Home » , » Forgotten fairytales slay the Cinderella stereotype | Philip Oltermann

Forgotten fairytales slay the Cinderella stereotype | Philip Oltermann

Written By Unknown on Friday, December 26, 2014 | 1:37 PM

Stories lost in Bavarian archive for 150 years and newly translated into English offer surprisingly modern characters

Once upon a time … the fairytales you thought you knew had endings you wouldn’t recognise. A new collection of German folk stories has Hansel and Gretel getting married after an erotic encounter with a dwarf, an enchanted frog being kissed not by a damsel in distress but by a young man, and Cinderella using her golden slippers to recover her lover from beyond the moon.


The stash of stories compiled by the 19th-century folklorist Franz Xaver von Schönwerth – recently rediscovered in an archive in Regensburg and now to be published in English for the first time this spring – challenges preconceptions about many of the most commonly known fairytales.


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