Synopsis:A rare discovery in the world of fairy tales - now for the first time in English.
With this volume, the holy trinity of fairy tales - the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and Hans Christian Andersen - becomes a quartet. In the 1850s, Franz Xaver von Schönwerth traversed the forests, lowlands, and mountains of northern Bavaria to record fairy tales, gaining the admiration of even the Brothers Grimm. Most of Schönwerth's work was lost - until a few years ago, when thirty boxes of manuscripts were uncovered in a German municipal archive.
Now, for the first time, Schönwerth's lost fairy tales are available in English. Violent, dark, and full of action, and upending the relationship between damsels in distress and their dragon-slaying heroes, these more than seventy stories bring us closer than ever to the unadorned oral tradition in which fairy tales are rooted, revolutionizing our understanding of a hallowed genre.
For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Review:
I got this ebook from Netgalley in return of an honest review.
Most of us grew up to the magic of fairy tales, songs our parents sang to us as we fell asleep. However, the majority of those kids who were shaped by Cinderella and Snow White grew into oblivious adults, people who wander through life without knowing the origins of the Disney movies they remember or the impact it had on its time. The Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen have become part of our culture, but there's so much more to european culture to be told by fairy tale collectors. This collection is one of the finest examples of that, the previously lost and untold history of unknown stories.
Reading the stories featured in this book felt like traveling through an entire century of oral culture, with Schönwerth serving as a translator and narrator. The evolution of oral tradition and storytelling is present in each page, and the sounds of a time past resonate in the whiteness of the pages upon which these newly discovered fairy tales where imprinted for our delight.
Despite its merit in salvaging a previously lost fantasy through the curious mind of Schönwerth, there are stories in here that need to be looked at with an equally curious mind, knowing in the depths of our hearts that they are simply a reflection of the time they were meant to portray. It took me a while to arrive at this conclusion and it can be a difficult aspect to overlook, the fact that many of the characters and plots are underdeveloped, weak, unlikable or unbelievable. We are now so used to long intricate stories we forget the joys of a small quick trip through fairy tale territories. These stories aren't meant to be looked at as novels, they are stories passed down through generations orally and luckily put into paper. The enjoyment of these little fairy tales comes from how different from the real world they are, how unbelievable they feel to us common people. They are made of magical words that, put together, form a testimony of nameless people that, once upon a time, shared them with Franz Xaver von Schönwerth.
In conclusion, it was a privilege to be taken on this journey, with vivid images to travel through life by my side and many, many magical outcomes to a life well lived. That's what I take from this fascinating piece of literature and that I recommend to everyone.
