✨🍎Fairytale Friday 🍎✨
Fairest of All 🪞
This week’s tale draws us deep into the shadowed woods with Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs, the Brothers Grimm classic translated by Randall Jarrell and illustrated with chilling beauty by Nancy Ekholm Burkert. Published in 1973 by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, this is no softened bedtime tale. Here, jealousy festers, danger waits in disguise, and innocence flickers like a fragile flame.
Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) was an acclaimed American poet, novelist, critic, and essayist. He served as U.S. Poet Laureate (then called Consultant in Poetry) to the Library of Congress. Though best known for his war poetry, Jarrell also turned his pen to children’s literature. In this translation, Jarrell preserves the tale’s severity while weaving in a rhythm and poetry that make its edges gleam all the sharper.
Nancy Ekholm Burkert (b. 1933) is an American artist whose style evokes Renaissance painting and dreamlike realism, capturing innocence and menace with equal power. Snow-White and the Seven Dwarfs earned a Caldecott Honor, placing her among the most celebrated illustrators in American children’s literature. Her Snow-White is ethereal, fragile, and luminous, while each illustration heightens the story’s gothic intensity, echoing the Grimm tradition of fairy tales as cautionary, perilous, and strange.
So, beware the silence of the forest, the whispers of a mirror, the gleam of a crimson apple. Fairy tales are never only sweet… sometimes, they bite.
Our copy is a gift of Megan Holbrook and Eric Vogel.
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--Melissa (who will most certainly not be eating apples this weekend), Distinctive Collections Library Assistant
