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  • The Golden Age of Folk and Fairy Tales: From the Brothers Grimm to Andrew Lang ed. by Jack Zipes
  • Brittany Warman (bio)
The Golden Age of Folk and Fairy Tales: From the Brothers Grimm to Andrew Lang. Edited by Jack Zipes. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2013. 714pp.

It is somewhat surprising that a collection of fairy tales with the scope of The Golden Age of Folk and Fairy Tales: From the Brothers Grimm to Andrew Lang has not appeared until now. The nineteenth century was truly the “golden age,” as Jack Zipes dubs it (xvii), of the fairy tale. The form was at its peak of popularity and interest and, spurred on by the somewhat erroneous idea that such tales were quickly disappearing from contemporary life, collection was at an all-time high. Although anthologies of Victorian reworkings of fairy tales exist—see, for example, Michael Patrick Hearn’s Victorian Fairy Tale Book (1988), Zipes’s own Victorian Fairy Tales: The Revolt of the Fairies and Elves (1989), and the more recent Victorian Fairy Tales, edited by Michael Newton (2014)—a collection dedicated to the variety of traditional oral tales collected across Europe during the period is a welcome addition to fairy-tale scholarship. Those with a particular interest in the early attempts at what is now considered the heart of the discipline of folklore will be delighted by what Zipes has gathered.

More specifically, the tales range from 1812 to 1919, though only seven tales after 1899 appear. The stories are divided by ATU numbers into eighteen [End Page 115] different categories that contain the most well-known tales, including “Hansel and Gretel” (ATU 327A), “Sleeping Beauty” (ATU 410), and “Cinderella” (ATU 510A). Tales appear from countries we have come to expect to be represented in fairy-tale collections—Germany, Italy, and France—but the collection also includes tales from Hungary, Portugal, Poland, and several other European countries not as well represented in collections printed in English. Each category has at least seven tales, often more, and Zipes provides each with a concise but helpful introduction that describes the “general format” (179) of the tale type and an overview of its history. The tales themselves are annotated, always including the precise nineteenth-century (or, as noted for the later few tales, twentieth-century) source in which the text was found. Every category begins with the earliest Grimm version of the text and, if possible, a later version or two from the brothers as well. Also included in the book is a large variety of less familiar versions of tales, including several by Laura Gonzenbach and Giuseppe Pitrè, both of whom Zipes first translated relatively recently in Beautiful Angiola: The Lost Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Laura Gonzenbach (2003) and The Collected Sicilian Folk and Fairy Tales of Giuseppe Pitrè (2008), respectively. I was excited to discover many tales and tellers I had never come across before—indeed, it is claimed that more than a few texts appear here in English for the first time, though which titles specifically are curiously not indicated. Tales previously unfamiliar to me, however, include Theodor Vernaleken’s “The Release from the Enchanted Sleep” (placed with the “Sleeping Beauty” tales but interestingly full of details from other tale types as well) and Ernst Ludwig Rochholz’s “Death of the Seven Dwarfs” (an odd “Snow White” [ATU 709] in which seven dwarfs are killed for housing a peasant girl presumed to be their mistress).

Although the organizational tactic that privileges the Grimms reveals certain interpretational biases on Zipes’s part regarding the Grimms’ position as inspiration for the rest of fairy-tale collection in Europe, Zipes makes a strong case for this decision in his introduction by arguing that, although “the Grimms were not the first scholars to turn their attention to folk tales,” they “played a significant part in a widespread cultural trend and set high standards for collecting folk tales that marked the work of most European and American folklorists up through the twentieth century” (xvii), facts that few would deny. The text also contains an in-depth introduction by Zipes that mainly covers the reasons behind the Grimms’ study and collection of...

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