Jack ZipesCritiques

Put together well, with a good introduction. This is a nice volume to keep on my shelves.

Salten intended this book to be read by adults. Apparently it is a metaphor about oppressed people, such as Jews; the Nazis who banned and burned it thought so. The first English translation was done by Whittaker Chambers (of Alger Hiss fame) and because of copyright problems, no other translation could be done until recently. I found the New Yorker article , "'Bambi' is Even Bleaker Than You Thought" by Kathryn Schulz (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/01/24/bambi-is-even-bleaker-than-you-thought), more informative than Jack Zipes' introduction.

Maybe bleak is the right word for the story; certainly it is not a warm cozy tale of frolicking animals. Humans, referred to as "He" with a capital H, are a dangerous intrusion on natural forest life. One deer, to his deep regret, learns that, although he is welcomed and cared for by Him, He cannot be trusted. I can see this incident as a warning that passing may only work to a certain extent; is Salten saying that He can always recognize the other? After all, a deer can't pretend to be human. There are some lovely, sweet bits and some gloomy, sad ones and some important life lessons and they balance out: this is not a happily-ever-after story, more a realization that life is difficult but survivable. I'm reminded of the end of Candide>---"we must cultivate our garden."½

Good stories but some are erotic. Read a selection.

I am honestly stuck on what I want to rate this, obviously there is no half star option but I am torn between giving this 2 stars, and 1.5 stars. Anyway, I wanted to give up by the end of February because I was kind of over this series. Some of the stories are just repetitive. So from March - June I would read a few pages here and there while doing my hair, but by July I wanted to get this book off of my "currently reading" list. Anyway, here is what I took from this series:

- Girls are stupid, girls are vain, girls can walk on a fruit or a vegetable without squishing it thus proving they are girls, and finally girls should marry men old enough to be their parent.

- Incest is okay between a father and daughter.

- A Dwarf is always magical, be nice to them.

- Animals sometimes aren't just animals, they could be magical, or even royalty.

- Witches are always old mean women.

- You must do whatever your parents tell you because they know everything.

- Don't wish for something out loud because there is a 99% chance it will happen.

- Kidnapping a child is okay if a child is bad.

- Oh, and you die in the end... a good portion of the time.

One star taken off for repetitiveness, one star taken off for having women look stupid a majority of the time, and one star taken off for the way they portray incest. I really want to take off .5 stars for just being annoyed with it, but I don’t think that would be fair. But hey, I am just glad I finished reading this.

This is a review of "The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest," translated by Jack Zipes, not the prior English translation of the book, a translation that has been roundly criticized pretty much since it was published because it lacked Salten's nuance and lost the sense that Salten's book is an allegory about discrimination against Jews in early 20th century Austria-Hungary. As Zipes's translation has just been released, I've not had time to read the whole thing yet but I have compared the two translations and have to say that Zipes's translation reads much more naturally. I wanted to post this here ASAP as the other reviews all seem to be for the older (and problematic) translation. If you're in the market for this book, make sure you get this new translation.

A collection of French fairy tales. There were very few that I didn't already know, but the reread was comforting, and it's a good collection.

Outstanding and a delight to read, this is essentially a primitivist early edition of Grimm's Fairy Tales. For the first time, all 156 stories from the original 1812 and 1815 editions are available in a new English rendering that effectively rolls back the numerous sentimental edits and changes made by Wilhelm Grimm in later editions which are more commonly known and restores tales that were deleted to avoid offending middle-class religious sensitivities. As a result, there are tales here such as "How Some Children Played at Slaughtering" that would be considered politically incorrect today. The original stories remain closer to the more bucolic oral tradition. This edition is to Grimm's Fairy Tales what "The Scroll" edition of "On the Road" is to Kerouac: stories allowed to be wonderfully strange and frightening again.

This is by no means beginner's Grimm, but if you've enjoyed the tales in the past, this glimpse into the "original" tales is fascinating. This is the first English translation of the Grimms' first edition of the tales. That means the tales are, for the most part, in their authentic, unaltered, unedited states, as taken down by the Grimms from their inceptive oral storytellers.

This does not make for easy, casual reading, but the tales are fascinating nonetheless. Some are repetitive and share many similarities with others, but this constant reminder of the fluidity of the tales only emphasizes the fact that "fairy tale" is in a constant state of reimagining and retelling. There is no one true version of any of these stories.

Having said that, the deeper, darker undertones of these tales shine through here. Starting with the Grimms themselves in their later editions, the tales have been bowdlerized over the years. This edition brings the tales back to their earthier, primordial origins. Within you'll learn: it is Snow White's mother who wishes to kill her, not her stepmother; Cinderella's stepmother is so intent on one of her own daughters winning the prince that she compels them to cut off parts of their feet to fit the lost shoe; and that it is Rapunzel's developing pregnancy which causes the Witch to finally uncover the girl's relationship with the Prince.

In closing, this is an indispensable volume every fairy tale enthusiast should have in their collection.

I've long wanted to read the original fairy takes by the Grimm Brothers. Their book of fairy tales went through many revisions over a number of years. Many of the original stories were very harsh and violent. Over the years, the revisions have combined similar stories and also softened them, making them more suitable for children. Then Disney took those stories and softened them even more and made them mostly pablum (Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Beauty and The Beast, and others). I wanted to read the original stuff. This book is the best source for that. On the plus side, you get a realistic look back in time to stories handed down verbally for hundreds of years. On the negative side (and the reason for only giving 3 stars to the book) is that there is a great deal of repetition in the stories as well as presenting stories which are fragments. Academically, there is value in this approach, but it also makes the book less enjoyable for reading. If i were rating its value as a reference book, it would get 5 stars, but as a book for reading, it's interesting, but gets only 3 stars.

The anti-blackness undid it for me.

This is a fascinating study of the evolution of folktales by focusing on one: the Red Riding Hood (or Red Cap) story from its earliest appearance through the present (as of when the book was written). It includes both discussion and thirty seven examples from the 1697 Charles Perrault version to a couple from 1990, including The Company of Wolves, a strange 1979 story that was turned into an even weirder 1985 movie, which inspired me to re-read this book.
The discussion covers the way different writers in different periods dealt with the subjects and turned it from a story about the dangers of the forest and necessity of obedience to a warning about sexual predators to empowering women with many twists along the way to make political points. Another section discusses the way the illustrations portray both the girl and the wolf. Zipes discusses the way some versions have her and her grandmother handling the problem themselves, and sometimes they need rescuing, and they range from having the disobedient child (and foolish old woman) being eaten, to happy endings.
Some of the modern versions were just silly, but then again, so were some of the Victorian ones.
This has become an iconic story, and I enjoyed seeing that what seems like "obvious" symbolism in the 21st century had completely different meanings in other times and places. I'd gladly read a similar book on Cinderella or other popular stories.

AU that is NC-17 and delicious.

Great stories that really highlight the mood and values of 19th century Germany. Interesting read for anyone looking to see where many Disney stories come from, just be prepared for the darker version.

I read almost 300 pages, and decided to call it quits. It's interesting from a historic perspective and to see the source of all the references from these stories, and I'm sure at the time, they were very entertaining, but for a modern reader, for pure reading enjoyment, it's a bit tedious. The stories are all very similar, and by today's storytelling standards, they're not that well written. They're spectacularly unbelievable, and I'm not referring to the jinnees (apparently how "genies" is really spelled) or mermaids. The reactions of the characters are ALWAYS over the top to a point you have trouble focusing on the plot. I'm sure this comes across as picking it apart, and that's not my intention, but I went into this to read another classic (which I usually enjoy), and also to see what these stories are all about (basically, what the big deal is, as I do with most classics I read). From that perspective, and for pure reading enjoyment, I didn't find this to be worth the time to finish. I felt like I had gotten the feel and gist of the book by then, and not much more was going to happen. Of course, I could be wrong. It was educational to learn what an incredibly racist society this was then, too. The descriptions of African characters in the book (a.k.a. Moors) are always stereotypically evil and ridiculous and licentious. It was a pretty jolting and sobering element of reading this book for me.

During my childhood I had already read parts of the 1001-nights stories. I never came across the official version, untill I got this book.

So... I have finished reading it today. Read it in parts, everybtime I picked up the book I read as much as I wanted. It isn't a book (at least for me it wasn't) to read without pauses.

I liked it and I loved to finally learn what fate had in store for Scheherazade and her sister.

Did I actually read this? Well, I read all the tales. None made an impression upon me. I skimmed some of the intro. and the criticisms, but since I'm not the kind of feminist who takes 'Women's Studies' courses, or the kind of mother who bought into the notions of Bruno Bettleheim, I didn't get anything out of them. I recommend, instead, Not One Damsel in Distress: World Folktales for Strong Girls ed. by Jane Yolen, or The Serpent Slayer and Other Stories of Strong Women ed. by Katrin Hyman Tchana or (maybe, as I've not read it yet) Fearless Girls, Wise Women, and Beloved Sisters: Heroines in Folktales from Around the World ed. by Kathleen Ragan.

“There is no such thing as the fairy tale; however there are hundreds of thousands of fairy tales.” With this contradiction, The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales begins. The ‘Introduction’ by Jack Zipes takes us into a genre, the literary fairy tale, which is entangled in the roots of oral folklore, ‘wonder tales’, and ancient literary texts, and survives in writings and re-writings that carry the mode itself through a journey of transformation and appropriation over and across artistic mediums and narrative sensibilities.

Zipes describes a genre that began by bringing the voices of peasant men and women into the houses of the literate, and that has continued to sympathise with and represent marginalised voices and ideas through simple and easily recognisable tropes. Yet he does not present us with a simple answer to the question, ‘What is a fairy tale?’, but guides us, as his subtitle states, ‘towards a definition.’ The fairy tale has come to mean so many different things; a tale with ‘fairies’, a moral tale, a radical form of communication, and is found in such a variety iterations in cultures all over the world, that, for Zipes, a single definition could never be sufficient.

The encyclopaedic A-Z of this Oxford Companion is an expansion of this very idea. There is no narrative thread, but a series of entry points into the fairy tale as a form and as an idea. Entries range from the obvious; the famous traditional fairy tales, and the writers who produced them, to the more obscure; ‘communist folk-tale films’, the 1987 musical production ‘Into the Woods’, the 1960s feature length movie ‘Cinderfella’. The companion also includes entries for composers such as Richard Wagner, Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Igor Stravinsky, who drew on fairy tales for their ballets and operas, and references contemporary writers like Jeanette Winterson and Salman Rushdie for the use of fairy tale in their works. Compiled in collaboration with a field of experts, these entries are all informative, authoritative, and accessible to the lay person.

New to this second edition are entries on topics such as ‘digital fairy tales’, and ‘fairy tale blogs and websites’, which bring the companion up to date with developments in technology and social media, as well as new entries for a range of more contemporary authors and creators. The greatest assets to this second edition though, are the feature articles scattered throughout the book, which highlight the fairy tale traditions of various countries; Britain and Ireland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, North America and Canada, Portugal, Scandinavian countries, Slavic and Baltic countries, and Spain. These articles are written by experts in the field, and are beautifully designed with a grey patterned border that makes them easy to identify from within the A-Z when the book is closed. Each of these articles brings to light some of the key histories, ideas, and discussions surrounding the fairy tales of these different nations in a way that invites further reading. A particular highlight for me was the discussion of the impact of Walt Disney and commercial culture on the consumption and understanding of fairy tales, which is to be found in the feature on North America and Canada.

The book itself is beautifully presented, and published to a very high standard. It benefits from a wide selection of black and white illustrations that accompany the entries, and a well-designed layout. A practical, but nevertheless important point, is that the opened book naturally lies flat; an invaluable quality for ease of use.

As a reference book for academic study, or for writers and readers with an interest in the fairy tale, this companion is difficult to surpass. Its entries are both wide ranging and comprehensive, and the additional bibliographical information is a fantastic resource for anyone looking to reach further into any of the subjects Zipes and his collaborators touch upon.

See this review on A Hermit's Progress: https://ahermitsprogress.wordpress.com/2015/08/25/the-oxford-companion-to-fairy-...

If I were to recommend Don't Bet on the Prince that recommendation would be primarily for its small collection of contemporary fairy tales, only two of which I'd read before. The analyses and criticisms, while interesting and potentially educational for newbies, read somewhat like old news. This was first published in 1986 so the outdated vibe is understandable, though I would be curious what a revised edition might offer this century's readers. Plus, the criticisms in Don't Bet on the Prince lacked any mention of historical context which, having recently completed From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and Their Tellers by Marina Warner, left the former's arguments feeling less informed and even more antiquated.

My favorite story from Part I: Feminist Fairy Tales for Young (and Old) Readers was "The Moon Ribbon" by Jane Yolen (1976). My favorite story from Part II: Feminist Fairy Tales for Old (and Young) Readers was a tie between "The Green Woman" by Meghan B. Collins (1982) and "Wolfland" by Tanith Lee (1983).

4 stars

Some stories work better than others, but I really liked this collection of fairy tales for a new time. It's been awhile since I finished it, so I don't clearly remember which works I liked best, but I remember that the one with the blind princess and the one by A.S. Byatt were both standouts.

If you carry your childhood with you, you never become older...

In this treatise Zipes examines the commodification of fairy tales and the story telling art. He puts more faith in post-modern subversion than I would, but he still makes some excellent points and makes you think about how you relate to other people through stories.

This is an beautifully produced edition from Princeton University Press. You might not have seen the marketing campaign that Princeton University Press put on in the month of December about this title. PUP featured 12 days of short tales and original artwork from the newly published translation, complete with illustrations by Andrea Dezso (http://blog.press.princeton.edu/2014/12/12/on-the-first-day-presenting-the-twelv...). I had only happened upon it by accident; otherwise I might never have encountered the book.

What makes this book interesting is all the stories (pleasant and otherwise) that you may have missed reading from your childhood. Those blithely sanitized versions might have been sanitized for good cause. If you follow that link above, for example, you’ll find the horrific tale of what happens when children play at slaughtering a pig (or you can read it on page 79 in the printed volume). If you are familiar with Philip Pullman’s collection from 2011/2012 entitled Fairy Tales From the Brothers Grimm, you may recall that it was handled in such a way as to make it suitable in most respects for sharing with your child or younger siblings. Zipes’ version really isn’t. In fact there’s an interesting bit in the Zipes’ preface that references re-telling of the tales “mixing in mannerisms of contemporary writing.” Pullman did that with some deftness to make the tales he selected more fun to read aloud. There is none of that in the 170 tales contained in this Princeton University Press edition.

Zipes does what Philip Pullman could not. An acknowledged expert in German, comparative literature and fairy tales, Zipes did his own translation of the two earliest editions of the Tales of the Brothers Grimm. He does not expurgate, he does not censor, he does not in any way soften these tales from the harsh originals gathered at least in part from an oral tradition that was disappearing from German homes even as the Brothers worked to preserve them. (We tend to forget that the Brothers -- at least one of them -- was employed as a librarian.)

The illustrations by Andrea Dezsö nicely complement the macabre tales here, the ones that usually are edited out of sanitized versions of the Brothers Grimm intended for sharing at children’s bedtimes. Because so many of these tales from the 18th century which appear in this volume are macabre and are unapologetic in presenting the savagery that we know continues to lurk in modern man in the 21st century. Quick side note: Dezso frequently illustrates the tales that feature Satan -- who really isn’t nearly as frightening as you might anticipate he would be. But like the tales, some of the illustrations may not be entirely suitable for children. (Again follow that link to the Princeton University Press blog in the second paragraph above to see an example..

Interesting content.

HORRIBLE production of the actual book. Terrible paper, terrible font choices, terrible illustration reproduction. This is a great example of publisher self-destruction. A sorry excuse for a printed work.

I used this book for my thesis project on Disney and Fairy Tales. It was an excellent resource and a useful tool. I would recommend this for a serious scholar of fairy tales. It's a little dry for just light reading.