The tales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the early 1800’s constitute the greatest amassed from oral tradition in the western world and no classroom study of traditional tales would be considered without them. Many are set in the animal kingdom, like the ones translated here by Carnegie medal winning author and poet Kevin Crossley Holland. Some like The Bremen Town Musicians are extremely well known but others are much less so. The authors reveal in the afterword that they have particularly tried to keep the flavour of the different voices telling the tales and they have succeeded brilliantly. They are short, pithy, often funny and perfect for reading aloud. The animals exhibit human traits such as arrogance, greed, cunning, and less often kindness and will provide plenty of food for thought and discussion. I was particularly taken with a tale new to me, The Fox and the Cat, where an arrogant fox boasts that he has 100 tricks. The cat modestly replies that he has but one: ‘When the hounds are after me, I can leap into a tree and save myself,’ which he then does. The fox is killed by the dogs! This beautiful hardback edition, with lively pen and ink drawings from the award-winning Susan Varley, will survive many years of classroom use.
A collection of eleven Grimm fairy tales featuring animal characters, including The Bremen Town Musicians and The Hedge King, translated by Carnegie Medal winner Kevin Crossley-Holland, wonderfully illustrated by Susan Varley, and bound together in a lavish hardback collection.
Kevin Crossley-Holland was born in 1941 in Mursley, North Buckinghamshire, and grew up in Whiteleaf, a village in the Chiltern hills of western England. He attended Oxford University, where after failing his first exams, he developed his passion for Anglo-Saxon literature. After graduating, he was the Gregory Fellow in Poetry at the University of Leeds, and from 1972–1977, he lectured in Anglo-Saxon for the Tufts University of London program. He worked as a children's book editor while beginning to write his own poems and reinterpretations of medieval legends. He has also taught for extended periods in America. He now lives in Norfolk, England.
Kevin Crossley-Holland has published six volumes of adult poetry and several libretti for opera. In the world of children's books, he is best known for his numerous retellings and anthologies, and in particular his version of Beowulf. "Storm," his novella, won the Carnegie Medal in 1985.
