Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version

Finally, I’d say to anyone who wants to tell these tales, don’t be afraid to be superstitious. If you have a lucky pen, use it. If you speak with more force and wit when wearing one red sock and one blue one, dress like that. When I’m at work I’m highly superstitious. My own superstition has to do with the voice in which the story comes out. I believe that every story is attended by its own sprite, whose voice we embody when we tell the tale, and that we tell it more successfully if we approach the sprite with a certain degree of respect and courtesy. These sprites are both old and young, male and female, sentimental and cynical, sceptical and credulous, and so on, and what’s more, they’re completely amoral: like the air-spirits who helped Strong Hans escape from the cave, the story-sprites are willing to serve whoever has the ring, whoever is telling the tale. To the accusation that this is nonsense, that all you need to tell a story is a human imagination, I reply, ‘Of course, and this is the way my imagination works.

The fairy tale is in a perpetual state of becoming and alteration. To keep to one version or one translation alone is to put robin redbreast in a cage.

Princess, princess, youngest daughter, Open up and let me in! Or else your promise by the water Isn’t worth a rusty pin. Keep your promise, royal daughter, Open up and let me in!

He sat down and collected his thoughts. They were quite easy to collect, because there weren't very many of them, and they all concerned the same subject--what a burden his life was.

the particular plant longed for by the wife, which was originally parsley, was a well-known abortifacient.

Much ingenious interpretation of story is little more than seeing pleasing patterns in the sparks of a fire, but it does no harm.

and she saw a bed of lamb’s lettuce, or rapunzel.