Brother's Grimm Essay

Brandon King

Rick Dollieslager

11/16/2014

Guardians of Fairy Tales: The Brothers Grimm

The Grimm Brothers developed a lot of fairy tales throughout their days of writing tales for many adults and children. They had tales that represented everything you could imagine could happen, they wrote tales about how it all happened.

The Grimm Brothers stories were influenced by the folk poetry collection of Clements Brantano and Achim Von Armin. They both were from Germany. They started forming there side of the tales with many volumes and editions. The first edition contained 86 stories, over time through the second and third edition they all added up to 170 tales. Many of their tales were taking away and some were added to their collection. There tales were criticized by many people that read their tales because many did not impose to be kid friendly. Later they made a selection of 50 tales just for children readers. Being fairy tales for kids, they had to be set up like fairy tales by different volumes and editions.

One of the tales that the Grimm Brothers wrote was “The Donkey”. In this tale there was a king and a queen who really wealthy. The king and queen really wanted a child but never could till one day they finally did. When the child was born it was a donkey, not an ordinary child. The donkey could do everything a human could do and he also wanted to learn to play the lute. This shows that the donkey really wants to be a child buy is almost stuck in a donkey’s body. The donkey was on journey to this kingdom, that had a king. The king had a beautiful daughter that the donkey adored. The donkey decided to stay at the kingdom with the king and his daughter, which the king became very fond of the donkey. The king offered the donkey anything he wanted for helping out around the kingdom and taking care of his daughter. The donkey took in to consideration of what he could get but nothing appealed to him. The king offered the donkey half of his kingdom on one condition, that he marries his daughter, and gives her happiness. Later that evening the donkey and the kings daughter gets married. The king had one of his servants hide in there room, so when they got back from the wedding the donkey did something like no other. The donkey took his suit off and reveled himself to his wife. Once the servant told the king what was up with the donkey, he confronted the donkey and demanded him to burn the suit and be loyal to his daughter as himself. The lesson of this story is don’t hide what you really are because no matter what people should accept you for the way your personality is.

This tale represents my life because if I were in that situation I would probably have done the same thing to hide what I actually was. I would’ve done that because I would’ve wanted to hide what I actually was and if I were to be accepted by someone of high power.

The Grimm Brothers have many great tales that have an impact on many people and have important lessons that are reveled in the tales. Many are life lessons that most people encounter in their lives and know what lessons are out there. I would personally recommend there tales to anybody young or old. They contain many fun tales to read and many lessons to learn from every tale in there whole collection.

Works cited

O’Neil Thomas. “Guardians of the Fairy Tale the Brothers Grimm:. “Living in the World: Cultural Themes of Writers.” 1st edition. Boston. Wadsworth. 2014. 44-57. Print 2008.

The Brothers Grimm. “The Donkey”. Fairy tales. 1812. Project Gutenberg, 2008. http://www.gutenberg.yada.yada.yada