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I am charmed by this person's page: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/ashliman.html on several fronts - the awesome mid-90s vintage geek-sparse layout, the tidy dry link collections, and the huge lists of fairy tales.
Please no one tell me he was or is an unpleasant curmudgeon in person. I wish to remain charmed. Especially by this: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/folktexts.html
In related news, I stole (for values of stole that equal "requested and was given permission to take") my grandmother's copies of Grimm's and Andersen's Fairy Tales. The battered two volume set from the 1940s or so that every household ever must have bought as my dad's mom had one too - they used to have boxes but the boxes long since fell apart.
I'm not sure I'll be brave enough to read Andersen again. I find Andersen utterly horrifying, and I can't understand his obsession with women's feet and footwear except to think perhaps he was a closet foot fetishist and conflicted about it? That poor girl who wears red shoes to church and has her feet chopped off. That rather unpleasant girl who steps on the loaf of bread because she doesn't want to get her new shoes dirty and ends up falling into some kind of netherworld where flies crawl all over her. The little mermaid and how every step was like walking on knives but she went hiking with the prince to keep him company.
Compared to that, merely having the wicked stepmother put in red hot iron shoes to dance at the wedding till she died seemed quite gentle, really. At least it was happening (thought my child self) to the villain, and not the little mermaid or the girl who just wanted to show off her shoes.
Please no one tell me he was or is an unpleasant curmudgeon in person. I wish to remain charmed. Especially by this: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/folktexts.html
In related news, I stole (for values of stole that equal "requested and was given permission to take") my grandmother's copies of Grimm's and Andersen's Fairy Tales. The battered two volume set from the 1940s or so that every household ever must have bought as my dad's mom had one too - they used to have boxes but the boxes long since fell apart.
I'm not sure I'll be brave enough to read Andersen again. I find Andersen utterly horrifying, and I can't understand his obsession with women's feet and footwear except to think perhaps he was a closet foot fetishist and conflicted about it? That poor girl who wears red shoes to church and has her feet chopped off. That rather unpleasant girl who steps on the loaf of bread because she doesn't want to get her new shoes dirty and ends up falling into some kind of netherworld where flies crawl all over her. The little mermaid and how every step was like walking on knives but she went hiking with the prince to keep him company.
Compared to that, merely having the wicked stepmother put in red hot iron shoes to dance at the wedding till she died seemed quite gentle, really. At least it was happening (thought my child self) to the villain, and not the little mermaid or the girl who just wanted to show off her shoes.
Is there a rewrite of the Little Mermaid out there where the mermaid takes her sisters up on their offer, plunges the magic knife into the prince's heart and the heart of the princess he married, bathes in their blood, and turns back into a mermaid before dawn to spend the rest of her soulless 500 years dancing in the waves with her sisters, singing beautifully? Inquiring minds totally want to know. Disembodied spirit floating around trying to motivate little children to do good in hopes of getting a soul, bah! This is one area where the Disney version is actually an improvement.
