Grimm Tales Made Gay
Public-domain ebook
Grimm Tales Made Gay
Language: en3,159 downloads on Project Gutenberg
Subjects
Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #23024.
About this book
Grimm Tales Made Gay is a humor‑infused reworking of familiar fairy‑tale motifs, assembled by Guy Wetmore Carryl and originally scattered across early‑20th‑century periodicals such as Harper’s Magazine, The Century and The Saturday Evening Post. The collection opens with a formal acknowledgment of permission to reprint those verses, then launches into a series of tongue‑in‑cheek retellings, “How the Babes in the Wood Showed They Couldn’t Be Beaten,” “How Fair Cinderella Disposed of Her Shoe,” “How Little Red Riding Hood Came to Be Eaten,” and many more. Each tale is introduced with a mock‑epic title and proceeds in rhymed couplets that parody the moralizing tone of the originals while inserting contemporary wit, absurd exaggeration, and a playful subversion of expectations.
The voice is unmistakably that of a late‑Victorian to early‑Edwardian satirist, employing a brisk, rhymed cadence and a narrator who delights in exaggeration and moral irony. Carryl’s style blends the formal diction of the period with colloquial humor, making the work appealing to readers who enjoy clever parodies of classic stories, lovers of literary nonsense, and anyone with a taste for witty, slightly irreverent verse that both honors and lampoons the fairy‑tale tradition.
Opening lines
I have pleasure in acknowledging the courteous permission of the editors to reprint in this form such of these verses as were originally published in Harper's Magazine, The Century, Life, The Smart Set, The Saturday Evening Post, The Home Magazine, and the London Tatler. G. W. C. …
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