You can have them in exchange for your dog and your little finger

February 1, 2015 11:43 AM

In 2012, selections from an archive of five hundred previously undiscovered fairy tales, found in Regensburg, Germany, were published by Erika Eichenseer. The fairy tales were collected by the historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth, a contemporary of the brothers Grimm. Last year, an English translation of the collection was published. Here are three of the stories, in translation:

• The Turnip Princess
• King Goldilocks
• The Flying Little Box

posted by frimble (12 comments total)

I read these all in the narrator's voice from Fractured Fairy Tales.
posted by jeribus at 11:54 AM on February 1, 2015

Looks like it's available in the US later this month. (How did it get to be February already? Did I also fall into a long sleep?)
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 11:58 AM on February 1, 2015

The discovery was covered on the blue previously, back when they first came to light in 2012.
posted by filthy light thief at 12:01 PM on February 1, 2015

I'm kind of not down with what happened to that dog in King Goldilocks.
posted by lagomorphius at 12:02 PM on February 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

The Flying Little Box reads like an excerpt from an Iain Banks 'Culture' novel...
posted by ennui.bz at 12:07 PM on February 1, 2015

The discovery was covered on the blue previously, back when they first came to light in 2012.

I completely missed the previous post. Thanks for pointing it out. Two more links that I didn't work in to the post: a pro (by the translator) and a con article about whether the Schönwerth archive is significant.
posted by frimble at 12:13 PM on February 1, 2015 [1 favorite]

Looks like they were discovered a long time ago by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth. Neat, none the less. Missed the 2012 post, so thank you for this.
posted by carping demon at 1:05 PM on February 1, 2015

That con article was fascinating, I didn't know that there were so many collections:

I am presently working on an anthology of 19th-century European folk tales, and there are literally fifty or sixty collections that are more interesting than Schönwerth’s early collection, Aus der Oberpfalz — Sitten und Sagen, one reason why Schönwerth’s tales have not been studied or collected in the twentieth century.....

...Many of the European folklorists like the Grimms, had a great artistic sensibility. The artistic power of the Grimms’ tales and other collections can be experienced when they are read aloud. I believe that the best folklorists always had to “translate” and “adapt” the tales they collected, and they did this while trying to remain true to the spoken word. So, you can praise Schönwerth’s “raw” tales, but those that I have read thus far lack an important element of artistic re-creation. To varying degrees, the best 19th-century European folklorists shaped the raw quality of the takes to make them more effective in print. They also provided notes and provided dialect versions side-by-side with their raw translated versions in high German, French, Italian, etc. The general public is not aware that Schönwerth’s work was just a drop in the bucket of folk-tale collecting in Europe during the nineteenth century.

posted by blahblahblah at 1:42 PM on February 1, 2015

Those titles would make some great user names.
posted by Mr. Yuck at 3:50 PM on February 1, 2015

Hm, interesting. "The Turnip Princess" read like someone wrote down a dream or drug-induced hallucination. "King Goldenlocks" was, well, odd. But I quite liked "The Flying Little Box", which seemed to make the most sense. Plus, as Maria Tatar says, "Suddenly I understood the kaleidoscopic magic of fairy tales—a little twist here and another one there, and you have a completely different story, yet constructed from the very same bits and pieces."

Flying carpet meets Rapunzel meets Cinderella and results in something completely different. Awesome.
posted by Athanassiel at 8:43 PM on February 1, 2015

The Flying Trunk always used to terrify me. I was a geeky kid, and knew what an elephant's trunk was before I knew the item of luggage was called that. So I always did (and still do) think of a flying trunk as being some kind of flying worm like a disembodied elephant trunk.
posted by raygirvan at 8:43 AM on February 2, 2015

Hooray! I've been awaiting the english translation - This'll go nicely next (in un-bowlderized opposition) to my Andrew Langs' collection.
posted by LD Feral at 4:01 PM on February 2, 2015