Content area
Full Text
Dollerup, Cay: Tales and Translation: The Grimm Tales from Pan-Germanic Narratives to Shared International Fairytales. Amsterdam/New York: John Benjamins 1999 (Benjamins Translation Library 30). 325 p. + notes, appendi- ces, index, illustrations, figures, tables.
Denmark welcomed the Grimm Tales with open arms. Translated and re-translated into Danish, the tales made themselves so much at home in Ger- many's northern neighbor that in the 1980s, Cay Dollerup has noted, there were schoolchildren who believed that the Grimms themselves were fellow Danes (p. 153). Demand for the Grimm Tales rose when Andersen published his tales, and not even Denmark's mid-nineteenth century war against Prussia over Schles- wig-Holstein diminished the sales of Danish translations of the Grimm tales (153). Since that time, demand for all editions of the Grimm Tales rises when- ever a Grimm translation appears.
Such a phenomenon suggests a level of international connection more intense than usual, and that was indeed the case with the courts of Kassel and Copen- hagen in the early nineteenth century. Kurfürst Wilhelm, Hesse-Kassel's ruler during the Grimms' stay there, had been reared at the Danish court between the...