Maria Tatar

Honestly I found this book disappointing. It isn't my first time reading Maria Tatar or the Annotated Books series and expected more based on my past experience with each. I read Tatar's The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales and The Annotated Alice several years ago and found both terribly interesting and informative, The Annotated Brothers Grimm doesn't compare to either. The pictures are pretty good, but the footnotes are on the slim side for the series. They aren't particularly show more insightful and often repeat themselves.

To make matters worse Tatar's translation was underwhelming. To be fair this is hardly the first time I've been frustrated by an artless Grimm translation, but it's always disappointing. One of the things I love best in a good Grimm translation is the poetic repetition. There is a lot of variety in how the verse in Grimm stories in translated, but the versions here lack the grace and focus of more artful translations.

Compare the exchange between the princess and the horse head from Grimm's Fairy Tales: Twenty Stories with Tatar's rendering of the exchange.

'Alas! dear Falada, there thou hangest.'

And the Head answered--

'Alas! Queen's daughter, there thou gangest.
If thy mother only knew thy fate,
Her heart would break with grief so great.'

Tatar's:

'Alas, poor Falada, hanging up there.'

And the horse's head would reply:

'Princess, princess, down and out,
If your mother found this out,
There's no doubt--her heart would break.'

I might not know what 'gangest' means but it's a hell of a lot better than a verse that hinges on rhyming 'out' with 'out'.

And then there's the dire warning in the Robber Bridegroom:

'Turn back, turn back, thou bonnie bride,
Nor in this house of death abide.'

Tatar's:

'Turn back, turn back, my pretty young bride,
In a house of murders you've arrived.'

Yes she's managed a real rhyme half rhyme here, but the rhythm lacks the musicality of better versions. It isn't exactly hard to versify dire warnings either. The story Mr. Fox (not printed in this collection) does just fine with its variant.

Mr. Fox's warning:

'Be bold, be bold, but not too bold,
Lest that your heart's blood should run cold.'

Tatar's translations may owe their flatness to accuracy at the expense of art, but clearly I favor flash and rhythm over strict accuracy.

As if this wasn't enough all of the stories except the ones 'for adults' were taken from the Grimm's last edition after the stories had been heavily edited to be more suitable for Christian children. This means that all hints of sexuality were purged (Rapunzel's pregnancy), gratuitous mentions of prayer and piety were inserted (though the stories were of pagan origins) and blame was shifted off of fathers to mothers (Furrypelts) and off of mothers to stepmothers (an awful lot of them) to maintain the sanctity of parenthood. The only reason the 'stories for adults' escaped unedited was because after the first edition they were deemed inappropriate for printing and were purged from the collection. Actually that's not completely true. One of the stories, "Jew in the Brambles" was only deemed inappropriate by later editors. Jacob and Wilhelm printed the anti-Semitic tale in several of their books.

I guess Grimm's Fairy Tales: Twenty Stories is still my favorite. show less

World-renowned folklorist Maria Tatar reveals an astonishing but long-buried history of heroines, taking us from Cassandra and Scheherazade to Nancy Drew and Wonder Woman.
The Heroine with 1,001 Faces dismantles the cult of warrior heroes, revealing a secret history of heroinism at the very heart of our collective cultural imagination. Maria Tatar, a leading authority on fairy tales and folklore, explores how heroines, rarely wielding a sword and often deprived of a pen, have flown beneath show more the radar even as they have been bent on redemptive missions. Deploying the domestic crafts and using words as weapons, they have found ways to survive assaults and rescue others from harm, all while repairing the fraying edges in the fabric of their social worlds. Like the tongueless Philomela, who spins the tale of her rape into a tapestry, or Arachne, who portrays the misdeeds of the gods, they have discovered instruments for securing fairness in the storytelling circles where so-called women’s work—spinning, mending, and weaving—is carried out.

Tatar challenges the canonical models of heroism in Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces, with their male-centric emphases on achieving glory and immortality. Finding the women missing from his account and defining their own heroic trajectories is no easy task, for Campbell created the playbook for Hollywood directors. Audiences around the world have willingly surrendered to the lure of quest narratives and charismatic heroes. Whether in the form of Frodo, Luke Skywalker, or Harry Potter, Campbell’s archetypical hero has dominated more than the box office.

In a broad-ranging volume that moves with ease from the local to the global, Tatar demonstrates how our new heroines wear their curiosity as a badge of honor rather than a mark of shame, and how their “mischief making” evidences compassion and concern. From Bluebeard’s wife to Nancy Drew, and from Jane Eyre to Janie Crawford, women have long crafted stories to broadcast offenses in the pursuit of social justice. Girls, too, have now precociously stepped up to the plate, with Hermione Granger, Katniss Everdeen, and Starr Carter as trickster figures enacting their own forms of extrajudicial justice. Their quests may not take the traditional form of a “hero’s journey,” but they reveal the value of courage, defiance, and, above all, care.

“By turns dazzling and chilling” (Ruth Franklin), The Heroine with 1,001 Faces creates a luminous arc that takes us from ancient times to the present day. It casts an unusually wide net, expanding the canon and thinking capaciously in global terms, breaking down the boundaries of genre, and displaying a sovereign command of cultural context. This, then, is a historic volume that informs our present and its newfound investment in empathy and social justice like no other work of recent cultural history.

Source: Publisher show less

This is our current bedtime read. I keep forgetting that my son is having a different childhood than I had, and that he didn't spend asthmatic afternoons stuck in bed with books. So he's not as fairy-tale literate as I was at his age. Also, he's old enough to be interested in the origin story of these stories as well as the stories themselves. So we're enjoying this collection and its introduction and footnotes.

--Just finished. This is a fine selection. The most famous tales rub shoulders show more with more obscure offerings. Maria Tatar included my favorite story, the clunkily titled "A Fairy Tale about a Boy Who Left Home to Learn about Fear;" but I loved reading grim stories that were new to me like "Godfather Death," "The Hand With The Knife," "How Children Played Butcher With Each Other," and the single-paragraph "The Stubborn Child" (hint: he does *not* come to a good end).

Speaking of grim stories: Was anyone else confused as a child by the coincidence of grim and Grimm? I remember starting a collection of the stories when I was young, and having to close it unfinished -- too much cannibalism, too many chopped-off heads. I looked at the name on the cover and wasn't sure if it meant that these stories were grim (which they certainly were) or if that was the name of the authors (which seemed like a scary coincidence). show less

You never quite know what you’re going to get with a massive fairytale compendium, and annotated collections are even trickier - are they going to include the best version of the story, are the annotations going to take over, are we given anything new to sink our teeth into? I bought this book to add to my section of classic fairytale illustrators, since it includes Rackham, Nielsen, and Dulac, but I was pleasantly surprised with the book overall! Not only did the author provide a show more selection of illustrations to accompany each story (discussing the influence of each artist briefly on the story and their individual styles), but they chose an excellent range of stories by a variety of folk and fairytale authors/collectors. They discussed each story with a concise introductory section and included brief, but worthwhile, annotations that (while they may not be the most literary in quality nor completely comprehensive) gave the reader food for thought and prompted them towards a variety of quality academic sources. Overall an enjoyable read, with just enough history and criticism to give the book a real depth. show less