Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749–1832).Germany's Olympian poet and dramatist, Goethe turned to literary fairy tales on several occasions in mid‐life, integrating them into memoirs and novels. Chapbooks read in his childhood introduced him to popular tales like ‘Fortunatus’, ‘Melusine’, ‘Till Eulenspiegel’, and ‘The Wandering Jew’, and storytelling at home made children's stories like ‘The Brave Little Tailor’ familiar. In his twenties he made references in his correspondence to magical components recognizable from fairy tales such as ‘The Juniper Tree’, ‘One‐Eye, Two‐Eyes, and Three‐Eyes’, and ‘The Frog King’. Like all educated urban Germans of the 18th century, Goethe was also acquainted with French tales about fairies, both through his own reading and, by his own account, from stories his...
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