Aschenputtel

by Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm, Hans Hafen (Narrator)

Edition of Aschenputtel (original Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella) produced using the LARA platform. German text with integrated audio and English translations.

Genres: France

10 pages, ebook

Published July 27, 2022

About the author

German philologist and folklorist Jakob Ludwig Karl Grimm in 1822 formulated Grimm's Law, the basis for much of modern comparative linguistics. With his brother Wilhelm Karl Grimm (1786-1859), he collected Germanic folk tales and published them as Grimm's Fairy Tales (1812-1815).

Indo-European stop consonants, represented in Germanic, underwent the regular changes that Grimm's Law describes; this law essentially states that Indo-European p shifted to Germanic f, t shifted to th, and k shifted to h. Indo-European b shifted to Germanic p, d shifted to t, and g shifted to k. Indo-European bh shifted to Germanic b, dh shifted to d, and gh shifted to g.

This jurist and mythologist also authored the monumental German Dictionary and his Deutsche Mythologie .

Adapted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am continuing to experiment with the scripts I've developed for cutting up audiobooks and turning them into multimedia LARA texts (more details here if you're curious). I've tried French and English, so I thought I'd move to a different language and do something in German. What better place to start than Aschenputtel, the original Brothers Grimm version of Cinderella? You can see the result here. As usual with LARA texts, view in Chrome or Firefox and hover over a pencil icon to get a translation of the preceding sentence; clicking on a word shows you all the places it occurs in the text, and also gives you a link to a German lexicon/grammar page. The audio comes from someone on Librivox called Hans Hafen, who sounds like the kind German grandfather every child ought to have to read Grimms Märchen to them. Vielen dank Herr Hafen!

I did the translation myself, partly because the one I found on Gutenberg was far removed from the German, and partly because it was fun. What a weird story Aschenputtel is compared to the bland Disney film! I started off thinking it was very politically incorrect, which I suppose it must be, but after a while I decided that the proto-feminist component was even stronger. Herr Charming, if you haven't figured it out yet, I must warn you that this is a seriously dangerous princess. You look like you're way out of your depth.
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[Update, Oct 1 2022]

This afternoon, we watched the Adelaide Gilbert and Sullivan Society's charming production of Into the Woods, which I'd never seen before. I was amazed to discover how closely the Cinderella segment followed Aschenputtel! If you're a fan, I definitely recommend checking out the original text.

[Nente · Rating 4 out of 5]

Перечитывая эту сказку уже взрослой, я обратила внимание на то, что история Золушки вовсе не о возвышении простой нищенки: всё же она по рождению такая же аристократка, как и мачеха с сестрицами. Пожалуй, речь здесь скорее о том, что благородную кровь (ну и изящную ножку, конечно) не испортишь бесконечным мытьём полов. Мораль вполне в духе времени, не так ли?

В моём издании от Речи прекрасные иллюстрации Рейпольского и классический перевод Габбе.