William Elliot GriffisCritiques

Heavily Christianised, along with contextual racism, xenophobia, animal cruelty, religious bigotry towards paganism and of course any story involving Black Pete and mentioning how good Santa Klaas was to 'the good slaves' is difficult to read. Taken in context, these are still tales of cultural and religious erasure, colonialism, superior attitudes and a level of racism that can be - even keeping in mind the time in which they were written (1918) - disturbing to parse.

I still like fairy tales like this because they situate the perspectives of the time and the place, and they also don't pretend that this isn't the heritage, or handwave it away, or make it seem like it wasn't that bad at the time when it was. I was most fascinated hearing about the hints of Pagan druidry and similar, but they are largely only hints, and in many cases all of these figures die to make way for Christianity, saints, and farms. These fairy tales are dark not because they're particularly grotesque, but because they show us that in many ways, we actually haven't come that far from these roots, and we have a long way to go.

I found this interesting because Grimm's fairy tales, which came from a nearby country, are moral tales more than anything else, while the Dutch tales in this book are more origin stories than just moral ones. There's a lot of "way back when our ancestors worshipped Wotan..." That was neat. The stories were collected just after the turn of the twentieth century, from what I can tell; there are references to newfangled radios and submarines. But the stories are all set in the distant past. A curious one was about an Oni from Japan making it's way to Holland. I liked most of the stories. Fun read.

Does just what it says on the tin. Short narratives with the usual themes and some nice variations.

Delightful stories.

Couldn't get into this, persevered to halfway through reading very slowly - but I'm not enjoying it, so what's the point.

William Elliot Griffis was formerly of the Imperial University of Tokio [sic], Japan, and is the author of four other books about Japan. This history can be considered primary source material for historians, as it provides an ancient and "contemporary" (turn of the century) history of Korea from a Japanese political perspective. It's possible this may be the first history book of Korea published in the U.S. Engravings and maps are included amongst the text, though many of them are illustrated from photographs that exist in university archives (and are now on my Pinterest).

Originally published in 1882, this early history of Korea in English by Japanese historian William Elliot Griffis became the dominant text on Korea during a critical period of history when Western interests began to converge on the peninsula. While Griffis has a distinctively pro-Japan pont of view, and much of his research is based on Japanese texts, his bibliography also includes a few Chinese sources, and all the extant English, French, Dutch and missionary-written reports of investigations, both failed and successful, into the kingdom. The "contemporary" history is important for its insight into Japan's politics toward infiltrating and its ultimate takeover of Korea.

I was at BookPeople and decided I wanted to learn more about Japanese history. This seemed like a pretty good book, I didn't bother to read any of the pages or summary. It turns out the book was written in 1875 and the writing shows it. Since I know nothing of the history of Japan I can not judge it's accuracy, but I am sure it will show what Japan looked like to the west in the 1800's once I find a better book to read. There have been changes in the field of histroy-graphy that are very obvious when reading, but the author obviously loves Japan culture and this makes it very fun to read.

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