So this guy Franz Xaver Von Schonwerth collected all these fairytales and in the 2000′s they were discovered in an attic and published. Unlike the Grimm brothers, he did not edit anything. The Grimms deliberately edited the stories to fit middle class tastes - they also were trying to create a national identity with these tales as a touchstone. Meanwhile Von Schonwerth’s goal was documenting the Bavarian oral traditions - which is why he didn’t edit the stories in his notes. 

And the stories are weird and intense. Some have the classic “beginning middle end + moral” - some are just “here’s stuff that happened….” 

And some of the endings…you know that story about a weary soldier who performs three tasks and gets to marry the princess? In this book, the soldier is continually rejected by both the king and the princess, so he brings an army to burn down the entire castle with everyone inside. The end, lol.

The other interesting thing is that while the Grimms tales had mostly female protagonists, Von Schonwerth’s have as many boys trying to escape nasty situations as girls. There are boys who cuddle up with frogs to discover that the frogs are princesses, there are boys called “King Goldenhair,” there are brothers fighting, and fathers sending sons out to stop being a burden on the family. In the introduction, Maria Tatar posits that the Grimms, having suffered from being orphans, may have avoided these types of stories. 

Mixing traditional Chinese clothes with current Western clothes with @spookybanana

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When you’re out with your dad and he just keeps talking to some random guy

Twenty years ago, a team of divers found the wreck of the Sydney Cove. In 1796, the ship set sail from Calcutta, India, for Sydney, Australia. It sank along the way, taking 31,500 liters of tightly-sealed alcohol to the ocean floor. They were so well-sealed, in fact, that modern divers were surprised to discover that some bottles were still good!

Analyses revealed that the Sydney Cove was carrying port, grapes, and beer. The beer was an especially exciting find, because beer is a living thing, filled with yeasts for fermentation.  Brewers with Australia’s oldest brewery are hoping to use that yeast to create 18th-century-style beer.

First, they isolated the yeast from one of the beer bottles. They were excited to discovered that not only was the yeast 220 years old, but it was a rare hybrid strain, totally different from those used in modern beer. They had to experiment a lot to find a drink that was drinkable to modern tongues. One brewer described it as “taming” the yeast!