Contes de Grimm (1812)

With love from Mummy and Daddy Xmas 1959, I was three and the words and pictures have never left me. A rock on which the rest of my life was built. The book records a moment in time and place, defined by stories, marked on every page by the history of the world, cousin to other stories in other places all over the world and full of the expectancy of the ever changing future. ( )

Wow. I knew the original Grimm stories were dark, and nothing like Disney, but I didn't realize how gratuitously bloody and cruel they would be. Listening to the audiobook before going to sleep a few days on a trip was...interesting. ( )

The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm with illustrations from Arthur Rackham is indeed, as the Rock Point series says, a timeless classic.

This is specifically a review of the Rock Point edition in their Timeless Classics series. It uses the 1897 Margaret Hunt translation as its source and the Rackham illustrations from a 1909 edition. Reviewing the tales themselves doesn't make a lot of sense here, we have all read at least some of them, whether in this form of one of the many variations. The introduction in this volume does a nice job of introducing the tales and gives a very brief overview of what exactly these stories represent both culturally and historically. If you want to learn about all of the questions and issues around them you will not want a collection of the tales for that, you will want a book devoted to the topic, though a collection like this one will be necessary to fully understand those issues.

This edition is packaged wonderfully and will serve as both a nice addition to a library as well as a book you can read from, ideally to your children, then pass down to them when the time comes. The addition of the illustrations in beautiful plates adds to both the pleasure of reading and the pride of ownership.

There are some writers that deserve a "complete works of" volume in most libraries and the Brothers Grimm are among those writers. This particular edition will serve that function very well.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley. ( )

Read this book with my nine year daughter during the COVID-19 quarantine in Sao Paulo. We read one tale per day and some of our favourites were 'Clever Grethel' and 'The Fisherman and His Wife'. Found myself repeating to my daughter that it was written in different times because of the portrayal of women. ( )

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