21.09.2020

“The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition” by Brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, translated by Jack Zipes

"The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition is a complete and uncensored edition of Grimms’ fairy tales.

The 2014 collection was translated into English from the original first edition for the very first time by a professor at the University of Minnesota, Jack Zipes, and features all 156 stories unedited and unchanged. The illustrations are presented in a striking and stark papercut style by visual artist Andrea Dezsö.

Thanks to Zipes, we can now read the horrific tales of Rapunzel, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, and Sleeping Beauty as they were originally written- complete with blood, death, and terrible mothers. The trope we know today of the ‘evil stepmother’ was one of the changes made over the years because, according to Zipes, they had to uphold the view that motherhood was “sacred”. In the original stories it is actually Snow White’s own mother who orders the huntsman to murder her daughter and cut out her liver for her to eat, and Hansel and Gretel’s mother, not father or step mother, who abandons them in the forest.

The original edition was not published for children or general readers. Nor were these tales told primarily for children. It was only after the Grimms published two editions primarily for adults that they changed their attitude and decided to produce a shorter edition for middle-class families. This led to Wilhelm’s editing and censoring many of the tales.

It is no wonder a few of the stories were removed as some of them were truly bizarre tales of infanticide and suffering. How The Children Played at Slaughtering is a terrible tale of a child who accidentally kills their brother, only to be murdered by their mother, who neglects her other child in the bath, and they drown. The deaths don’t stop there as the mother hangs herself in despair, and when the father returns home he dies soon after from a broken heart. The Children of Famine is as jolly as the title suggests, and yes pretty much everyone dies.

No happily ever after to be seen!"