![]() From very early I had an unthinking category in my mind of the "real"(authentic) fairy tale which centred on the brothers Grimm, and some of the Nordic stories collected by Asbjørnsen. ![]() But I did learn early to distinguish between them and the authored tales of Hans Christian Andersen (and Walter de la Mare and William Thackeray). I don't think I had a book at that stage that was specifically the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm. I knew nothing about the Wagnerian Nordic pageantry of the Third Reich. I learned from the Asgard book that even the gods can be defeated by evil. I liked magic, the unreal, the more than real. I never really liked stories about children doing what children do - quarrelling and cooking and camping. ![]() ![]() I read early and voraciously and indiscriminately - Andrew Lang's coloured fairy books, Hans Christian Andersen, King Arthur, Robin Hood and my very favourite book, Asgard and the Gods, a German scholarly text, with engravings, about Norse mythology, which my mother had used as a crib in her studies of ancient Norse. I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the second world war. ![]()
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