The Storytellers

• Ellen Handler Spitz

  Ellen Handler Spitz

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• September 30, 2010 | 12:00 am
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Anne Anderson's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves"

The Grimm Reader: The Classic Tales of the Brothers Grimm

translated and edited by Maria Tatar

W.W. Norton & Company, 368 pp., $16.95

Year after year, we print and re-print fairy tales. What is it that makes them valuable? Should we keep telling them, and if so, why? What about their detractors, the self-appointed child protectors who complain about their violence and cruelty, not to mention a different set of worriers who protest their “false” happy endings? And surely the tales do not teach morality. Remember the egregious brutality of that spoiled princess in The Frog King who, after hurling the little animal who helped her against the wall, gets rewarded. And we quail at even a mention of The Jew in the Brambles, an outrageous portrayal of barbarism and prejudice, which, in Maria Tatar’s new selection of the Grimm fairy tales, wisely appears only in a separate section marked for adults. 

See link for the rest.