Portable Magic

I think my only exposure to the Grimm brothers’ stories has been the Disney-fied version. I think I prefer Disney’s.

Stories:

1. Hans in Luck – Hans is a fool who wouldn’t know a good bargain if it punched him in the face.
2. The Goose Girl – Trickery and ambition get you thrown naked into a barrel of nails and dragged to your death.
3. The Frog Prince – He’s the original “nice guy”. Accept help from a nasty toad and you will wind up with a Prince who feels he has the right to your time, your food, and your bed
4. The Wolf and the Seven Goslings – “If you don’t do it,” cried the wolf, “I’ll eat you up!” And the miller was afraid and did as he was told. And that just shows what men are.
5. Faithful John – Abducted princess suffers Stockholm Syndrome, parents willingly decapitate their own children to save their faithful servant, wtf is this story?
6. Rapunzel – If the prince loved her so much, why didn’t he just bring a ladder to help her escape, instead of visiting every night to have sex with her in prison?
7. Hansel and Grethel – For once in these stories a girl takes action and saves herself and her brother.
8. The White Snake – A princess has fun setting impossible tasks for her suitors and killing them when they fail. Until a servant boy’s animal friends help him pass all the tasks, and he and the princess live HEA. Yay?
9. Mother Hulda – Helpful and industrious girls are rewarded. Lazy and mean-spirited girls are tarred and feathered.
10. Tom Thumb – He’s a tiny psychopath.
11. The Elves - oooookaaaayyy
12. The Robber Bridegroom – Girl keeps her head, brings justice to man who chops up and eats women.
13. The Almond Tree – Wicked woman decapitates and dismembers her stepson and feeds him to his father. All is HEA when stepmother is crushed by a millstone and the boy is resurrected by the almond tree.
14. The Six Swans – More wicked stepmothers and abducted girls “willingly” married to their captors
15. The Sleeping Beauty – Two beautiful privileged youth find each other and live HEA without a thought of the many boys with poor timing who died an agonized death impaled in the thorn hedge. This may be the best one, with the wonderful imagery of the kingdom asleep in suspended animation.
16. Snow White – Snow White is TSTL but is such a beautiful corpse that a prince marries her, and the evil queen is an incompetent murderess, but gets death by red-hot iron shoes.
17. Rumpelstiltsken – I think Rumpelstiltsken got a raw deal here. The greedy 1% stole his gold and welshed on the trade.
18. The Golden Bird – Another story where some dolt gets to own a beautiful princess as a contest prize.
19. The Golden Goose – I’d be a sourpuss too, if my father announced he’d give me away as a contest prize.

Illustrations: They are wonderfully intricate, but the style doesn’t really appeal to me.

Hardcover copy with the text translated from the original German and with intricately detailed illustrations.

I read this for the 2018 Halloween Bingo square A Grimm Tale: any fairy tale or retelling of fairy tales, folklore, legends, etc.