Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Take a fairytale trip to Germany


Hello Magazine recently posted Take a fairytale trip to Germany as a short article about fairy tale themed travel in Germany, obviously. It's a nice piece and includes links to a Fairy Tale Route site. (If you click through to the site, note the animated Puss in Boots in the right column. At least Germany is quite happy to use a French fairy tale.... :)

From Hanau to Bremen, there stretches a trail of magic where childhood dreams come true. The Fairy Tale Trail, a journey of 600 kilometres on the map, but farther than that into the depths of imagination, leads back to the early nineteenth century to the palace where Sleeping beauty lay for a hundred years and through the forest where Little Red Riding Hood met the wolf. You can listen to the melodies of the Musicians of Bremen and perhaps Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs will come out to greet you on your way.

It's ideal for a family trip, a journey full of magic, linking some 70 cities and towns from the marvellous stories of Jacob Ludwig Karl and Wilhelm Karl Grimm. The brothers were students of philology and folklore and their studies prompted them to travel around the country talking to the people. They talked to farmers, and wood cutters and women in the market, and they asked them to dig into their memories for the stories their grandparents had told them when they were young. First they collected the stories together in the book Tales of Children and the Home and then later expanded the collection in Grimms' Fairy Tales: the tales that are still so familiar to us today.

This is one of the trips I dream of taking someday, so I always notice articles about it and this one stood out as one of the better ones.

2 comments:

  1. Just after college I spent a few weeks with family in Germany— one of the most memorable things being an afternoon trip to Hamelin (of Pied Piper fame). The fact that this was a real place, and that they not only acknowledged, but embraced the tale, made the legend all that more real.... and strange...in a really cool way...

    Jeff A. Menges

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  2. How nice! Thanks for sharing!!

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