SOURCE: "Response and Responsibility in Reading Grimms' Fairy Tales," in The Reception of Grimms' Fairy Tales: Responses, Reactions, Revisions, edited by Donald Haase, Wayne State University Press, 1993, pp. 230-49.

In the following essay, Haase discusses the importance of each individual reader's response to Grimms' Fairy Tales, suggesting that "the recipient and context of reception are as much a determinant of meaning as the text itself"

The Engraver Responsible for the title page of the nineteenth-century American edition of Grimms' tales translated by Edgar Taylor evidently was given the original German text to work from. And he evidently had some trouble deciphering the German typeface he encountered. Little did he know it was the Kinder- und Hausmärchen he had before him and not—as we read on the American title page—the Kinder- und Hans Märchen (Alderson n2). Fortunately, the error did no lasting damage, and the...