Essay Week 14

The Grimm Brothers

My reading this week was over the Grimm (Ashilan) Unit. I chose this unit because last week I read the hunt version of the Grimm tales and I wanted to see how the authors differed from one another. In this week’s reading I found that there was a difference in the size of each story. In the Hunt unit the reading were much longer and although they were good they seemed to have less stories. This unit kept the stories short and to the point. This allowed for a greater selection of the stories from the Grimm tales. There were a couple of stories that really stuck out to me.

The story about the wolf and the seven young kids seemed extremely familiar as I was reading it. It reminded me of the Three little pigs and the Big Bad wolf and I am not sure but I figure that this story probably inspired that fairy tale. There were notable difference between the Grimm story and the one I was read as a child. One of the main parts is the number of kids in the story. I was used to there being 3 pigs and in this story there were 7 goats. The wolf did trick the kids into letting them in much like the big bad wolf attempted to let them in and when the wolf got in he ate all but one of the kids and then there there was the scene in which the mother replaced the kids in the wolfs belly with stones and got away. For some reason this reminded me of Zeus and his father Chronos. I am sure there is not real parallel between the two that can be drawn but still it was a thought. I really like this story.



The other story that stood out to me was the little red cap. When I read this story I thought this might be a different tale than the little red riding hood story, but I guess this is the one of the original versions of the story. Even though I read the story knowing it quite well I still found it very enjoyable to read and I thought it was pretty cool to see that some of the stories that I was read as a child had different names originally. Overall I would recommend this unit.

Picture Attribution
Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons