ooking
for a sweet, soothing tale to waft you toward dreamland? Look somewhere
else. The stories collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the early
1800s serve up life as generations of central Europeans knew
it—capricious and often cruel. The two brothers, patriots determined to
preserve Germanic folktales, were only accidental entertainers.
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Once they saw how the tales bewitched young readers, the Grimms, and
editors aplenty after them, started "fixing" things. Tales gradually
got softer, sweeter, and primly moral. Yet all the polishing never
rubbed away the solid heart of the stories, now read and loved in more
than 160 languages.
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