books went on), a few of the Pantheon series (Japanese Tales, Russian Fairy Tales - which should be owned by anyone who likes the Russian fantasy epps of MST- and American Indian Myths and Legends) as well as a few others (Kwaidan, W.B. Yeats' Irish Fairy and Folktales)

...one thing noticeably absent is a nice copy of Grimm's Fairy Tales! Most of the stories are collected in the first few of Lang's books, but it's obvious I need the book itself. I'm thinking about getting the Jack Zipes translation because it has the all the tales included in the Grimm's final version as well as the stories that were left on the cutting room floor.


Any thoughts? Particularly favorite stories? Particular collection you were fond of as a kid?

[caucasoididiot]

You might find the introduction to this book quite interesting. It was used in one of my classes as an introduction to semiotics, essentially the interpretation of symbols and their changing interpretations in different historical epochs. The intro looks at the medieval French versions of several modern fairy tales. Now, in part, it's a refutation of some modern academics tendency to interpret things in psychological terms which are (unconsciously) very modern, such as the "red riding hood" being symbolic of menstrual blood and building interpretations of the tale solely on that basis. But Darnton looks at the history of the tale and determines that that is really a fairly modern addition to it. When looking at these stories in their earliest forms the idea of wealth beyond imagination is not gold and jewels and marrying a prince, but rather magic that allows one to eat until no longer hungry.