View a FREE sample

This test consists of 5 short answer questions, 10 short essay questions, and 1 (of 3) essay topics.

Short Answer Questions

1. What does "The Ear of Corn" remind people not to be?

2. What does the magician enchant to get revenge on the girl in "The Beam"?

3. Who comes down from the heavens and forces the dead to lie back in their graves in "The Moon"?

4. What does the maiden want in "The Maid of Brakel"?

5. There is a heavy use of what element in "The Iron Stove"?

Short Essay Questions

1. What is understood about the maiden in The Maid of Brakel?

2. What is the story of The Hurds telling readers?

3. What is the moral of The Two Travelers?

4. What is The Twelve Apostles about?

5. What is the riddle of The Bright Sun Brings it to Light?

6. Compare Lazy Harry and Lean Lisa.

7. Discuss the use of the colors black and white in The White Bride and the Black Bride and The Three Black Princesses.

8. Laziness is discussed in both The Three Sluggards and The Twelve Idle Servants. What is different between the two tales?

9. What do The Willow-Wren, The Sole, The Bittern and Hoopoe, and The Moon all have in common?

10. What is the moral of The Owl?

Essay Topics

Write an essay for ONE of the following topics:

Essay Topic 1

The bad people in fairy tales range from evil stepmothers to wicked witches and more. List each type of evil character and give a brief description of each. What behavioral codes do these bad people follow? What are the similarities between them? What are the differences? Why are these characters always evil? Are there any instances in which the stepmother is not evil? Use specific examples to support your claims.

Essay Topic 2

Evil stepmothers, beautiful maidens, and clever princes are a few examples of certain types of characters that have shown up in several fairy tales. What other character types have reappeared in the tales? Give a description of each character type and explore the different tales that use them. Compare and contrast the characters. Why did the Grimm Brothers use reoccurring characters? What roles do they play and are they realistic in any sense? Why did these characters have a set role? (For example, why is the stepmother always evil?)

Essay Topic 3

Discuss the social attitudes of a culture and how they affect fairy tales. What social attitudes are seen in the Grimm fairy tales? How are they portrayed? What do these social attitudes tell children from that time? What do they tell children now? What can general readers today decipher about society back then?

(see the answer keys)

This section contains 944 words (approx. 4 pages at 300 words per page) View a FREE sample