Brothers Grimm
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The Brothers Grimm (die Brüder Grimm or die Gebrüder Grimm), Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859), were German academics, philologists, cultural researchers, lexicographers and authors who together specialized in collecting and publishing folklore during the 19th century. They were among the best-known storytellers of folk tales, and popularized stories such as "Cinderella" ("Aschenputtel"), "The Frog Prince" ("Der Froschkönig"), "The Goose-Girl" ("Die Gänsemagd"), "Hansel and Gretel" ("Hänsel und Gretel"), "Rapunzel", "Rumpelstiltskin" ("Rumpelstilzchen"),"Sleeping Beauty" ("Dornröschen"), and "Snow White" ("Schneewittchen"). Their first collection of folk tales, Children's and Household Tales (Kinder- und Hausmärchen), was published in 1812. The brothers spent their formative years in the German town of Hanau. Their father's death in 1796 caused great poverty for the family and affected the brothers for many years after. They both attended the University of Marburg where they developed a curiosity about German folklore, which grew into a lifelong dedication to collecting German folk tales. The rise of romanticism during the 19th century revived interest in traditional folk stories, which to the brothers represented a pure form of national literature and culture. With the goal of researching a scholarly treatise on folk tales, they established a methodology for collecting and recording folk stories that became the basis for folklore studies. Between 1812 and 1857, their first collection was revised and republished many times, growing from 86 stories to more than 200. In addition to writing and modifying folk tales, the brothers wrote collections of well-respected German and Scandinavian mythologies, and in 1838 they began writing a definitive German dictionary (Deutsches Wörterbuch), which they were unable to finish during their lifetimes. The popularity of the Grimms' best folk tales has endured well. The tales are available in more than 100 languages and have been later adapted by filmmakers including Lotte Reiniger and Walt Disney, with films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Sleeping Beauty. During the 1930s and 40s, the tales were used as propaganda by the Third Reich; later in the 20th century psychologists such as Bruno Bettelheim reaffirmed the value of the work, in spite of the cruelty and violence in original versions of some of the tales, which the Grimms eventually sanitized. |
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The Grimm Brothers'
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Sleeping Beauty
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This article is about the fairy tale. For other uses, see Sleeping Beauty (disambiguation). For the 1959 film, see Sleeping Beauty (1959 film).
"Sleeping Beauty" (French: La Belle au bois dormant "The Beauty Sleeping in the Wood") by Charles Perrault or "Little Briar Rose" (German: Dornröschen) by the Brothers Grimm is a classic fairy tale written by Charles Perrault, which involves a beautiful princess, a sleeping enchantment, and a handsome prince. The version collected by the Brothers Grimm was an orally transmitted version of the originally literary tale published by Charles Perrault in Histoires ou contes du temps passé in 1697.[1] This in turn was based on "Sun, Moon, and Talia" by Italian poet Giambattista Basile (published posthumously in 1634), which was in turn based on one or more folk tales. The earliest known version of the story is Perceforest, composed between 1330 and 1344 and first printed in 1528. Myth themesSome folklorists have analyzed Sleeping Beauty as indicating the replacement of the lunar year (with its thirteen months, symbolically depicted by the thirteen fairies) by the solar year (which has twelve, symbolically the invited fairies). The basic elements of the story can also be interpreted as a nature allegory: the princess represents nature, the wicked fairy godmother is winter, who puts the Court to sleep with pricks of frost until the prince (spring) cuts away the brambles with his sword (a sunbeam) to allow the Sun to awaken sleeping princess (nature). |
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Robert Louis Stevenson |
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), Scottish poet, essayist, and author wrote Treasure Island (1883); | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| I brooded by the hour together over the map, .... I climbed a thousand times to that tall hill they call the Spy-glass, and from the top enjoyed the most wonderful and changing prospects. Sometimes the isle was thick with savages, with whom we fought, sometimes full of dangerous animals that hunted us, but in all my fancies nothing occurred to me so strange and tragic as our actual adventures.--Ch. 7 | What was to be one of the world's most enduring stories of pirates sailing to exotic islands, singing "Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!", one-legged sailors with parrots as pets, black spots signifying the fate of a man, dead-men's chests, and hidden treasure maps, Stevenson's Treasure Island was an immediate success and affirmed his passions for story telling and writing. It and numerous other of Stevenson's works populated by such memorable characters as Long John Silver, Captain Alexander Smollet, Billy Bones, and Dr. Henry Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, have been adapted to the stage and screen and continue to be read today. ".... he avoids most of the snares and pitfalls of genius with noble and unconscious skill.--from "Robert Louis Stevenson" (1895) by Sir Walter Raleigh. An avid reader of the works of Walt Whitman, Victor Hugo, Francois Villon, William Shakespeare, Henry David Thoreau, and fellow Scots Robert Burns and John Knox, Stevenson himself inspired many other authors including Rudyard Kipling, Ernest Hemingway, and Peter Pan author James M. Barrie. Despite a weak constitution and frequent bouts of ill-health throughout his life, Stevenson led a life of adventure and embraced the unconventional. "A sincere and faithful man, .... though with a touch of sudden, bright, quiet humour and fancy, ...."--from Robert Louis Stevenson: a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial (1905) by Alexander H. Japp. Gilbert Keith Chesterton wrote of Stevenson | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| ".... he had to make one story as rich as a ruby sunset, another as grey as a hoary monolith: for the story was the soul, or rather the meaning, of the bodily vision. It is quite inappropriate to judge 'The Teller of Tales' (as the Samoans called him) by the particular novels he wrote, .... These novels were only the two or three of his soul's adventures that he happened to tell. But he died with a thousand stories in his heart."--from Twelve Types: A Collection of Biographies (1902) | Stevenson's life, itself the subject of many a scholar, is also mirrored in many of his works; he left a treasure trove of essays, diaries, poetry, letters, short stories, and unfinished manuscripts at the time of his death at age forty-four, including Weir of Hermiston (1896). Other popular novels include his Scottish historical tales of David Balfour in Kidnapped (1886) and its sequel Catriona (1893), and his study of split-personality, good versus evil in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886); | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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