Household Tales (1884)

Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm, Margaret Hunt, LibriVox volunteers · 1884 · 1818 min

Not "Grimms' Fairy Tales" — the selection of forty that every children's edition reprints — but the whole thing: two hundred stories and ten children's legends, in the order the brothers fixed them in 1857, in Margaret Hunt's 1884 translation, which is the first complete English one and still the standard. Most of these you have never heard of, and some of them are astonishing: the ones about fear, the ones about hunger, the ones where the moral is simply that the clever survive. The famous tales are here too, uncut, with the endings the cartoons removed.

A collection this size on LibriVox is a group project by necessity, and forty readers means forty voices; treat it as an anthology, which is what it is, and dip in. Thirty hours, 1.7 GB — the biggest thing on the shelf.

Chosen reading: LibriVox group production, forty readers; Internet Archive item household_tales_1708_librivox — 210 files contiguously numbered (householdtales_001_grimm_128kb.mp3 … householdtales_210_grimm_128kb.mp3), 1.75 GB, 30 h 18 min total, cataloged 2017-08-26.

Hunt's edition has 200 numbered tales plus 10 children's legends, and the item has 210 numbered files: the count is the completeness check. No gaps, no duplicates; running order correct once sorted; the 128 kbps MP3 set ships. The 2022 version 2 is a second complete group reading and the natural alternate.

Published on the source's record rather than a listen-through (owner decision, 2026-08-26): LibriVox proof-listens every completed project chapter by chapter before release, and the three pilots' full listens turned up nothing their project pages had not already said — so the chapter table and byte check above are the verification, and the first listener who finds a fault in any of these forty voices should write to the Den.

Three layers, all clear:

• The tales. Kinder- und Hausmärchen, Berlin, editions 1812–1857; both brothers died in the 1860s.
• The translation. Margaret Hunt's Grimm's Household Tales, George Bell & Sons, London, 1884 — a translation is its own work and this one is inside the pre-1931 line; Hunt died in 1912. This is the text LibriVox reads.
• The narration. LibriVox dedicates its recordings to the public domain; the item carries a Creative Commons Public Domain Mark 1.0 label. Recorded 2017 by the forty volunteers credited on the project page.