The Grimm Reader

by Maria Tatar

BRUCE LANSKY

  “Nothing stays the same forever—especially if it doesn’t make sense. Take fairy tales, for example. I think you’ll agree with me that a princess shouldn’t have to marry a knight she doesn’t love (even if the knight does defeat a dragon), that no one can weave straw into gold, that no prince in his right mind would marry a princess who complains about a pea under twenty mattresses, and that the brave little tailor was actually a vain braggart.”

  “Introduction.” In Newfangled Fairy Tales. New York: Meadowbrook Press, 1997.

  O, HENRY

  “Lena lit the stump of a candle and sat limply upon her wooden chair. She was eleven years old, thin and ill-nourished. Her back and limbs were sore and aching. But the ache in her heart made the biggest trouble. The last straw had been added to the burden upon her small shoulders. They had taken away Grimm. Always at night, however tired she might be, she had turned to Grimm for comfort and hope. Each time had Grimm whispered to her that the prince or the fairy would come and deliver her out of the wicked enchantment. Every night she had taken fresh courage and strength from Grimm.

  To whatever tale she read she found an analogy in her own condition. The woodcutter’s lost child, the unhappy goose girl, the persecuted stepdaughter, the little maiden imprisoned in the witch’s hut—all these were but transparent disguises for Lena, the overworked kitchen maid in the Quarrymen’s Hotel. And always when the extremity was the direst came the good fairy or the gallant prince to the rescue.

  So, here in the ogre’s castle, enslaved by a wicked spell, Lena had leaned upon Grimm and waited, longing for the powers of goodness to prevail. But on the day before Mrs. Maloney had found the book in her room and had carried it away, declaring sharply it would not do for servants to read at night; they lost sleep and did not work briskly the next day. Can one only eleven years old, living away from one’s mamma, and never having any time to play, live entirely deprived of Grimm? Just try it once, and you will see what a difficult thing it is.”

  “The Chaparral Prince.” In Readings from Literature, ed. Reuben Post Halleck and Elizabeth Graeme Barbour. New York: American Book Company, 1915. P. 202.

  LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ

  “It started—my reading, that is—innocently enough. . . . The Harvard Classics in black leather and gold trim were forbidding. . . . I did manage to find one, though, volume 17, containing all the Grimm and Andersen fairy tales, which I practically licked off the page. They tasted bitter and pungent, like curries.”

  Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books. Boston: Beacon Press, 1997. P. 24.

  MAE WEST

  “I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.”