Grimm's fairy tales: Semper fidelis Grimm Tales: For Young and Old. By Philip Pullman. Penguin Classics; 406 pages; £20. To be published in America next month by Viking; $27.95. THE most striking feature of the fairy tales of the brothers Grimm is their anarchy. A creature in a tree, half-boy, half-hedgehog, plays the bagpipes, mounted on a cockerel. A golden bird takes wing with a chain in one claw, red slippers in the other, and a millstone round its neck. A fisherman's wife sits on a golden throne two miles high, wearing a crown three yards by two yards. Beautiful or grotesque, the mad poetry of these tales is often delightfully funny too. For this collection, Philip Pullman has translated 50 of the best; old favourites such as "Hansel and Gretel" and "Snow White," as well as many less well known. They are a real pleasure to read. Swiftness and clarity, he says, were his guiding principles; to which he has added wit and invention. A fairy tale is not a text, he explains. Rather, it is a transcription of something told and told again. Tellers have a duty to embellish and elaborate, even to steal. But there is a catch. A sprite, he says, attends each tale, a special voice, which must be treated with respect and courtesy. Mr Pullman, who made his name with an anticlerical children's trilogy, "His Dark Materials," notes the huge body of interpretation surrounding these tales. But he insists they are stories first, not allegories. The Grimms first published their collection in 1812, having gathered them together from a variety of sources, some better than others. A few, like "The Juniper Tree," ask to be left alone. In others Mr Pullman has felt free to follow his nose. His common people, for example, are always gabby. Take dwarves. "What a nice girl," they say, to one of the many put-upon stepdaughters in this book. "She's wearing paper," remarks one. "Fashionable, I expect," says another. "Chilly, though," adds a third. A sense of comedy is never far off. Mount Sepsick! Mount Spittelboom!" cries the wicked brother in another story, groping for the magic words that will open the cave. "Mount Siccapillydircus!" he tries again in desperation. Readers aloud will be heartened. This is the kind of writing that stands up to years of bedtime repetition. Not that bedtime is necessarily the best time to be exposed to it. Little boys have their heads chopped off (and stuck on again), dead men converse as they swing from the gallows, bisected bodies drop down the chimney. But it brings comfort too. The wicked get their comeuppance and the starving their banquets. And anyway, as Mr Pullman remarks, these are not people, as in novels, but cut-outs - flat, fixed and whizzing through their adventures. In his introduction Mr Pullman explains that he aims to make the stories "as clear as water." He succeeds, though here and there his own wry presence is unmistakable. St Peter jumping onto his "holy horse" is one such place; his description of the abbots and bishops crawling to kiss the left and right toes of the fisherman's wife (now pope) is another. But the author's best appearances are in the notes, which are often as entertaining as the stories themselves. The note to "Thousandfurs" even proposes another ending, a gruesome coda told with gusto, involving severed limbs and incestuous molestation. "I think that would work quite well," Mr Pullman adds, deadpan.