10 Books A Day: #12

The Complete Fairy Tales Of The Brothers Grimm...Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, tr. by Jack Zipes...Bantam

Great Swedish Fairy Tales...tr. Holger Lundbergh, ill. by John Bauer...Delacorte Press

Scandinavian Folktales...tr. and ed. by Jacqueline Simpson...Penguin

Russian Fairy Tales...collected by Aleksandr Afanas'ev, tr. Norbert Guterman...Pantheon

Irish Folk Tales...ed. Henry Glassie...Pantheon

Heimskringla; or, The Lives Of The Norse Kings...Snorre Sturlason...Dover

The Kalevala; or, Poems Of The Kaleva District...Compiled by Elias Lonnrot, tr. Francis Peabody Magoun, Jr....Harvard University Press

The Story Of King Arthur And His Knights...Howard Pyle...Scribners

Jack The Giant Killer...retold and ill. by Richard Doyle...Children's Classics Everyman's Library

Tyll Ulenspiegel's Merry Pranks...Moritz Jagendorf...Cadmus Books

The Adventures Of Baron Munchhausen...ill. by Gustav Dore...The Book League Of America

The Scarecrow: Fact And Fable...Peter Haining...Robert Hale/London


The main draw of Great Swedish Fairy Tales for me are the illustrations by John Bauer. As you can tell from the sample shown above, his great depictions of trolls influenced both their designs in the Rankin/Bass production of The Hobbit and Brian Froud's design of the Mystics in The Dark Crystal.

Tyll Ulenspiegel is a once famous European folk character, noted for his "sharp wit, keen wisdom, and rough pranks." His last name translates as "owl-mirror", and is sometimes listed as "Howleglass"; he was seen as lifting up a wise but playful mirror to the folly of the world. The old prank of "the horse with his head where his tail should be" is attributed to him, and many of his original "jokes" (not illustrated in this children's book about him) involve excrement. He has since gone the way of many an elderly vaudevillian, retired as hokey and crude, but still appreciated by a few.

I found the scarecrow book by Peter Haining while researching my post about scarecrows, and had to get it. Peter Haining is an uber-fan, a collector and collator, an editor of rare skill, and has put together some of the greatest anthologies of stories and illustrations that the world of weird tales has ever known. He is to be appreciated, revered, and magnified forever.