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This article confuses some things. Struwelpeter is not fairy tales by any definition. It is a hilarious and gruesome picture-book with small moralistic verses
by goto11 6y ago
This article confuses some things.
Struwelpeter is not fairy tales by any definition. It is a hilarious and gruesome picture-book with small moralistic verses intended to teach children good manners. It is an original work, written and illustrated by Heinrich Hoffmann.
Grimms fairy tales are folk tales collected by the brothers Grimm as anthropological research. We don't know the original authors of these stories. It was an orally transmitted genre, and many stories exist in multiple versions. This genre of folktales were not originally intended for children, but at the time of the collection there was a boom in children's literature, and the Grimms cached in on that by publishing modified versions for children.
There are other collections of folktales beside the Grimms, for example the french Charles Perrault. Disneys Cinderella for example is based on the Perrault version, not the Grimm version. I'm not sure what the "English translation" in the article refers to?
Hans Christian Andersen wrote original stories, although to some extent inspired by folktales, they are a very different genre of literature.
- spacechild1 6y agoYes, that's indeed worth pointing out!
- andi999 6y agoI remember by accident quite a few of the tales the Grimms record weren't German folk tales but French one (as unbelievable as this sounds) :https://www.zeit.de/zeit-geschichte/2012/04/Maerchen-Brueder-Grimm-Urspruenge/komplettansicht https://www.zeit.de/zeit-geschichte/2012/04/Maerchen-Brueder...
- goto11 6y agoWhy is that unbelievable? Folktales are an orally transmitted genre which does not respect national borders. Some stories appear in both Decameron and Arabian Nights.
- andi999 6y agoIt is not that the stories already diffused in the German population. It is (I think) the person telling the stories was raised by a French person. In an analogy it is more like you write a German English dictionary, but the German words are French (and not yet absorbed by the German language). I find this surprising (of course not if you know the backstory)
- type0 6y agoOne example is Reynard the Fox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynard_the_Fox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reynard_the_Fox that's probably of Old High German origin but has been adopted into other languages, see how it has transitioned between the languages.
- azepoi 6y agoIt was so popular it displaced the french word for fox. Foxes were called "goupil", "renard" in modern french.
- mjw1007 6y agoI can't find a reference, but I remember reading that at least once the when the Grimms were collecting oral tales they were given a retelling of a Hans Christian Andersen story.
- goto11 6y agoAs far as I know, the Grimm tales were collected before H.C.Andersen began writing his tales. But there is a theoretical possibility since the latest Grimm revisions were published after Andersen.
- simonh 6y agoI highly recommend the Philip Pullman translation of Grimm into English, it’s excellent. My daughter was obsessed with it when she was little, but unlike other stories she wouldn’t let me read it to her. She wanted to absorb it in detail at her own pace.