Into the Dark Wood — The Original Fairy Tales of Europe: A Critical Anthology, Vol. I

Perrault · Brothers Grimm · Andersen · Jacobs · Lang | Erato Press

De: Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, Joseph Jacobs, Andrew Lang

Narrado por: Virtual Voice

These are not the stories you think you know. They were never meant for children. They were never innocent. And no previous edition in English has treated them with the seriousness they deserve.

The fairy tale is the oldest technology of cultural transmission the human species has produced — older than any writing system, older than any nation, older than any of the five authors whose names appear in this volume. What Perrault wrote at Versailles in 1697, what the Grimm brothers assembled in Kassel between 1812 and 1857, what Andersen composed from his own wound across four decades in Copenhagen — these are not transcriptions of a pre-rational folk wisdom. They are literary constructions of the highest order: acts of authorship disguised as acts of preservation, and in that disguise, one of the great frauds and one of the great achievements of Western literature.

This critical anthology presents, for the first time in a single English-language edition with full scholarly apparatus, the complete Western European and British-Isles fairy-tale canon — translated from original sources and accompanied by five critical afterwords and a concluding essay on oral narrative as the deep structure of all fiction.

The French Tradition — Charles Perrault (1697) — Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin, and the complete Histoires: the texts as Perrault actually wrote them — with their disturbing morals intact, their sexual economies visible, their violence unsentimentalized. The version in which Little Red Riding Hood is simply eaten. The version in which Bluebeard's wife is saved not by her own courage but by the structural accident of her brothers arriving in time.

The German Tradition — Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (1857) — All 200 tales of the seventh and final edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, in new translation from the German: Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, The Girl Without Hands, The Juniper Tree — the complete archive, including the tales that have been quietly dropped from children's editions, with variants from the 1812 first edition noted where Wilhelm Grimm's revisions are ideologically significant.

The Danish Tradition — Hans Christian Andersen (1835–1872) — Twenty-five tales in new translations from the Danish, including The Little Mermaid, The Snow Queen, The Ugly Duckling, The Red Shoes, The Shadow, The Little Match Girl, and the late masterpiece Auntie Toothache — in versions that restore the irony, the cruelty, and the autobiographical density that Victorian translators consistently erased.

The British Traditions — Joseph Jacobs & Andrew Lang — The English and Celtic tales of Joseph Jacobs, and the best of the Coloured Fairy Books that Lang (and, silently, his wife Leonora) assembled from the oral traditions of every continent.

✦ All translations new, from original-language sources — no previous English translation used as base or crib.

This edition also includes:
✦ Five critical afterwords, one per tradition — on Perrault's manufactured classicism, the Grimms' ideological revision across forty-five years, Andersen's autobiographical method, and the British anthologists' imperial collecting
✦ Essay: The Archive That Invents What It Archives — on the Grimms' informants, their French Huguenot sources, and the systematic fabrication of German folk tradition
✦ Essay: The Only Proper Name — on Andersen as the sole author in the fairy-tale canon whose tales belong to no oral tradition but to himself alone
✦ A concluding essay on oral narrative as the structural grammar beneath all literary fiction