Wednesday, November 12, 2014

Grim indeed …

… Grimm brothers’ fairytales have blood and horror restored in new translation | Books | The Guardian. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

How the Children Played at Slaughtering, for example, stays true to its title, seeing a group of children playing at being a butcher and a pig. It ends direly: a boy cuts the throat of his little brother, only to be stabbed in the heart by his enraged mother. Unfortunately, the stabbing meant she left her other child alone in the bath, where he drowned. Unable to be cheered up by the neighbours, she hangs herself; when her husband gets home, “he became so despondent that he died soon thereafter”. 

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