1booksaplenty1949
How many fairy tales did the Grlmms collect? I note that there are (at least) 5 separate entries for books titled The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales or some variation thereof. Are the contents sufficiently different to justify keeping these editions separate?
2thorold
Grimms' Fairy Tales, originally known as the Children's and Household Tales (German: Kinder- und Hausmärchen, pronounced ˌkɪndɐ ʔʊnt ˈhaʊsmɛːɐ̯çən, commonly abbreviated as KHM), is a German collection of fairy tales by the Grimm brothers or "Brothers Grimm", Jacob and Wilhelm, first published on 20 December 1812. Vol. 1 of the first edition contained 86 stories, which were followed by 70 more tales, numbered consecutively, in the 1st edition, Vol. 2, in 1815. By the seventh edition in 1857, the corpus of tales had expanded to 200 tales and 10 "Children's Legends". It is listed by UNESCO in its Memory of the World Registry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimms%27_Fairy_Tales
3booksaplenty1949
>2 thorold: So, an edition with 210 stories is “complete” ? That would describe The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Fairy Tales and perhaps others, although they appear as separate works. What are we to make of The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: Tales 101-242?
4reading_fox
>3 booksaplenty1949: tread carefully when stepping into those woods! I would say your Tales 101-242 is only half the stories (ish) and so should be separate. Short story collections from prolific authors can be a nightmare for combiners, as they are frequently published in many editions of varying composition and only the contents page, which we can't see, has the details.
5booksaplenty1949
>4 reading_fox: Of course The Complete Tales of the Brothers Grimm: Tales 101-242 should be separate, as it is volume II of a set. My point was that it indicates that there are 242 tales, not 210. Which number is correct?
6Cecrow
I'm not an expert in this field/subject, but my instinct is that you're not going to discover an agreed-upon official total number of tales.
>4 reading_fox:, right you are. I've been reading John Steinbeck, and collections like The Long Valley and The Red Pony have varying numbers of tales, and some of them overlap between the two depending on which editions you pick up. In those cases it looks like combiners threw their hands in the air and decided everything published under each title shall be combined together, just live with it. Seems to work out okay.
In the case of Grimm, I'm speculating what the hesitation would be. Viewing the author page, the editions seem to have been distinguished by year of publication, which suggests to me there's historical value to be captured by recording what appears in the earliest ones, but 'completion' value in the later ones with a higher number of tales. Some editions may offer other content besides the tales themselves, and then there's illustrated/non-illustrated which may be worth distinguishing: https://www.librarything.com/author/grimmbrothers
Charles Perrault has all of the same problems: https://www.librarything.com/author/perraultcharles
And of course this fellow: https://www.librarything.com/author/andersenhanschristia
>4 reading_fox:, right you are. I've been reading John Steinbeck, and collections like The Long Valley and The Red Pony have varying numbers of tales, and some of them overlap between the two depending on which editions you pick up. In those cases it looks like combiners threw their hands in the air and decided everything published under each title shall be combined together, just live with it. Seems to work out okay.
In the case of Grimm, I'm speculating what the hesitation would be. Viewing the author page, the editions seem to have been distinguished by year of publication, which suggests to me there's historical value to be captured by recording what appears in the earliest ones, but 'completion' value in the later ones with a higher number of tales. Some editions may offer other content besides the tales themselves, and then there's illustrated/non-illustrated which may be worth distinguishing: https://www.librarything.com/author/grimmbrothers
Charles Perrault has all of the same problems: https://www.librarything.com/author/perraultcharles
And of course this fellow: https://www.librarything.com/author/andersenhanschristia
