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Grimms' Fairy Tales: Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, and Other Stories
Grimms' Fairy Tales: Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, and Other Stories
Grimms' Fairy Tales: Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, and Other Stories
Audiobook2 hours

Grimms' Fairy Tales: Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, and Other Stories

Written by Brothers Grimm

Narrated by Laura Paton

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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About this audiobook

Here are some of the most enchanting fairy stories of all time.

The Brothers Grimm conjure up a world of fantasy, hope, and good fortune where the princess meets and marries the right prince (even if he was once a frog), and where the cruel witch, the arrogant wife, and the greedy wolf get their come-uppance.

It is a magical world which we must all inhabit at one time in our lives and which are as important in this computer age as ever before.

(P)1994 NAXOS AudioBooks Ltd.; ©1994 NAXOS AudioBooks Ltd.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateAug 30, 1994
ISBN9789629544027
Grimms' Fairy Tales: Snow White, Hansel and Gretel, and Other Stories
Author

Brothers Grimm

Wilhelm Grimm and his brother Jacob are famous for their classical collection of folk songs and folktales, especially for Children’s and Household Tales, generally known as Grimm’s Fairy Tales.

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Rating: 4.184926929614874 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Narrator's Voice Is Captivating And She Can Mimick Any Kind Of Voice And That's The Reason I Seriously Loved Listening To This Audiobook. Great Job.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Timeless stories, in all their bloody glory. :) My favorite is Rumpelstiltskin, when he rips himself in half. :D
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Grimm’s Fairy Tales by Peter Glassman are not the original tales as told by the Grimm brothers. This book is a collection of re-told classic tales, such as Rapunzel, The Valiant Tailor, Rumpelstiltskin, Tom Thumb, and many more. The stories are accompanied by vivid illustrations that enhance the content of the stories.I’ll admit that I have a skewed outlook on fairy tales as I was brought up on Disney as a child. I was used to the very sanitized, heart-warming classics accompanied by feel good music and loveable characters. I did not realize what fairy tales used to be until I took a Folktale and Fairytale literature class in University. I was horrified by the true nature of the stories, but understood where they were coming from and developed a strange fascination with them. When I chose this book to review, I was hoping that the stories inside would be closer to the originals than to Disney, if that is the self-made spectrum that I am placing them on. Unfortunately, Glassman’s version of these well known tales disappointed. Though not as “fluffy” as some versions, these stories were still highly sterile and lacked the grit that really grabs the reader. In fact, the illustrations show more about the original nature of the text than the actual text does. I would recommend this book as an intermediate introduction to fairy tales, meaning that it is a little heavier than Disney but less graphic than the originals so would be more appropriate for a middle school audience.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I loved these stories! (Even with all the gruesome parts.) Very imaginative, albeit a bit repetitive if you read them all to close together. Still, in doses they're good bedtime reading to put oneself to sleep.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Very enjoyable! Pleasant voice and nice musical accompaniment. Highly recommend this audiobook.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    It was great to hear the original version of the classic fairy tales. I enjoyed this book very much!
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I loved these stories but they are definitely not intended for children. They were also more than a bi moralistic especially for Europe during the times of the Enlightenment
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Summary: The Grimm brothers' collection of folk stories was originally intended as a scholarly work for adults, although they're better known today as children's fairy tales. This collection contains early versions of favorites such as Cinderella, Rumplestiltskin, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. However, there are also many lesser-known fables as well, telling stories of noble kings and beautiful princesses, clever merchants and shiftless sons, magical sacks and enchanted animals, and wicked witches and the depths of the dark forest.Review: I'd always heard that the original versions of fairy tales were a lot darker and more gruesome than the Disney-fied versions that everyone knows. And, while it's true that the stories in this collection were certainly not nearly as sanitized as the versions that you'll find in children's storybooks, neither were they quite as dark as I'd been led to believe. A lot of the stories are either humorous and light, or relatively straightforward morality tales with the good and honorable people winding up happy and the wicked people ending up punished for their misdeeds. What really surprised me were the few stories that seemed to run counter to the implied morality of the rest of the tales - there was more than one story where the character who is clever and manipulative and greedy actually gets his own way, instead of causing his own downfall. That discontinuity actually interested me more than any of the so-called "dark" elements to the stories; I'd be curious to read a more analytical approach to these classic stories.This book took me a long time to finish, not because I wasn't enjoying it, but because when a book contains short short stories, it becomes too easy to put down and not pick back up again. The stories I enjoyed most were not the stories I already knew (i.e. Cinderella, etc.), nor the stories that were totally unfamiliar, but rather the stories that I had only ever encountered in passing in other works of fiction. I got a lot of background on quite a few Fables characters whose origins I didn't already know, that's for sure. Finally reading "The Goose Girl" let me see how much of Shannon Hale's version was her own invention, and I was shocked to see that Tender Morsels is an actual quote from "Snow White and Rose Red." Overall, if it isn't too blasphemous, I do have to say that I generally enjoy retellings more than the originals, but that my appreciation for the retellings is deepened by knowing where they come from... so reading the Grimm brothers' originals was certainly worth my time. 4 out of 5 stars.Recommendation: Every lover of fantasy and fairy tales should probably read this (and Hans Christan Andersen's Fairy Tales) at some point in their lives.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I got this book when I was a third grader, and always liked these darker versions more than the victorian versons, or disney
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I must have been the only person who didn't realize that many of Disney's stories were straight from the Grimm brothers. I found many of the stories contained throughout the book to be similar. Three brothers, princesses, people turned into animals, after a while everything blended together. After you've read the first five stories you can just stop, because everything else is very repetitious.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I appreciate these classic fairy tales more as an adult than I did as a child.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I have a confession to make: I find it more convenient to acquire the collected works of an author long after they're dead. That gives the experts plenty of time to wage their wars on authenticity, and translators the time to properly translate all the ancient idioms into today's slang, and so forth.Now, I don't wish any authors dead, as I'd rather they generate as much work as possible before I finish collecting it, but I just love it when I can get a copy of EVERY JOT AND TITTLE BY AUTHOR A, so I don't have to have too many books on my shelf.Because of this quirk, The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales is a wonder for me. Within this work, I discovered a very interesting thing that the Disney generation would probably miss: The fairy tales were not intended solely for children (and at times, probably weren't suitable for children), but were instead intended for the people. The children's stories, however, are not fairy tales, per se, but are more religious morality tales featuring Jesus or the Apostles.If you've been raised on Disney and colorful picture books, then reading the collected, uncut works may be a shock to you. They're pretty gruesome. And everybody had lice.But, within its pages, we have all the great tales: Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding-Hood, and so forth. And unless you're a Grimm scholar, there will probably be a story in there that you've never heard of before.I would probably not recommend this book for your children. Other people's children, maybe, but not yours, unless you don't want to molly-coddle them until they're 36. But, don't give it to your children expecting it to be the brightly-colored, sanitized version of all your favorite fairy tales. It is, instead, the grim (was that pun intended?) tales as originally written, and well worth the read.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Grimm brothers were a twisted pair. Their fairy tales are incredible but hardly fit for children. Then again, at least these tales, unlike the movies, television, and games children today immerse themselves in, have lessons and morals to impart.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Good folk tales but not for children!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Ever since I was a child all snuggled up under the covers with my stuffed bear, I have either been read or pursued on my own the imaginative fairytales written by a host of authors over the centuries. The Grimm brothers are perhaps the best-known.  Their tales are short and unique and without any barriers on creativity. I wonder if they were the first to make inanimate objects come to life?  Young or old, there is much enjoyment to be had in these treasured Fairytales. 
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Finally finished. I have lots of thoughts about these tales and their common motifs. Pretty much, if you have a stepmother, she's wicked and dabbles in witchcraft. Trials and events happen in threes. There's always a dress of the sun, a dress of the moon, and a dress of the stars that a beautiful maiden will exchange with a false bride so that she may sleep in the same chamber as her beloved, but the false bride will give the groom a sleeping potion so that he won't hear the beautiful maiden's story and remember who she is. Luckily the servants will inform the prince and all will be made well. The cleverest son is usually the one deemed stupid or daft. If you can slip from the skin of an animal, a form you are required to take by day, and someone steals the skin and burns it, then you are free from your curse and will remain human. And on and on. I learned many ways to cheat the devil, so that's handy. It was enjoyable to read the original, darker versions of the tales Disney "cleaned up" and to read the tales no one ever mentions, like "Allerleirauh" which in the German means "of many different kinds of fur." "The Bremen Town Musicians" and "The Master Thief" are two of my faves.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    As a child, I loved to read fairy tales more than anything else. My grandmother had a collection of Grimms’ fairy tales and Andersen’s fairy tales, and I grabbed one or the other off of her bookshelf at the first opportunity on each visit. I had never read anything like Ralph Manheim’s translation of Grimms’ fairy tales. It reads like exactly what it is – a transcription of oral stories and legends, with the voice of the teller unobscured by an editor. Some stories have multiple variations with slight differences between them. This collection makes it clear that the stories had a social purpose and were used to encourage positive character traits and discourage negative character traits. Manheim’s translation belongs in the libraries of all readers with more than a casual interest in fairy tales and legends.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Hmmm, as a child I loved these but as an adult I found them to be highly repetitive and predictable. It was interesting though to read the original stories Disney chose to create movies from. My favourite tale was probably the Lady and the Lion (is Beauty and the Beast loosely based on this..?)
    They weren't as dark as I remember them though, and Hansel and Gretel was so different to the common version!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Excellent omnibus of the classic fairytales as reimagined/edited for Victorian audiences by the Grimm brothers.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Although this was one part of a two book set, there was a great contrast to Andersen’s Fairy Tales. At times it seemed as if this were the Cliff Notes of fairy tales, rather than what I would have expected from the Ugly Duckling, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel and others. I suppose that over time the details of these stories have been embellished by others all the way up to Walt Disney. The lesser known tales have the usual heads chopped off, people transformed into animals, parents abandoning their children, wicked stepmothers, and so on. A surprising number of these tales repeat themselves. For example, several evil characters are cut open and filled with stones, then sown up again. Quite disappointing. You should read the revised versions.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I read my mother's copy while in elementary school and just about had them all memorized. Passed this one along to my Middle School grand-daughter at her request. I think this book is among the best translations for junior readers, simple and clear, but accurate (compare to Jack Zipes). The black-and-white illustrations give a good sense of the story and are appropriate for the era in which they were collected (19th-century Germany).
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    With love from Mummy and Daddy Xmas 1959, I was three and the words and pictures have never left me. A rock on which the rest of my life was built. The book records a moment in time and place, defined by stories, marked on every page by the history of the world, cousin to other stories in other places all over the world and full of the expectancy of the ever changing future.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm with illustrations from Arthur Rackham is indeed, as the Rock Point series says, a timeless classic.This is specifically a review of the Rock Point edition in their Timeless Classics series. It uses the 1897 Margaret Hunt translation as its source and the Rackham illustrations from a 1909 edition. Reviewing the tales themselves doesn't make a lot of sense here, we have all read at least some of them, whether in this form of one of the many variations. The introduction in this volume does a nice job of introducing the tales and gives a very brief overview of what exactly these stories represent both culturally and historically. If you want to learn about all of the questions and issues around them you will not want a collection of the tales for that, you will want a book devoted to the topic, though a collection like this one will be necessary to fully understand those issues.This edition is packaged wonderfully and will serve as both a nice addition to a library as well as a book you can read from, ideally to your children, then pass down to them when the time comes. The addition of the illustrations in beautiful plates adds to both the pleasure of reading and the pride of ownership.There are some writers that deserve a "complete works of" volume in most libraries and the Brothers Grimm are among those writers. This particular edition will serve that function very well.Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via NetGalley.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    So many stories in this version! Quite a few I'd read before, but most were new to me. Read the ebook version, seemed to never end.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    These were hit and miss tales. Yet, there was so much to gain from reading some of the better ones that it augmented the rating significantly. These are classics, through and throughout, and they touch on the simpler, more moralistic sense of storytelling and manage to convey so much with so little. Overall, it was well worth reading and I feel I am all the better for it.4 stars!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The original versions not Disneyfied. Lots of deaths. Tricksters. Fools. Kindness rewarded. Cleverness rewarded. Some have morals. Some are just for fun to laugh at the foolishness.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I loved these tales (in German) when I was a child. Now I'm reading this book to our almost 5-year-old and he loves the stories also. I'm realizing how odd some of them seem in translation, and there sure are a great deal of religious references. But the main stories (Ashputtle, The Bremen Musicians, etc. ) are still classics!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    (Original Review, 2005-11-16)In Genesis there is suddenly this sentence/observation about giants walking the Earth in them days... I always see those elderly male Jews in Babylon, staring glumly at some campfire, thinking about the good old days and thinking up revengeful plans to smite the enemy. They tell the stories of their tribes but there is that one quite senile idiot always going on about 'them giants' - so in the end they say, "Okay, we WILL put them in. Now shut up already!" I can see myself being the Giant Guy (if more all over the place) and I'm not sure the good campfire folks here need the distraction... I don't know if it is only about 'folk tales' per se, but I am with most people on the campfire and howling wolves. For me the atmospherics are very, very important. Our culture no longer has much in the way of campfires and wolves so our writers have had to incorporate them, figuratively, into the fictions themselves. The rest is literary history.I don't see fairytales simply as children's stories; that's a relatively recent- and, of late, receding- viewpoint. There is a vast quantity of material around beyond Grimm and Andersen and little of it aimed at children. Perrault or Marie Catherine d'Aulnoy were writing for the amusement of adults, and the Arabian Nights were not exactly suitable bedtime reading for under-5's, while Karen Blixen/Isak Dinesen achieved almost occult-like effects in her wondrous tales, which float somewhere between Baghdad and Copenhagen.Fairytales are most powerful when they access the taboo, the suppressed, or the deepest fears and desires within us. And they do so often. Your "children's rituals" and "simple messages" are really only the tip of the iceberg. For that matter, “The talented Mr. Ripley” (LINK) fulfills a similar role - a very wicked and challenging little tale full of deliciously gratuitous moments, the enjoyment of which made me at least think long and hard about my own morality.I was raised on the standard stuff: Grimm and Andersen mostly. There is obviously darkness there - and taboos, yes. (It's interesting that in the stories where children are imperiled the original versions had 'mother' and the later versions 'stepmothers'.) The ones I and probably most children end(ed) up with are the simpler, safer ones though, don't you think? I love Angela Carter's “Bloody Chamber” but most kids will be more likely to see Disney as the centre of the fairytale universe - which truly is a disservice to fairytales, of course.I am no longer that interested in stories where the characters are merely there to move things alone. Like standard puppets that can be used and reused for all kinds of similar types of stories. As I mentioned elsewhere, that goes for all kinds of stories, including movies. What I find fascinating about the early stories passed along (mutating on the way) is more that they give us some kinds of fleeting glimpse of the origin story of stories. Because most of the early part of that origins stories is/was in an oral form we can never really know how stories began and evolved. There are no helpful fossils - or not enough to have more than (slightly) informed theories.Did stories start as parts of religious/ceremonial chants? Were they like cave paintings: meant to magically influence the outcome of the hunt? Where did fiction start to make an entrance, if the earliest stories were mostly a sort of remembering (the deeds and wisdom of) dead tribe members? All endlessly fascinating to me - and no more than useless musings in the end.Back to fairytales for a moment. They may no longer really work for me as entertainment but the reason they don't is in a way part of their strength. That they are predictable is partly why they work so well as stories. They warn us about the evils of the world but they are also almost like a church service: a repeated ritual to explain the world. They bring order to what basically is a chaotic system. Which is of course also why they are so enduringly popular with children, who like rituals and the idea of safety-through-repetition. I like my stories, like “Grimms Märchen,” more complex but it is easy to see how stories that carve simple messages out of the complex narrative of the world will be as enduring as the world. In that way they are exactly like religion (for me at least). The Grimms, despite their initial attempt to be "invisible" curators of folklore, began increasingly to modify and colour the tales they transcribed. Italo Calvino discusses this phenomenon at length in the introduction to Italian Fables, his own attempt to replicate the Grimms' work in Italy.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Absolutely horrible. I would have been more entertained reading a dictionary. I found myself yelling at this book in my head asking why in the world anyone considers these stories good. I am convinced that all the high ratings people are giving this book are based on the Disney stories that were loosely based on the pure garbage contained within this book.

    I don't care if it's "good for its time" or "loses something in translation". Unless it was translated by house cat with slightly below average intelligence or written at a time when people considered gouging their own eyes out a leisure activity there is no reason for it to be this bad.

    Do not read this crap to your children, they will become entitled racists who play the lottery.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This collection is a load of interesting little stories. These originals are way more twisted than fairytales of my childhood. In these versions, the repercussions are more bloody and less forgiving.