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Read a Newly Rediscovered Bavarian Fairy Tale
The Enchanted Quill and some 500 other fairy tales were transcribed by Franz Xaver von Schönwerth in 1850. A few of those made it into a published collection, but most were lost until quite recently. They have now been translated into English for the first time by Maria Tatar in The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales (Penguin Classics, 2015). The prose seems a bit more modern that one might expect from a fairy tale (one of the characters shouts “No way!” at one point), but I can’t fault the translator for attempting to move away from the stilted, formulaic style you usually see in this kind of story (and which I even attempted to imitate in a couple chapters of Children of Pride).
500 New Fairy Tales Discovered
Please hurry, English translators!
A whole new world of magic animals, brave young princes and evil witches has come to light with the discovery of 500 new fairytales, which were locked away in an archive in Regensburg, Germany for over 150 years. The tales are part of a collection of myths, legends and fairytales, gathered by the local historian Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (1810–1886) in the Bavarian region of Oberpfalz at about the same time as the Grimm brothers were collecting the fairytales that have since charmed adults and children around the world.
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Von Schönwerth spent decades asking country folk, labourers and servants about local habits, traditions, customs and history, and putting down on paper what had only been passed on by word of mouth. In 1885, Jacob Grimm said this about him: “Nowhere in the whole of Germany is anyone collecting [folklore] so accurately, thoroughly and with such a sensitive ear.” Grimm went so far as to tell King Maximilian II of Bavaria that the only person who could replace him in his and his brother’s work was Von Schönwerth.
Darrell J. Pursiful 