THE BROTHERS GRIMM: Popular Folk Tales

Anyone who's still telling stories to children will want Brian Alderson's renderings of Grimm for he's pared down the stories and pointed them up, given them the natural swing of speech and put them in words spoken today. Children bored with ""Hansel and Gretel"" (though how smart of him to identify Hansel as ""a lad"" and Gretel as ""a lass"") and other simple plottings will find here such eerie, infrequently selected tales as ""The Moon"" and also the brusque, masculine ""Boots of Buffalo Leather."" No pietistic introduction, but the insinuating Kinder-und-HausmÄrchen verse (""Night gathers. Outside/All is comfortless"") followed by a sneaky, untitled ""Story to begin with""; and, at the close, the briefest of source notes. Unfortunately, the package isn't up to the contents: Michael Foreman's mannered, fin-de-siècle illustrations, while acceptable for Andersen (p. 879), are altogether too lightweight for Grimm, and one longs to see this on good honest unsized paper with perhaps an assortment of line cuts--say, Cruikshank to Hans Fischer to Madeleine Gekiere. But meanwhile the stories are here to rediscover and share.