Grimm's Fairy Tales (Annotated Large Text Easy Read Edition) This collection of Grimms' Fairy Tales features the original stories by which many popular books, movies, and plays were inspired.
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.
What Grimm's Fairy Tales has taught me about 18th-century culture:
1.) If an animal starts talking to you, just run. Don't engage. Just get away. 2.) Single? And looking? Well, go to the woods. There is an inordinate amount of handsome, wealthy, royal men wandering the woodlands for no apparent reason. 3.) No story is complete without someone cutting off their toes, ears, or fingers. And bleeding profusely is required. 4.) God really likes to come down to Earth and play mind games with people. And not to teach them any lessons. Just to mess with them. 5.) The devil goes to sleep at night and dreams that someday he will grow up to be as evil as the step-mothers in these tales. Because whoa.
28 hours on Audible. Long and meandering, this translated work is composed of 200 tales that the Brothers Grimm compiled from 1807 to 1857. Many of the tales are familiar to American readers, but their endings are shockingly different with violent or sexual or antisemitic references.