Excellent book. Read it and think how many current books/movies are based on these tales...

I decided to read the original Grimm's Fairy Tales, possibly the world's first set of collected fairy tales, shortly after finishing The Tales of Beedle the Bard. I loved Grimm's Fairy Tales for their darkness and originality. Although some of the fairy tales have become ubiquitous in our culture, such as "Hansel and Gretel," I enjoyed reading the original version. ( )

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. ( )

Started reading these for book club, but they really got too repetitive to get through the whole lot. They were mostly a lot shorter and less detailed than I remember these stories being. The same themes come up again and again - three brothers, lots of gold, princesses, talking animals, wicked step parents. Of course they are classics in their way, but I didn't find these versions of the stories particularly engaging.

They weren't as gruesome or sexually charged as I'd hoped either! The intro makes clear these are still quite edited from the versions they originally collected. So while they can be a bit nastier than the disney versions they are still a bit cleaned up. ( )

i have read a number of the stories out of this book and its pretty awesome a bit different from the fairy tales that i grew up with.