Grimm Tales by Philip Pullman: review We think we know about the brothers Grimm, traipsing around Germany, painstakingly recording the fairy tales of garrulous old farmers" wives. This, says Philip Pullman in the introduction to this sprightly collection, is not true. They collated them from bourgeois sources, sometimes even literary ones. Pullman has retold them admirably, with added sprinklings of wit. The universe in Grimm Tales is both odd and familiar. People are defined by one characteristic: courageous, stupid, pure. They rarely meet fairies; when elves do appear, they tend to come in secret, and run away when approached. Instead the princesses, tailors and fishermen meet human wickedness. Here are the classic tropes of folklore: wishes, golden beings, metamorphoses. If you are good and die, most likely you will be resurrected, even if your head has been chopped off. If you are not good, the sense of justice is wild. Perpetrators of crimes are thrown into barrels with nails on the inside, drowned, cut into pieces. The tales have a swift yet stately sense of movement, the storytelling stripped down to the very basics. They manage to be gripping, even if their structure has a hypnotic regularity. The most famous are present: the original "Cinderella," with its wishing tree and mutilations; "Snow White," pre-Disney, and worryingly pre-teen. More interesting, perhaps, for the seasoned reader are the obscurer ones: the strange beauty of "The Golden Bird," with its battling brothers and helpful foxes; and the weirdness of "Hans-My-Hedgehog," which is about a half-boy, half-hedgehog, who rides a cockerel and plays the bagpipes. You don't find that in Disney. The footnotes are a fun touch. Pullman dismisses a Jungian interpretation of "The Golden Bird" as "twaddle." Echoes of the Grimms" collection occur throughout literature - Thyestes, King Lear, Philip Sidney's Arcadia. They are as old as we are. This version (while it could have been a little shorter) serves a commendable purpose. Pullman adds himself to the great line of storytellers, achieving his aim of clarity, as well as a sense of these tales as living, mutable things that still transmit deep truths - even if they did come from a bourgeois's mouth. Grimm Tales for Young and Old Philip Pullman Penguin Classics, £20, 405pp