Household Stories from the Brothers Grimm, Vol. 2
Illustrated by Walter Crane
Free Download: The Vagabonds (2 page layout)
Free Download: Rapunzel (2 page layout)
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There are 10 fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm and illustrated by Walter Crane included in Volume Two: The Wonderful Musician, The Twelve Brothers, The Vagabonds, The Brother and Sister, Rapunzel, The Three Little Men in the Wood, The Three Spinsters, Hansel and Grethel, The White Snake, and The Straw, the Coal, and the Bean. There are also about 20 intricate illustrations by Golden Age illustrator Walter Crane.
In the Preface to the Second Edition (1819) of the Fairy Tales they so painstakingly collected, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm (the Brothers Grimm) wrote:
Where they still exist, they live, so that no one thinks about whether they are good or bad, if they are poetic or in poor taste for intelligent people. One knows them and loves them because that is the way they were learned, and one delights in them without any specific reason. So splendid is the living custom – indeed, poetry shares with all things enduring that one is drawn to it even against one's own will . . . . In the same way, we do not want to praise these fairy tales nor even defend them against other opinions. Their mere being is sufficient to protect them. Whatever delights again and again, whatever moves and instructs, carries its own necessity in itself and has certainly emerged from that eternal source which covers all living things with dew, and even if it were but a single drop caught by a small leaf it would nonetheless shine in the dawn's first light . . . .
It was our aim that the poetry itself – alive within the tales – would have an influence and delight whom it can, that it could thus serve as an educational tool.
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