a cheerful one

[kip_w]

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I've scanned the second of the fairy tales from that German 1873 edition. They aren't quite as scary as the 18th century versions, but with Gustav Dore's art, they reach some pretty Gothic levels of horror. Witness this cheery fellow:



That's Mister Giant to you, in the story of Tom Thumb. The picture I took this example from is probably the scariest thing in the book. Click on it to see all the current pictures in the "Es war einmal..." flickr set, including a rather lovely study of a lantern beam at night.
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Comments

[davesslave.livejournal.com]

Beautiful artwork. But I don't know if Sarah should see them.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Indeed, even when I was working on them, I was checking to be sure she wasn't in the room for the real harsh ones. Sarah gets upset at stuff in fairly recent Disney movies. We're not reading "der Maniak mit der grosse Messer" to her any time soon.

[madfilkentist]

That book looks wonderful!

I have that illustration, in an excellent book called The Classic Fairy Tales, which has the oldest known English versions of a number of fairy tales. It turns out the Giant is stupidly killing his own kids, so everything's all right ... I guess.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

It's a beautiful book, and sadly fragile. I'm being as careful as I can with it, but it's losing bits and pieces every time I turn it over. If it had been in mint or anything, I'd have been afraid to try scanning it at all.

Ah, "The plucky hero tricks him into killing his own family." I've seen instances of that. What's the one where the baddie is tricked into killing his own mom?

I might see if the library can get The Classic Fairy Tales for me to look at.

[angevin2.livejournal.com]

First of all, HOLY SHIT.

Secondly, I have a book which I'm pretty sure reproduces one of the original paintings, or at least it doesn't look much like an engraving. So I scanned it for you.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

That'd probably be the original. When the engraver copies it, and the print with it, it flips the image over. Thanks for that -- come to think, I'll look at my Dore biography and see if it mentions that being in a museum somewhere.

[letzteschatten.livejournal.com]

good lord. k, haven't seen many like this. makes the others we have look like nursery wall paper material.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

That's brilliant! Does he do Rumpelstiltzkin tearing himself in half?

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

Surprisingly, that's not in there. I'm sure he'd do a vigorous job on it. His History of Holy Russia is all full of graphic violence, played for laffs -- overstated in a way reminiscent of "Sam Peckinpah's Salad Days" on Monty Python.

(Of course, every time I see that name, I think I'm seeing a reference to my own epic verse, Rumplestiltstein.)