Proposal

I propose an edition of the fairytale Rumpelstiltskin. The fairytale originated almost 3000 years ago. My edition will include one of the oldest renditions which I can find, a version from Grimm’s Fairytales from the 1800s, and a modern day version. I think that a careful observation of differences across these three time frames will provide some view into how everyday life has changed as well as what people look for in a children’s story. The primary intended audience of fairy tales is children and the parents of those children. I believe the intended audience of my edition will be similar to the intended audience of the original children’s stories. The introduction about what changes are present in various versions of the fairytale will likely be of less interest to these groups, but hey, the next generation of bibliographers may enjoy it. I believe that the introduction to the edition will be most used for scholars of early literary work, ideally those with some interest in children’s stories. I will present this edition on paper. It will include a short introductory synopsis of each of the versions, then a summarization of the differences between each of the versions, an edited version of the story which will follow the editorial practices laid out after this and a short conclusion regarding why some of the changes present in the edition may have come to be. While Rumpelstiltskin is an old enough tale that its original author is not well known, older versions will still be given more weight due to the fact that they are chronologically closer in time to when the author wrote the original story. Additionally, I will consider the fact that the most modern version is likely the most well suited version for what parents and children in our culture expect and, therefore, try to maintain a similar level of maturity of content to that version.