The House in The Wood and Other Old Fairy Stories with Drawings By L. Leslie Brooke, London, Frederick Warne & Co. Ltd. and New York, 1909
Contents
The House in The Wood
The Brave Little Tailor
The Goblin and the Grocer
The Bremen Town Musicians
The Table, the Ass, and the Cudgel
The Jew in the Bramble Bush
The Vagabonds
Red Jacket; or, the Nose Tree
The Straw, the Coal, And The Bean
Snow-White and Red-Rose
This book features ten fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm. L. Leslie Brooks created a full-color plate for eight of them and the illustration for The Bremen Town Musicians is used as a cover too. There are also several black-and-white illustrations but I don’t know if I managed to find all of them. We’ll quickly skim the book and, if possible, provide the links to specific tales, where you can find more about them.
By the way, it’s not the only version of the book. Here is another one.
The House in The Wood
There was a woodcutter who had three daughters. The eldest had lost in the wood and strayed around until she found a house where an old man live with three animals. She asked for food and shelter. The man welcomed her only after the animals agreed.
When she ate dinner, she wanted to sleep. He showed her the bedroom but when she fell asleep, her bed sank into the cellar. This was her punishment for not thinking about animals.
The next day exactly the same thing happened to the middle sister.
When the youngest strayed in the wood and got to the house, she didn’t want to eat until she took care of all the animals. Her bed didn’t sink. She woke up in a castle with a prince and three servants who were all enchanted to the forms of the old man and animals until a compassionate girl finds them. The prince married her and makes her sisters become servants to a charcoal burner until they learn what is proper behavior.
The Brave Little Tailor
This is a well-known story about an ordinary tailor turning into a hero. All he needs is some self-confidence, beating a few giants, and hunting a unicorn and a wild boar.
Well, in the end, we also find out that some true adventures begin only after marriage …
The Goblin and the Grocer
A goblin lives in a house where a grocer and a student also reside. He prefers the grocer because he has jam but one day realizes that the student has something much more precious.
A goblin lives in a house where a grocer and a student also reside. He prefers the grocer because he has jam but one day realizes that the student has something much more precious.
One day, a fire breaks out and for some time it’s not clear which house burns. The one with the goblin, the grocer, and the student, or one of the buildings nearby?
Everybody has to decide what is the most important to them and the goblin immediately decides for himself. In his opinion, the house’s greatest treasure lies in the student’s room.
Yet, when there is no more danger, he also admits he can’t leave the grocer. Because he has the jam. And this is also the message of the tale: we often, if not always, make decisions shaping our lives because of the jam.
The Bremen Town Musicians
This is a fairy tale about animals who are too old to be still useful to people and decide they should finally take their destinies into their own hands. Why not become musicians?
Yet, they should travel to Bremen if they want to play there, and the path to Bremen is longer than a day. When the animals look for a place to spend the night, they find a robbers’ hideout.
After a series of comical accidents, the robbers leave the house in the wood, leave their treasures, and the animals decide to stay there.
The Table, the Ass, and the Cudgel
We start a story with a father who has three sons and a goat. For some reason, the goat lies about the boys not caring well enough about her and the father forces his sons to leave the home one by one.
Each of the boys finds a job and earns a very special magical object. But the oldest and the middle brother lose their treasures due to a cunning innkeeper. They return home empty-handed. Fortunately, the youngest son manages to get the magical objects of his brothers back and comes home with all three precious gifts.
In the meantime, their father also realized how wicked was the goat, so the family reunites and lives happily ever after.
The Jew in the Bramble Bush
The Jew in Thorns, as this fairy tale is often titled, is today an almost forgotten story about a boy who served full three years to earn only three pennies. Even that pocket money he gave to a poor man when he was asked for. But the poor man was actually a magician who granted him three wishes and the boy soon got a chance for exercising them.
He met a Jew and with his magic fiddle forced him to dance until the Jew offered him a full purse of gold. When the boy left, the Jew convinced the king he was robbed and the boy was caught. He was about to be hanged when he asked for his death wish – to play the fiddle one more time.
Of course, everybody started dancing until the boy was freed, the gold returned to him, and the Jew admitted he had stolen it. After that, the boy moved on and the Jew was hanged.
The Vagabonds
A colorful party, made of the cock, the hen, the duck, the needle, and the pin, goes around until the night falls. They find a place to stay the night in the inn, promising to pay with eggs laid by the hen and the duck in the morning.
But in the morning, cock and hen ate the egg she laid, hid the shells, and put the needle and the pin into the landlord’s towel and armchair. Then they left the building through the window.
When the landlord wakes up, he falls into a series of accidents only to find out his guests are already gone. He swears he’ll never take similar vagabonds under his roof.
This very same fairy tale is also presented with a longer summary together with illustrations of Karl Appold under one of many titles: A Pack of Ruggamuffins.
Red Jacket; or, the Nose Tree
This is the seventh fairy tale in the book and the third about three magical wishes or objects. It starts with three poor soldiers who wandered through the country until they were one day forced to spend the night in the wood. There they met a nice old man, dressed in a red jacket, who helped them with three magical objects, one for each.
The soldiers enjoyed the magical cloak, the magical purse, and the magical horn for some time until they meet a princess who was a witch. She tricked them out of their treasures and they became poor again.
Fortunately, the man in the red jacket helped them again, this time with special fruit: everybody who eats an apple suffers from an extremely enlarged nose and the situation could be cured only with special pears. Soon, the soldiers restored their wealth and enjoyed the rest of their lives.
The Straw, the Coal, And The Bean
One day, a bean, a coal, and a straw escape from the kitchen and decide to get in the world together. When this unusual company gets to the brook, the straw lies across the stream and invites others to carry on from one shore to another.
The coal went first but in the middle of the path he became scared, burned the straw and both fell down.
The bean started laughing so hard that his belly broke. Fortunately, a tailor came by and sew his bell. He had only black thread, so a visible sign of sewing stayed on the bean’s body. From then on,
Snow-White and Red-Rose
Once upon a time, two girls, named Snow-White and Rose-Red lived with their mother in the wood. They make friends with all kinds of animals. Especially interesting was a friendship with a bear who stayed at their home through the winter.
In the spring, the bear left saying he has to find a dwarf who stole a treasure from him. Snow-White and Rose-Red soon met a dwarf, not knowing that he is the one the bear was talking about. He was in trouble and they helped him but he was rude and angry at them.
The girls saved the dwarf’s life two more times, yet he was still swearing and cursing at his rescuers.
One day Snow-White and Rose-Red surprised the very same dwarf when he was checking his collection of precious stones. When he started screaming at the girls, the bear, their old friend, appeared and killed the dwarf. Right after that the ber turned into a handsome prince and explained he was cursed to stray around as a beast until his enemy, the dwarf, dies.
He got his stolen treasures back and took both girls to his castle. They took their mother too. Sometime after, the prince married Snow-White and his brother became the husband of Rose-Red.
If you would like to learn more about this fairy tale, visit the post about The Snow-White and Rose-Red.
Leonard Leslie Brooke was an accomplished oil painter and one the leading children’s book illustrators at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. He didn’t just illustrate texts by others but created his own characters as well. Johnny Crow is his most well-known creation.
Children's and Household Tales by Brothers Grimm 