storytellers

Looking for last minute gift ideas?  I couldn't resist this imaginatively provocative portrait of farmer and storyteller Dorothea Viehmann who told Brothers Grimm a number of their famously recorded folk tales. The picture is shown in a handwritten edition housed at The Brothers Grimm Museum in Kassel, Germany.

The storyteller was the daughter of a tavern keeper who heard most of these tales from her father's guests-- bards of old, then sharing them with the Grimm brothers who were making major inroads in the scientific documentation of folklore. According to the folklorists, the also mother of seven had an astounding memory, recalling many of these tales, word for word, as told to her.

The brothers published their first edition 200 years ago on December 20, 1812 as Children's and Household Tales.  Now familiarly known around the world as Grimms' Fairy Tales, it is the 2nd most distributed work of German origins next to the Lutheran Bible.  Yet scholars have found that the origins of these stories go way beyond Germany and even Europe, with parallel tales existing on every continent.

The art book publisher Taschen released a new edition last year celebrating the 200 year anniversary and culling from among the best and most memorable vintage illustrations dear to now-grown readers' hearts. 

Review here from Brain Pickings who says the book retains the "the shadow play and shape shifting at the heart of the stories" with a visually stunning edition basically geared towards these former readers of now vintage publications who wish to share the best of those experiences with their own children - who, in the publisher's words, "take seriously a child’s exposure to stories and images with depth and historical meaning."

Spiegel reports the more gruesome stories tailored down or edited out altogether.  Although this is tied to the view that the stories were originally for broader audiences or just adults, looking at some synopses, I found myself wondering if older societies had the equivalent to our modern problems with violent video games.  (Yet presumably couldn't care less, given the prevailing view of children in those times.)  For this similarly come-of-age reader, I remember the scene, for example, whereby Cinderella's stepsisters savagely cut off their own toes, an act that still agreeably revealed to me, in the deep pools of childhood's tender wisdom, the extent of the stepsisters' depravity, and in a world where justice ultimately reigns.  Spiegel reports there were even more chilling tales of brutality - details and stories that *didn't make the final cut* (and that evaded my earlier experiences, as well).  Still the publishers successfully avoid sanitizing the literature, or sapping and perverting the deeper psychological meanings (as beloved Disney has long been criticized), and which we adults (banished from Neverland) must nevertheless conclude eludes video.  "The horse's head is still nailed to the fence in 'The Goose Girl,'" says editor Noel Daniel,  "and various people in different tales lose appendages."

Photostream here from Spiegel.

You can also peruse free ebook versions here at Media Bistro and thanks to the informative tweets from Somers Public Library.

On the other hand, forge your own vintage archaeological findings with online used booksellers.

The "woild," as Popeye used to say, is still your oyster.