Book Review: The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales by Franz Xaver Von Schonwerth

The Turnip Princess and Other Newly Discovered Fairy Tales by Franz Xaver von Schonwerth, compiled and edited with a forward by Erika Eichenseer, translated with an introduction and commentary by Maria Tatar

Franz Xaver von Schonwerth was a lawyer with a successful career in the Bavarian royal court of the mid-1800s. His interest in local customs and folklore had him doing lots of research and interviews in local towns. He published a book called From the Upper Palatinate: Customs and Legends. The book included a small portion of his research. In 2009, Erika Eichenseer found hundreds of fairy tales that von Schonwerth had collected and had been stored in a municipal archive. Some seventy of the stories are collected in this book.

The stories run the gamut from the familiar (a Bavarian Cinderella and Pied Piper) to the bazaar (the title story has a lad pulling a nail out of a cave wall which transforms an old hag into a beautiful princess). A lot of familiar tropes are present: sets of three (princesses, sons, brothers, magical animals, tasks, etc.), enchanted castles, fairy folk of various kinds (including mermaids!), royalty, commoners (farmers, bakers, and tailors seem very common), good-hearted fools, magical animals, and wicked step-parents. The stories have not been edited to make them more literary like in Hans Christian Andersen or the Brothers Grimm. There's quite a few shifts in narrative or logic that are unexpected and unpredictable. Even so, the stories are enjoyable and very short (most are two pages). 

The translation manages to have that timeless feel without having archaic language or sentence structure. "Once upon a time" never shows up but there's plenty of "they lived happily ever after" endings, sometimes even literally that. Tatar has produced a lot of other good works on fairy tales, so she has the scholarship and the skill to translate the tales well.

Recommended.