I appreciate the scholarship Opie employs to present these stories as they were collected long before all the modern variations. They were enjoyable even though not the genera I usually read. ( )

A collection of well-known tales with historical/critical introductions tracing variants from different times and places. Most stories are generally known from European (English, French, German) traditions though they may have other connections. Stories include well-known ones like Tom Thumb, Jack the Giant-killer, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Ridinghood, , Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Beauty and the Beast, Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin,
Goldilocks, and the Princess and the Pea, and others less known (at least to me) such as The Yellow Dwarf, Diamonds and Toads, The Three Heads in the Well, and The Swineherd .Though these stories are often told to children, this edition is more aimed at adult readers interested in the background of the tales. The special point of this book is that its version of the tales are the first known versions in English -- early translations of Perrault and the like. As the Opies point out, folklorists often focus on trying to find the most "authentic" folk versions, but in fact the versions which become beloved and influential are "literary" versions. ( )

We grew up on these stories. Generations of us have grown up on these stories. For centuries children have gathered around the fire at night, listening to these stories; peasants who could neither read nor write passed them along from one settlement to another, from one generation to another. When these peasant women were employed as nursemaids by noblemen in their castles and the new mercantile class in their mansions, they told these same stories to the children in their comfy nurseries. Some of them were the caretakers’ favorites; some of them became the children’s favorites. Some of them became national favorites in Germanic countries and France and England. Eventually they were captured in books by antiquarians and folklorists: the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and Joseph Jacobs, then Andrew Lang borrowed them for a whole series of collections: The Blue Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, The Green Fairy Book, The Yellow Fairy Book and on and on until he got to Olive and Lilac. A professional writer and literary critic, Lang is far better known for these stories he did not write than for anything he wrote himself.

Ordinary folk brought their versions of these stories across the Atlantic to the Americas; so did their aristocratic governors and the Tory royalists who participated in settling and civilizing the United States When Andrew Carnegie funded libraries all across the country, when dime novels led to dime-store books (Little Golden Books, and their competitors), when Bertha Mahoney Miller and her partner opened the first children’s book shop (in Boston in 1916) and a few years later established Horn Book Magazine to review and promote “children’s literature,” these fairy tales took their place in elite permanent collections, but still held their own with “the kid next door.” By the way, most of them aren’t actually fairy tales, for they rarely involve true fairy folk. Their magical creatures are more likely to be elves, gnomes, goblins, trolls, and dwarves, as well as witches, ogres, giants, and monsters. Many involve, or center around, animals who talk – and not just on Christmas Eve.

The Classic Fairy Tales, edited by Iona and Peter Opie (Oxford UP, 1974) represents most of these sources: e.g. “Tom Thumb” and “Jack the Giant Killer” (British), “Sleeping Beauty” and “Cinderella” (French/Perrault), “Beauty and the Beast” (French/Madame de Beaumont), “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and “The Frog Prince” (German/Brothers Grimm), “The Princess and the Pea” and “Thumbelina” (Scandinavian/Hans Christian Andersen). The Opies provide a splendid introduction, discussing the cultural phenomenon the preservation of these stories represents, especially in the work of Charles Perrault, the Madames d’Aulnoy and de Baumont, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Andersen. Furthermore, their brief introduction of each of the twenty-four stories give just enough of the history and derivation of the stories to be intriguing, but not so detailed and scholarly as to be daunting. Here is the Opies’ description of the tales they are dealing with:

Although a fairy tale is seldom a tale about fairy-folk, and does not necessarily even feature a fairy, it does contain an enchantment or other supernatural element that is clearly imaginary. Usually the tale is about one person, or one family, having to cope with a supernatural occurrence or supernatural protagonist during a period of stress. The hero is almost invariably a young person, usually the youngest member of a family, and if not deformed or already an orphan, is probably in the process of being disowned or abandoned. . . . They describe events that took place when a different range of possibilities operated in the unidentified long ago; and this is part of their attraction. (15)

When I was a child, one of my favorite stories was “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.” I took great pleasure in trying out the beds and chairs in the cottage in the woods and in sampling the porridge right along with the naughty Goldilocks; then I knew just how the littlest bear felt when he found his chair broken, his porridge all gone, and a stranger sleeping in his bed! You see, I got to have it both ways: I could identify with both the mischievous child and the mistreated child. Little did I know then, or later when I was sharing this story with my own children, that it emerged from an old, old British story.

Originally the intruder was a sly fox, sometimes called Scrapefoot; but somehow, in the retelling, the fox – a vixen by now – became a little old lady. Robert Southey in his version says the little old woman “could not have been a good, honest old Woman; for first she looked in the window, and then she peeped in at the keyhole, and seeing nobody in the house, she lifted the latch.” Southey’s retelling popularized the story, and it was often attributed to his authorship, but he plainly introduces it as a story told by an old uncle. The old woman came to be called Silver-Hair; hence, “Silver-Hair and the Three Bears.” Then twelve years later an editor, Joseph Cundall, deliberately changed Silver-Hair to a little girl, but eventually her silver hair became gold and she was assigned the name Goldilocks. Henceforth, children like me had the dual pleasure of the naughty child and the youngster she took advantage of.

All the stories in the Opies’ edition have several illustrations, showing how the story has been visualized by different artists in different media addressing readers in different periods of time. Here are a few I think you will find absolutely unforgettable: Lord Marquis of Carabas (aka as “Puss in Boots”), exquisitely engraved by Gustave Dorė; three charming bears from Cundall’s Treasury of Pleasure Books for Young Children (1850); Beauty and her beast, a water color by Walter Crane (1874); Tom Thumb, literally the size of his father’s thumb, in a full-page color wood engraving from Old Nurse’s Picture Book (1869); one of the twelve dancing princesses, from an intricate, fragile color illustration in Kay Nielsen’s “art-nouveau” manner of (1913); and Cinderella and her carriage from a paper doll book (dated 1814, but I suspect much later, maybe 1914). Most of the illustrations, though not all, are British, representing the art of book illustration in the Georgian, Victorian, and Edwardian periods.

The Opies, however, emphasize the significance of the writers’/retellers’ artistry and their contribution to the growing genre of fantasies for children. “Whether good writers are people who recognize a good story when they see one, or whether they themselves make the story good” is a question worthy of further study. It’s our good fortune, the Opies maintain, that Perrault and Southey and the French Madames were the ones to find they stories they did (p25). Writers such as Frances Brown (Granny’s Wonderful Chair), Charles Kingsley (The Water-Babies), Jean Inglow (Mopsa the Fairy), George MacDonald (The Princess and the Goblin) and even Lewis Carroll “wrote in the way they did, and certainly were greeted by the public as friends in the way they were,” because of the work of the Grimms and Andersen. “Imagination,” the conclude, “which had formerly brought terror to mankind, had become a source of delight.” (p28)

A seminal text. One of the most important (and oft-returned to) texts on my reference shelves. ( )

A classic, the best of its kind in its genre. However, the book itself is a paperback and poorly bound with a glue binding from 25 years ago, which tend to fall apart. ( )