Read the following Grimm Brothers stories:

"Sleeping Beauty"

"Snow White"

"Little Red Riding Hood"

" Cinderella"

"Hansel and Gretel"

"The Bremen Town Musicians"

"The Frog King"

" Rapunzel"

" Rumpelstilzchen"

"The Brave Little Tailor"

Online versions of these stories:

www.nationalgeographic.com/grimm

"The Brave Tailor" site: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm020.html

"Rumplestiltskin" site: http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm055.html

If you'd like to listen to the stories, here's a site with oral versions: http://storynory.com/

Questions for the discussion board

What kind of a culture would inspire a storyteller to tell stories like these? What kind of assumptions are made about women, children, the discipline of children, the value of individual life?

What are the characteristics of a hero in these stories?

What kind of life must the storytellers--not the brothers who collected them, but the tellers themselves--have led to come up with stories like this?

The Grimms were editors, adding details like punishments of bad characters. What kind of editing is permissible when one is collecting stories for publication to an audience of children? How true to the original telling must the story be in order to remain the same kind of story?

I'll ask this question repeatedly, because thinking about editing makes for great insights into literature, its purposes and its audiences: did the Grimms enhance the stories or distort them with the changes they made? They obviously thought they were improving the stories--what do you think?

The stories for this week are more violent than most literature for children in the United States today. Some of these stories are actually offensive to many of us. And given the level of school violence in our society, there are those who think that stories like these promote violence; there are others who say the violence in literature is therapeutic, giving children an imaginative way to dealing with their problems.

What do you think about the violence in the stories--good or bad, and why? This is another question that will get repeated as we move through the course.