The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales
The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales
By Franz Xaver von Schönwerth
Translated by Maria Tatar
Illustrated by Engelbert Suss
Edited by Erika Eichenseer
“Schönwerth’s tales have a compositional fierceness and energy rarely seen in stories gathered by the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault.” —The New Yorker
“Schönwerth’s legacy counts as the most significant collection in the German-speaking world in the nineteenth century.” —Daniel Drascek, University of Regensburg
A rare discovery in the world of fairy tales—now for the first time in English
With this volume, the holy trinity of fairy tales—the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, and Hans Christian Andersen—becomes a quartet. In the 1850s, Franz Xaver von Schönwerth traversed the forests, lowlands, and mountains of northern Bavaria to record fairy tales, gaining the admiration of even the Brothers Grimm. Most of Schönwerth’s work was lost—until a few years ago, when thirty boxes of manuscripts were uncovered in a German municipal archive. Now, for the first time, Schönwerth’s lost fairy tales are available in English. Violent, dark, and full of action, and upending the relationship between damsels in distress and their dragon-slaying heroes, these more than seventy stories bring us closer than ever to the unadorned oral tradition in which fairy tales are rooted, revolutionizing our understanding of a hallowed genre.
Paperback
288 pages | illustrated
Penguin Classics, 2015
8.5 x 5.43 x .69 inches
ISBN 9780143107422
Fairy Tales, German Classics