The book includes 8 of the 14 most famous fairy tales of the German romantic Wilhelm Gauf (1802-1827), which have not lost their popularity for two hundred years. This desperate reveller in his student years at the Faculty of theology, and then a home teacher of the children of the nobility and a novice writer who tried to become the "German Walter Scott", knew some secret of composing entertaining fairy tales, just as poets and songwriters create songs from a combination of the most ordinary words and simple memorable melodies that then the whole nation sings. After the translations of the book of Arabic fairy tales "1001 nights" into European languages, this genre experienced a rebirth and its "golden age" in national literatures. The difference between Gauf's fairy tales from the archaic and cruel fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, Raspe's burlesque fantasies, Hoffmann's grotesques or Andersen's "fairy tales for girls" is that they are addressed to an extremely wide audience. Little Muck, Dwarf Nose, stories about the heart of stone and the ship of the dead - who doesn't know them today?
The book includes 8 of the 14 most famous fairy tales of the German romantic Wilhelm Gauf (1802-1827), which have not lost their popularity for two hundred years. This desperate reveller in his student years at the Faculty of theology, and then a home teacher of the children of the nobility and a novice writer who tried to become the "German Walter Scott", knew some secret of composing entertaining fairy tales, just as poets and songwriters create songs from a combination of the most ordinary words and simple memorable melodies that then the whole nation sings. After the translations of the book of Arabic fairy tales "1001 nights" into European languages, this genre experienced a rebirth and its "golden age" in national literatures. The difference between Gauf's fairy tales from the archaic and cruel fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, Raspe's burlesque fantasies, Hoffmann's grotesques or Andersen's "fairy tales for girls" is that they are addressed to an extremely wide audience. Little Muck, Dwarf Nose, stories about the heart of stone and the ship of the dead - who doesn't know them today?