Read of the Week: Selected Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

This week's Read comes from the Brothers Grimm, Clare recommends a Selected Tale for readers to enjoy.

"There was once an ancient castle in the middle of a great, dense forest, and within it there lived an old woman all alone who was a sorceress of sorceresses. By day she turned herself into a cat or a night-owl, but in the evening she would take on the form of a proper human being once more..."

Jorinda and Joringel by Brothers Grimm

When I am stuck in a rut of any kind, I turn to the collected tales of Brothers Grimm for a shake-up. If you want to experience the extraordinary within the ordinary, then the tales of Brothers Grimm will certainly transport you to some very interesting places!

When you read Grimm's fairytales, you too are able to metamorphasize into different beings, try out different shapes and forms, and in the process stretch your own being. Often with Grimm, these adventures can be dark and scary, and we all need to be careful that we don't get lost in the woods as the old woman in Jorinda and Joringel or become the deluded megalomaniac wife of The Fishermen and his Wife, whose limitless ability to wish leads to not only her own destruction, the world around her.

Imagination can be dangerous. But the fairytales come to an end, often with a moral or lesson learned, and we come out at the other side, back into our original shapes, back to reality, but hopefully with an additional sense of something else...