Swanhilde, and other Fairy Tales

Wilhelm Hauff brought new life to the ancient art of the fairy tale. Writing in early nineteenth-century Germany, he took the bones of old folkloric traditions and breathed something vivid and startling into them. This collection holds Swanhilde, the beautiful maiden trapped between worlds, and The Caliph Stork, in which a ruler's foolish curiosity earns him feathers and a bird's perspective on his own kingdom. The tales nest inside each other through The Caravan, a frame story where travelers exchange stories by desert fire. Hauff's magic is not the sanitized kind that came later. These stories retain theirdanger, their wit, their taste for the strange and the clever reversal. They endure because they remember what fairy tales were always for: to make the reader feel that shiver of wonder, then laugh at how neatly everything turns out. Or doesn't.