The Heroic Industry of the Brothers Grimm | Hacker News Reader

The Heroic Industry of the Brothers Grimm

hudsonreview.com

48 pointsprismatic9 comments

At the end of the essay, the author (David Mason) quotes the beginning of Cinderella. I agree with Mason about the beauty of the terse prose here:

> So much is conveyed here about character, time and the natural world, because Cinderella’s piety is natural piety, respect for nature more than conventional Christian belief.

It's something that modern fantasy usually doesn't capture, by being too modern, and by being far too verbose. The latter is one aspect in which Tolkien's Simarillion feels better than his "The Lord of the Rings": The Simarillion leaves all the details out, it has little direct speech, and only mentions what's important. Its style is not as raw and authentic as in Grimm's fairy tales, or as in actual historical legends like King Arthur, but it gets close as times, mainly by avoiding the verbosity that is so common in all modern literature.

List the modern fantasy titles that you find difficult to read.

Out of curiosity, what makes you confident that your orders deserve to be obeyed?

Do you mean titles they find too verbose? Verbosity is not the same as difficulty.

Exactly. Verbosity is usually easier to read when comparing text of the same length, because verbose text is less compressed, it contains less important information per word.

>The Simarillion leaves all the details out, it has little direct speech, and only mentions what's important.

The Silmarillion is basically Elder Edda Pastiche.

Le Guin talks about the need for linguistic distancing in fantasy in one of her essays in The Language of The Night, that is to say language that sounds too close to our world is unsatisfying in Fantasy (by which of course she does means fantasy that is a completely other world, like Earthsea, LOTR, or similar) because an Elven Prince should not talk like a Senator on an appropriations committee.

It is probably this that you found objectionable about modern fantasy rather than verbosity. What do you feel about E. R. Eddison? The man was verbose, but not in any way modern.

I haven't read Eddison. I meant "modern" in a wide sense that even includes Tolkien's prose to some degree. He doesn't sound very modern, but he still sounds to me more modern than Grimm's tales, even in the Silmarillion, which is the opposite of verbose. Tolkien is more "realistic". He goes more in the direction of pseudo history, he mentions family trees and specific years. I don't think the Edda does that to a similar extent either, though I haven't read it. It's possible that Eddison is again different.

I think the "natural piety" part also gives the works a very universally accessible quality - every culture in the world understands and has its own version of it in their religion or spiritualism. One doesn't need to know the details of Christianity or German culture to follow the emotions and motivations of the characters. The same with the archetypes: siblings, stepmothers or stepfathers, these are universal roles. Even when our modern-day lives don't feature many "hunters" or "woodsmen" it's part of every culture's collective history.

> Since their deaths (Wilhelm in 1859, Jacob in 1863), so many legends have accrued about their lives and works that they almost seem fairy-tale figures themselves, quaint Hobbit-like creatures trawling the peasantry for stories. Nothing could be further from the truth, which is why Ann Schmiesing’s brief, eloquent and moving biography, The Brothers Grimm, is bound to prove enlightening to English-language readers.

Huh, that is actually true: of course I knew they were real people, even when very young, but on an "emotional" level I've never thought of them as such. They were always mythical characters themselves, as if I couldn't separate them from their stories. Something that they share with Homer and… actually, that's it, really.

What a strange thing to realize, I wonder how that happened?

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