Dark Grimm

The household tales in Margaret Hunt's translation of 1884, the first complete Grimm in English, together with twenty-seven tales that stood in the brothers' first edition of 1812 and in no edition after it. Those twenty-seven are translated for this edition from the first printing, and they are the hardest things the brothers ever put in print: children play at butchers and one of them has his throat cut; the mother kills the child who did it, drowns her youngest in the bath and hangs herself; a mother-in-law orders her grandsons slaughtered and cooked in a brown broth; a bride finds the cellar where her bridegroom keeps the women he has killed. The Grimms took the tales down from tellers in and around Kassel and spent seven editions softening what they had written. Hunt translated them as they stood, with the mutilations, the punishments and the endings that are not happy; the tales of 1812 are given as the brothers first set them down. This is an adult edition: nothing has been softened, and the cruelty of the tales - the mutilations, the child-murder, the cannibalism - stands as the brothers first set it down. Its 286 original illustrations have been carefully restored and coloured for this edition.