one of the grey ones. Priestley’s indictment of con-
formity and complacency is cleverly done and is
probably his best-remembered short story.
Grimm, Jacob (1785–1863)and
Grimm, Wilhelm (1786–1859)
The Grimm Brothers, along with the Danish writer
Hans Christian ANDERSEN, are the most famous and
revered writers of fairy tales. The two German
brothers, one a linguist and the other a literary
scholar, were intensely interested in folklore and be-
lieved that it was important that it be recorded so
that individual tales would not be lost over the
course of generations. They began their project with
their first collection of folk tales in 1812 and pre-
served almost 250 of them before they were done.
Although the stories were not original with
them, it is likely that many would have been lost
to us had they not done their careful work, and in
some cases they “improved” on the folk tales by
adding scenes or even changing plot elements.
Among the many classics they adapted are “Cin-
derella,” “Snow White,” “Tom Thumb,” “The
Bremen Town Musicians,” “The Frog Prince,”
“Rumpelstiltskin,” “The Golden Goose,” “Little
Red Riding Hood,” and “Hansel and Gretel.”
The number of stories, novels, and films based di-
rectly or indirectly on these is far too great to list.
As with Hans Christian Andersen, the Grimm
Brothers were writing for adults, but when trans-
lated into English their work was invariably tar-
geted at youths and even dismissed as children’s
literature.
Gulliver’s Travels Jonathan Swift(1726)
Although Jonathan Swift wrote a number of other
works, some of them fantasy, the single title for
which he remains most renowned is this episodic
novel, which was originally titled Travel into Several
Remote Nations of the World,acquiring its more fa-
miliar title, Gulliver’s Travels, almost a century
later. Although Swift used the experiences of
Lemuel Gulliver for satirical purposes, targeting a
different idiosyncrasy of humanity in each country
Gulliver visits, most of that has now been forgot-
ten, and the book, like most early fairy tales, is
generally considered a children’s classic, its subtext
forgotten or ignored. The names of his nations of
tiny people and giants, Lilliput and Brobdingnab
respectively, have entered the general vocabulary
as descriptive terms for very small and very large
objects or concepts.
Gulliver is alternately honored and made cap-
tive, delighted and shocked, mystified and elated
as he visits a succession of obscure regions. There
are satires of capitalism, technological progress, the
legal system, and other subjects, as in the case of a
war fought over the question of which end of an
egg should be broken first. Some of the societies he
encounters would not be out of place in science
fiction, including a land of immortals, but others
are clearly fantastic, including one in which magic
is employed to communicate with the dead, pro-
viding Gulliver the chance to converse with Aris-
tole, Julius Caesar, and others.
More than half a dozen film versions, includ-
ing a recent television miniseries, have been based
on Swift’s classic novel. There were several early
sequels by other writers, none of which were worth
preserving, and the form of the novel, which Swift
adapted from earlier writers, has been imitated
many times since. The author conveys one or more
protagonists through a series of societies, each of
which is distinct and designed to illustrate a satiri-
cal point. The most recent of these is Lurulu
(2004), by Jack Vance, which substitutes different
planets for the various islands of Gulliver’s day but
otherwise follows a very similar pattern.148 Grimm, Jacob and Grimm, Wilhelm