Excerpt from The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm The inference is plain that these tales must have had a common origin; but whether the stories were carried from one land to another by early traders, or whether their possession by widely scattered peoples proves these groups to have sprung from one original stock, students of mythology have not yet decided. Certain it is that many of the tales are very old, having undergone numerous changes in the course of years, with such omissions and additions as were need ful to adapt them to the country using them. A ver sion of the Cinderella story, for instance, as old records show, was current in Iceland at least one thou sand years ago; while the Wolf and Kids story can be traced in Greek mythology antedating the Christian era. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.