Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

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I have a copy of some early Grimm's version. It's a bunch of disconnected fragments of stories with events out of order and no particular moral.

The Grimm brothers went around interviewing busy people about stories. Not the storytellers for the most part; just regular people. They had imperfect memories of the old stories, got them confused and mixed up, and probably the whole household was competing to tell the scholars their version. Result: fragmentary and confused.

Not one of the stories in this old book resembled anything in any modern telling. E.g. There were several versions of Cinderella-like stories all different, with entirely different endings, some with no ending. Different slippers or no slippers. One or two or three sisters. Various parents dying, sometimes both! Her inheritance stolen and she exacted revenge to get it back. And so on.

The second half was more like story fragments, nothing complete. Just notes really.

So never mind 'original' versions, there may be no such thing.

> So never mind 'original' versions, there may be no such thing.

There may be no authoritative version of a particular story. But there is an authoritative version of a particular writer's version of a particular story. If you want to retell the Little Match Girl story so that she gets to stay inside and have a nice meal and wake up on Christmas morning with a whole pile of gifts under the tree, fine. But don't call it Hans Christian Anderson's Little Match Girl. Call it Bob McBobface's Little Match Girl.

Hans Christian Andersen died in 1875, the copyright is long expired but of course there might be other right-holders on the title or such.

Why would you want to write his story like this? The whole point of it is for the girl to die in cold, a critique of society's downlooking stance on poverty; just like Jonathan Swift wrote in his work a century earlier and looking at the number of children in poverty in Europe and the US I'd say there's no happy end in sight. 30% of the children in UK live in poverty, 21% in Germany, even Finland (which simply houses the homeless) has a rate of 10%.

> But there is an authoritative version of a particular writer's version of a particular story

Not necessarily. I heard this about, I think "Ulysses," but probably applies to most published books -- there are almost always changes between editions (if a books goes through multiple printings), differences in printings between different markets (even if those markets are in the same language), notes the author may have written at home but didn't get published, notes the author wrote on the review copy that got left out of the published version or got misunderstood or misspelled or otherwise improperly published...

A "text" turns out to be a lot less definitive of thing than it may at first appear.

Cinderella doesn't even have it's name from the German versions, that'd be Aschenputtel or Aschenbrödel, but from the French variant which was already 1700 years old when you take the story of Rhodopis from ancient greek as its origin (as far as we know now). The greek geographer recorded: "They [the Egyptians] tell the fabulous story that, when she was bathing, an eagle snatched one of her sandals from her maid and carried it to Memphis; and while the king was administering justice in the open air, the eagle, when it arrived above his head, flung the sandal into his lap; and the king, stirred both by the beautiful shape of the sandal and by the strangeness of the occurrence, sent men in all directions into the country in quest of the woman who wore the sandal; and when she was found in the city of Naucratis, she was brought up to Memphis, and became the wife of the king."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinderella

Two years ago I saw an excellent performance of Rossini's La Cenerentola at the Volksoper in Vienna, they put the choir into a 24-legged horse costume to pull the prince's carriage. https://www.volksoper.at/produktion/la-cenerentola-aschenbro...

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