Volume 17, Number 9 · December 2, 1971
The Great God Wish
By Janet Adam Smith
Paths through the Forest: A Biography of the Brothers Grimm
by Murray B. Peppard
Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 266 pp., $7.95
Transformations
by Anne Sexton
Houghton Mifflin, 112 pp., $5.00
About Wise Men and Simpletons: Twelve Tales from Grimm
translated by Elizabeth Shub
Macmillan, 118 pp., $4.95
Friend Monkey
by P.L. Travers
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 284 pp., $6.95
A Game of Dark
by William Mayne
Dutton, 143 pp., $4.50
The Third Road
by Martha Bacon
Atlantic-Little, Brown, 188 pp., $4.95
Squib
by Nina Bawden
Lippincott, 144 pp., $3.93
Innocent Grove
by Geoffrey Wagner
World, 124 pp., $4.95
The Lorax
by Dr. Seuss
Random House, 60 pp., $3.50
Children and Fiction
by Wallace Hildick
World, 222 pp., $6.95
Bear Circus
by William Pène du Bois
Viking, 48 pp., $4.95
The Beast of Monsieur Racine
by Tomi Ungerer
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 32 pp., $4.95
How the Mouse Was Hit on the Head by a Stone and so Discovered the World
by Etienne Delessert
Doubleday, 32 pp., $5.95
The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine
by Donald Barthelme
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 32 pp., $4.95
Tooni the Elephant Boy
by Astrid Bergman Sucksdorff
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 48 pp., $4.25
One Misty Moisty Morning: Rhymes from Mother Goose
pictures by Mitchell Miller
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 40 pp., $2.95
Lewis Carroll wrote Alice for the daughter of the Dean of Christ Church. Edward Lear made up his Nonsense Songs and Stories for the children at Knowsley Hall where he was painting Lord Derby's parrots. Beatrix Potter told the Tale of Peter Rabbit to entertain a five-year-old invalid. In collecting and publishing their Fairy Tales the brothers Grimm had a loftier end in view: the greater glory of Germany. Not that they didn't care for children: Wilhelm was a doting father, Jacob an affectionate uncle; both had romantic views about the sacred innocence of childhood. But pleasing children with fairy tales was only a by-product of their great endeavor, which was nothing less than to recapture the whole German cultural heritage. Fairy tales were part of a grand design which also comprised folk tales, heroic tales, mythology, translations from Old German and Danish, German legal antiquities, and the monumental Grammar and Dictionary.
Review, 3333 words
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