Introduction

Many years ago, when I was a child, I became interested in the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Since then, I have read their collection many times and enjoyed it. When I was a little bit older, I discovered that there had been more than one edition of the Grimms' collection, as it was revised over time, and many of the stories were drastically edited and some of them removed entirely. For the longest time, the earlier editions of their collection had never gotten a translation into English, with all of the supposedly "Complete Collections" only comprising of the stories from the final 1857 edition. In 2014, translator Jack Zipes translated the original 1812/1815 edition into English for the first time. Unfortunately, it carries its own copyright, as translations are considered transformative enough to be copyrighted. So, English readers have been unable to read the first edition of the Grimms' collection without either buying Jack Zipes' book or making do with the iffy quality of Google Translate... until now!!!!!

Yes, you read that correctly. I am making available for the first time ever a public domain English translation of every single one of the tales from the first edition of the Grimms' collection. Not only that, but I'm also providing English translations of the tales from the other editions that were omitted in the final edition. As well, I'm providing the full text of the final edition, mostly taken from the translations of Margaret Hunt, Lucy Crane, and the colorful Fairy Books of Andrew Lang (with corrections made to them), for the sake of comparison. For the first time, the world will have a public domain English translation of Grimms' Fairy Tales that truly can be called "The Complete Grimms' Fairy Tales."

I hope you all enjoy.