'The Turnip Princess, And other newly discovered fairy tales' by Franz Xavier von Schonwerth

A few years ago, thirty boxes of manuscripts were discovered in a provincial archive in Germany. These turned out to contain a vast and interesting collection of fairy tales collected in northern Bavaria in the 1850s by Franz Xavier von Schonwerth, whose work was admired by the Brothers Grimm but only very partially published. There has been much and long discussion as to what extent the stories collected by the Grimms, and, even more, by Andersen and Perrault, have been ‘worked over’ in preparation for publication. This collection, now available for the first time, is a tohu-bohu of psychologically resonant symbols, urges and adventures, a soup of images in which strands of story form and dissolve, some resembling familiar stories in their combination of elements, some developing in quite unfamiliar directions. Although much of the material is very raw, the stories are so rich, so immediate, often so violent and horrible, so full of desperation, beauty and horror, that they make for compelling reading, a handbook to the messy edges of our mental environment as well a glimpse into the minds of mid-nineteenth century Bavarians living in a world fragile to the whims of natural and human forces.

June 2015