Something there is in fairy tales that brings out the worst in literary critics. Or stirs to life the inner critic in novelists, philosophers, and psychiatrists. From Dickens to Chesterton, from Sartre to Derrida, from Jung to Bettelheim—everybody, upon reading this stuff, wants to say something profound. Especially, of course, about the stories collected in the early 19th century by those German brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. These fairy tales are so simple, you see, they must be complex. They're so earthy, they must be symbolic. They're so chaotic, they must be formulaic. They're so strange, they must be wise.

Take, for example, the new collection, The Grimm Reader, translated and selected by Maria Tatar, chair of Harvard's folklore department. You don't actually have to read the book. In some sense, we never read the Grimms' fairy tales anyway; we only reread them, for they exist in the air we breathed in as children even before we learned to read. But let's take the book and write a standard review—the review you'd read in any of a dozen magazines, any of a hundred newspapers.

It would open with some general observation of the magic spell cast by fairy tales—and by an iron law, the word enchantment has to appear somewhere in the first two paragraphs. Fairy tales, you understand, "lower their glittering buckets deep into the psyche's well." They are "stories made to summon wonder, horror, enchantment." They remain in the mind, "uncanny in the purest sense of the word, which is to say, both bizarre and familiar at once." They "truly possess an inexhaustible power. Children hold on tight, turn pale, close their eyes, and beg for more."

Thirty years ago, it would have been routine to speak, at this point, of the great psychological insight of fairy tales. Harold Bloom once remarked that the only problem with Freud's literary criticism is that it leaves us with the uncomfortable feeling that Shakespeare is a better reader of Freud than Freud is of Shakespeare. One could say something similar of Bruno Bettelheim: The Grimm Brothers proved better at expounding psychology than the psychologist was at expounding the Grimms. Still, Bettelheim's widely read 1976 book, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, capped an era in which anyone writing on children's books had to say something about how "Sleeping Beauty" represented the laziness of teenagers in the latency period, or "Little Red Riding Hood" was a story about the onset of menstruation, or "The Bremen Town Musicians" expressed a wish-fulfillment solution to failure anxiety. Or something like that.

These days, when the fashion is to reject Freudianism altogether, it's standard to make, at this point in the review, a deprecating remark about the overreading of the old straitjacket psychologizing. Instead, we are now required to observe something about the structure of narrative and the sense of an ending. Curiously, we seem free to say either that fairy tales violate the rules of modern fiction, or that fairy tales established the rules of modern fiction, but we are apparently compelled to say one or the other.

Thus, for example, in her introduction to Tatar's new collection, the British novelist A. S. Byatt insists on the difference between the anarchic character of true fairy tales and the deliberateness of what she calls "authored tales." (Her hatred of Hans Christian Andersen, whom she describes as a psychological terrorist, is almost palpable; if she authored a fairy tale about him, he'd be the one with the sweet gingerbread on the outside of his house, to lure the little children in, and the cruel oven in the kitchen in which to bake them alive.) Or we could, instead, assure readers of fairy tales' founding place in the enduring literary tradition—noting, for example, that the tales do "what all great children's literature does: they literalize metaphor."

Regardless, we need to make some literary point, after which our review should devote a paragraph or two to the Grimm Brothers themselves. Don't worry; this is nothing we can't steal from Wikipedia and the introduction to any standard old edition of their work. Although they were trained as lawyers, Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859) devoted themselves to academic pursuits—particularly their massive German dictionary, the Deutsches Wörterbuch, which they began in 1838 and carried up to the letter F before their deaths. A comment is allowed here, in the more uptown versions of the review, about Jacob's formulation of Grimm's Law, the linguistic rule that governs the transformation of the stop consonants in early Indo-European to the stops and fricatives of Germanic languages (as modified, of course, by Verner's Law and Kluge's Law, later in the 19th century).

But all that's merely a snack before we get to the real meat on the Grimms' bone. They were brought up in a family of boys and a single girl—and did that influence their selection of tales that showed similar groups of siblings? Their father died while they were young, forcing the family to move from the idyllic countryside to impoverished quarters in the city—and did that cause them to chose stories that tended to excuse fathers and to be set in forests? (We needn't actually answer these questions, merely raise them.)

Most of the tales they gathered aurally, although a few were from printed sources. (Jacob generally supervised the collecting, Wilhelm the writing up in that strangely featureless and almost-childish voice that became, after the Grimms, mandatory for fairy tales.) Although some of the stories were taken directly from peasant storytellers, many of them came from the Grimms' middle-class and aristocratic friends, retelling the stories the servants had told them when they were children—and Wilhelm eventually married the young woman who told them about Little Red Riding Hood. How authentic were the results? How modified by the 19th-century moral, religious, and aesthetic sensibilities of their collectors?

Again, a standard review mustn't answer these questions; we need just to ask them to show that we're aware of the textual ambiguities of the Grimms' work. Besides, they set up the next required section of a standard review—the one that takes up the particularities of the new translation and translator. Here's an easy and obvious way to handle the transition: If the Brothers Grimm were forced by the mores of their time to desexualize and moralize and Christianize the stories, then to what shifts is the translator of this new edition put? Maria Tatar may think she has escaped the stifling constraints of the 19th century, but she carefully segregates some stories off in a separate section, with the title "Tales for Adults," as though she were a prissy Victorian librarian.

They are, of course, the stories that have more than the usual Grimmian level of ugliness. Maybe you think of the movies that Disney made from the Grimms' stories as a sentimentalizing of fairy tales. If so, you need to rewatch the quite frightening 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. But whatever stands on the sentimental side of fairy tales, the ones in Tatar's adults-only section are way over on the other side: anti-Semitic, and cruel, and, well, German.

From her post at Harvard, Tatar has produced annotated editions of the Grimms, Hans Christian Andersen, and other classic tales, along with a provocative and quite brilliant scholarly study of children's literature, the 2009 Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood. (Its provocations start in the title: "The Enchanted Hunters" sounds like the name of a fairy tale, as Vladimir Nabokov understood full well when, in Lolita, he chose it as the name of the hotel in which the child is finally sexually captured by Humbert.) Her scholarship shows up in this new Grimm Reader with the book's long coda of quotations from famous authors, all succumbing to the temptation to opine profoundly on fairy tales:

Walter Benjamin, Bruno Bettelheim, Italo Calvino, G. K. Chesterton, Charles Dickens, Graham Greene, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, Richard Wright, and so on.

And so on, and so on. Look, the truth is, Maria Tatar's Grimm Reader is a reasonable reediting and retranslating of the most famous and most typical of the Grimm tales: "Cinderella," "Hansel and Gretel," "Little Red Riding Hood," "Rapunzel," "Rumpelstiltskin," "Snow White and Rose Red," and much else of what you remember. Plus some of what you wish you didn't remember, notably "The Jew in the Brambles" and "The Stubborn Child." She's got a clean, flat prose that's appropriate for telling the stories and avoids the worst excesses of the faux-childish voice sometimes assumed for such things. With its adults-only section, the book will have trouble finding an audience, but that's not exactly its fault; there's a use for a good, accurate shorter selection of the fairy tales, and now, with The Grimm Reader, we have it.

Of course, though that's the truth, it doesn't seem much on which to build a review. So, for constructing the standard magazine or newspaper entry on fairy tales, we need to loop back to the beginning and repeat our deep opening comment. The word enchantment should make another appearance here, and we have to say something about how these are not just for children but for adults, as well: "Fearlessly and sometimes fearfully, the Grimms embrace a welter of intractable human dilemmas."

Ah, yes. Add a sentence about how the stories are still meaningful, despite our cultural changes: "Their smoky looking glasses," we could say, hold up mirrors "to our glossy, high-tech, twenty-first century children, hidden aspects of their own inner lives, buried treasure all too rarely tapped." End with a bit of goo: The stories "perform a lasting and invaluable educational task: They teach us to marvel, to quest, to seek."

And the reviewer's job is done. The Grimm Brothers' fairy tales—hard, indigestible bits of prose—are thus digested, slathered in a sauce of right-thinking wisdom. These ugly stories are prettified, these nasty accounts are sweetened, and these brutal narratives are softened into "a lasting and invaluable educational task." All is surmounted, all is understood, and the place of the tales in the middlebrow canon is preserved.

There's only one task left after we've finished our review. And that's not to believe a word of it.

Joseph Bottum is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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