More on the Brothers Grimm from our European correspondent

Back in December I ran a little ditty on the Brothers Grimm, mostly so I could make fun of something German and especially from Hanau. This was for recovering former VAC employees. Over the Christmas holidays Pati Pawlak found herself in Hanau. Like how I said that, like she sort of drunkenly stumbled off the wrong train, like those cute-crazy drunken kids in the Southern Comfort commercial that can't tell the difference between a train bound for Prague and one bound for Barcelona? Anyway, Pati was in Hanau intentionally, and sent this fun email from which I have learned that the Grimm brothers were atypical Hessens in that they were lazy and just copied their work off the French. I guess we can thank them for sanitizing the French stories half-way so Disney didn't have to work so hard.

The subject of this email was toe cutting.

yesterday i witnessed a girl getting her feet cut in the sqaure. ´she
looked like a step sister, cinderells'a step sister to eb exact. then, if that
weren't enough, another girl had her heel cut off! she too looked oawully
similar to cinderella's other step sister. why, you may ask, were they
doing that? well, the sad truth is that they were trying to fit into a glass
slipper!

ok, so i didn't really see that, but i am in hanau right
now and they have little wooden german houses set up next to the grimm brother's
statue. it made me think of your hanau grimm blog. i think that you should add
that the brother's were a fake. they didn't travel the country collecting
authentic german fables, but rather did not set foot outside of the library in
which they worked and rewrote old french fables! they just added a 'german touch
to them' which was 1) to make them less morbid (apparently cutting off feet and
heels is LESS morbid! lol) and 2) they put in little tid bits of what good
german children should be like.

if you've never read the french
version of little red riding hood you should, it's an evil tale... the little
red darlind eats her grandmother's flesh and drinks her blood, because she
thinks it's wine. i can understand a little girl accidentally eating her
grandmother... but my only question here is... just at what age do french
children start to drink wine? (apparently it's at the same age as drinking the
blood of christ at church)