Rare Books @ NLS

Our new Treasures display centres on the fairy tales collected by the brothers Grimm.

2012 sees the 200th anniversary of the first publication of the tales. They were called Kinder- und Hausmaerchen, that is, Children’s and Household Tales. 

Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786-1859) had started collecting fairy tales in 1807. They did not go out into the fields, find a peasant or his wife, ask them to tell them a tale and write it down, however. They started by copying fairy tales out of old books in libraries, but then discovered some rich oral sources: their sister Lotte was friendly with a family with six girls across the road, and they told each other tales! Over the next few years, two more such families, or more precisely their daughters, contributed to the fairy tale collection. They even wrote a lot of their tales down themselves and sent them to the brothers. Wilhelm also visited their families and transcribed more material. In the end, when the last edition was edited by the brothers, there were 200 fairy tales and 10 children’s legends! You can surely guess the following ones:

The fairy tales first appeared in English translation in 1823 under the title Popular German Stories. Today they have been translated into over 160 languages! One of them is Igbo, which is spoken in South Eastern Nigeria. A copy of the Igbo translation is on display.

You can also see more academic works by the brothers, such as their German dictionary. They started to work on this in 1838 and published the first volume in 1854. They got to the letter F, and after their deaths the work was continued until the 32nd volume appeared in 1965, 127 years after work had started.

And there are lots of editions, translations and adaptations of the fairy tales too!

The display is open from 19 September to 18 November; entry is free.

We recently acquired an adaption of Sir Walter Scott’s novel “Kenilworth“, an adventure story set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603) with a bit of a tragic ending. What makes this acquisition so interesting is not that it is aimed at younger readers, but that it’s a Russian adaptation! It was printed in Moscow and St Petersburg in 1873, that is 52 years after the original edition.

Translations of Scott into Russian began to appear in the 1820s. Scott reached probably the widest audience of any foreign author in Russia in the 19th century. Not only that, he also had a considerable influence on the development of the Russian historical novel. It even became fashionable in 19th-century Russia to wear tartan and so-called ‘Walter Scott’ cloaks, and to dress up as characters from his novels.

You’ll find lots of information about Walter Scott’s life and works in the Walter Scott Digital Archive maintained by Edinburgh University Library. Have a look in particuar at the page about the novel “Kenilworth“.

More Information about Sir Walter Scott is available from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (accessible through NLS Licensed Digital Collections)

One of our recent purchases is a catechism for children printed in Edinburgh (Shelfmark: AP.3.210.09). It was written by an anonymous ‘Well-wisher to the Education of Children’. The text was at first drawn up for the private instruction of a girl when she was between four and five years old and then added to as she grew up, until she was twelve or thirteen; it was finally published in 1751.

In the 17th century, Robert Leighton, bishop of Dunblane, had argued for simpler catechisms. His catechism for children was printed posthumously in 1695 in Edinburgh (we hold a copy at shelfmark: Ferg.92). A number of similar children’s catechisms, with shorter and simplified texts, were printed in Scotland in the first half of the 18th century. In the preface to our new acquisition it is noted:

‘that the author has studied a natural plainness [sic] and simplicity of stile [sic], a thing much wanted in productions of this nature, and which few attained to; … he has studied to give this performance the air of dialogue, which by the best critics is judged the easiest and most entertaining way of writing and teaching.’

Our new holding is one of only three known copies (the other two are held outside the UK) and includes ‘Some forms of prayer for children’ at the end.

Further reading:

• On our website: Children’s books in the National Library of Scotland.
• Robert Leighton  (bap. 1612, d. 1684) in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (accessible through NLS licensed digital collections).