The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Annotated and illustratedSelection #12306

As everyone knows, the brothers Grimm (to whom we owe one of the finest collections of fairy tales of the eight hundred century), were, first of all, two extremely precise and noticed philologists. To proceed to the transcription of the stories, they had to visit the farthest corners of the German countryside, trying to be told by the elders the only repositories of an ancient memory and a knowledge exclusively oral, these tales, commonly called fairy tales. In fact, originally, these were not stories for children, but the misunderstanding arose from the fact that these stories were told by the elders around the fire on winter nights, and the listeners were mostly children. The Brothers Grimm were impressed by the fact that the elderly narrators repeated their tales always with the same words, idioms, expressions and even gestures, like in a ritual.. (It continues here http://thetreasuresofnature.wordpress.com/tag/brothers-grimm-fairy-tales-romanticism-fairies-old-tales/)