Home Stories: collected by the Brothers Grimm, Routledge 1855

London: G. Routledge & Company, 1855. Translated from the German by Matilda Louisa Davis. Illustrated by George Thompson. By the time this unique 1855 edition of ninety one fairy tales was published only a third of the stories known in Germany had ever been read by an English audience. Davis' translation is one of the early examples of a faithful adaption of the source material and of translating more and yet unkown fairy tales from later German editions, hence her being able to work with a geater corpus of tales. The first German edition of 1812 had been the source for the famous Edgar Taylor translation "German Popular Stories" in 1823, presenting only fifty seven fairy tales. In 1857 the seventh and last revised edition of the then two hundred "Kinder- und Hausmärchen" (Children's and Household Tales) were published in Germany which is considered the standard for publication today. An excerpt from David Blamires "Telling Tales" concerning the Davis translation of the Grimm tales: Matilda Davis provides new translations of eighty-eight tales from the Grimms, divided into ninety-one in the English. They are presented in the same sequence as in the Grimms’ 1850 edition, which makes it look as if she was aiming at a translation of the full corpus, but when Routledge, her publisher, took over the Addey and Co. edition her translation lost out, though it was reissued in 1866 and 1876. Despite this, selections from Davis have been included in several mainly early twentieth-century editions of Grimm. Martin Sutton regards Davis’s work as important on two counts: she is the first woman to be named on a title-page as translator of the Grimms, and her translation actually sets new standards of fidelity to her source texts. Although her translations display some of the mid century’s tendency to verbosity, she aims at an accurate rendering rather than an adaptation. She is the first person to give accurate translations of the violent details to be found in ’Little Red Cap’, ’The Robber Bridegroom’ and ’Fitcher’s Bird’, and she is the first translator at all to venture a rendering of ’Der Schneider im Himmel’, entitling it ’The Tailor in Olympus’. She solves the problem of treating religious matters in a humorous way by transposing the figures of God and St. Peter into Jupiter and Mercury. It seems a pity that Davis’s translation was not better received. George Thompson’s illustrations did nothing to help. Her work was not the commercial success that Routledge obviously found with the Addey and Co. edition (…) [from: David Blamires. Telling Tales: The Impact of Germany on English Children’s Books 1780-1918. Cambridge, Open Book Publishers, 2009. p 165-166.] [Content] The Frog King, or the Faithful Henrik — The Cat and the Mouse as Companions — The Virgin Mary's adopted Daughter — Story of a Son who set out to learn to Shiver — The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids — The Faithful Johan — The Good Bargain — The Wonderful Musician — The Twelve Brothers — The Host overreached — The Little Brother and Sister — Rapunzel — The Three Dwarfs in the Wood — Hans and Peggy — The Three Magical Leaves — The White Snake — The Straw, the Coal and the Bean — The Brave Little Tailor — Cinderella — The Riddle — Story of the Mouse, the Bird, and the Sausage — Madam Holl — The Seven Ravens — Little Red-Cap — The Musicians of the Town of Bremen — The Singing Bone — Pluto and the Three Golden Hairs — The Lady-bird and the Flea — The Maiden without Hands — Clever Hans — The Three Languages — Wise Alice — The Tailor in Olympus — The Tailor, the Donkey, and the Cudgel — Thumbling — The Marriage of Dame Reynard (Tale the First) — The Marriage of Dame Reynard (Tale the Second) — The Fairy Folk (First Tale) — The Fairy Folk (Second Tale) — The Fairy Folk (Third Tale) — The Robber Bridegroom — Squire Korbes — The Godfather — Dame Trude — Godfather Death — Thumbling's Travels — Fitcher's Bird — Old Sultan — The Six Swans — Rosaline — Fundvogel — King Thrushbeard — Little Snow-white — The Knapsack, the Hat, and the Horn — Rumpelstiltz — Roland and his Bride — The Golden Bird — The Dog and the Sparrow — Fritz and Catherine — The Two Brothers — The Clever Countryman — The Queen Bee — The Three Feathers — The Golden Goose — The Little Hare and his Bride — The Twelve Huntsmen — Jorinda and Joringel — The Fortunate Sons — The Six Successful Companions — The Wolf and the Man — The Wolf and the Fox — The Fox and his Godson's Mother — The Fox and the Cat — The Pink — Wise Margaret — The Old Grandfather and the Grandchild — The Water Nixie — The Death of the Hen — Fortunate Hans — Hans Married — The Golden Children — The Fox and the Goose — The Goose-herd — The Wise Peasant Girl — The Wren and the Bear — The Wise Peasants — The Miller's Apprentice and the Cat — The Clever Little Tailor — Snow-white and Rosy-red — The Four Ingenious Brothers — The Three Sisters