tales I have very often endeavoured to translate to them in such an ex tempore manner as I could and I was always gratified by the pleasure which the German fictions seemed to convey. In memory of which our old family cat still bears the foreign name of Hinze which so often occurs in these little narratives. In a great number of them tales I can perfectly remember the nursery stories of my childhood, some of them distinctly and others like the memory of a dream. Should you ever think of enlargening your very interesting notes I would with pleasure forward to you such of the tales as I remember. The Prince Paddock was for instance a legend well known to me where a princess is sent to fetch water in a sieve from the Well of the Worlds End succeeds by the advice of the frog who aids her on promise to become his bride.
Stop with moss and dugg with clay
And that will weize the water away
The frog comes to claim his bride and to tell the tale with effect the sort of plash which he makes in leaping on the floor ought to be imitated singing this nuptial ditty.
Open the door my hinny my heart
Open the door my ain wee thing
And mind the words that you and me spoke
Down in the meadow the well-spring.
In the same strain as the song of the little bird:
My mother me killed
My father me ate etc. etc.
Independently of the curious circumstance that such tales should be found existing in very different countries and languages which augurs a greater poverty of human invention than we would have expected there is also a sort of wild fairy interest in them which makes me think them fully better adapted to awaken the imagination and soften the heart of childhood than the good-boy stories which have been in later years composed for them. In the latter case their minds are as it were put into the stocks like their feet at the dancing school and the moral always consists in good moral conduct … being crowned with temporal success. Truth is I would not give one tear shed over Little Red Ridinghood for all the benefit to be derived from a hundred histories of Tommy Goodchild. Miss Edgeworth who has with great genius trod the more modern path is to be sure an exception from my utter dislike of these moral narrations but it [is] because they are really fitter for grown people than for childern. I must say however that I think the story of Simple Susan in particular quite inimitable. But Waste not, Want not, though a most ingenious tale is I fear – more apt to make a curmudgeon of a boy who has from nature a close cautious temper than to correct a careless idle destroyer of whip-cord. In a word I think the selfish tendencies will be soon enough acquired in this arithmetical age and
Otto Hartwig: Zur ersten englischen Übersetzung der Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm. Otto Harrassowitz, Leipzig 1898, Seite 13. Digitale Volltext-Ausgabe bei Wikisource, URL: https://de.wikisource.org/w/index.php?title=Seite:Hartwig_Uebersetzung_Maerchen_Grimm.djvu/13&oldid=- (Version vom 1.8.2018)
