A fairy wife story, containing two of the usual morals of these types of stories: Fairy laws are arbitrary, but you'd better follow 'em anyway, and Men are horrible. (There is a touch of Fairies don't care about you, but since the whole point of the story is "the fairy wife gets a soul and uses it better than anyone who was born with one," that's pretty minor.) ( )

Sadly, the mermaids here are far and few between, like most mermaid stories I read. She's a human for about all of the book. She's some sort of orphaned water-nymph taken in by parents, and she never betrays a non-human nature. She marries a wandering knight, and then there's some strife and betrayal. To be honest, I tuned out the last quarter of the book once I realized the mermaids were not happening.

The nice thing about it was that it was classic romance genre, so there was nothing complex about it. It smacked of Ivanhoe -- wandering knight, torn between two women, and I think there was a joust. But it was much shorter so that was good. I can also see where Hans Christian Andersen got some of his influences for The Little Mermaid. If you want to say you've read some classic romantic literature, this is a good place to start. ( )

Undine Okay, I feel like one of those people who go, "omg, the Glee cover was WAY better than the original", but...
 
I read Jean Giraudoux's Ondine when I was a child, and re-read it a thousand times since, plus I watched the wonderful comédie-française production, starring a young Isabelle Adjani, so it's fair to say I'm a little bit obsessed with Giraudoux's take on the story.
 
I guess since that story is practically set in stone in my mind, when I got to the original by Motte Fouqué, every page of it my brain would go, "No! That's not how it goes!"
...which is absurd because Giraudoux's work is an adaptation of this!
 
That being said, it's still a delightful fairytale, well worth reading (you can find it for free at Project Gutenberg!) And Arthur Rackham's illustrations are AMAZING! Look!
 

 
You can see all of his illustrations for this book at the site Rackham Fairy and Fairy Tale Art. ( )

Undine is a slender novella, or rather, a longish fairy-tale in the ninteenth-century romantic tradition of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. The afterword seems to indicate that it was an inspiration for Andersen's "The Little Mermaid," and that may well be. Undine appeared in 1811. (I was constantly struck by how much the language - which is to say, German - has changed since then, though one gets accustomed to the differences quickly enough.) It is the story of a water spirit, an elemental creature without a soul, mischievous, inconstant, childish. But she marries a knight, and through their union acquires a soul, becoming good and selfless. Two forces conspire against the happiness of Undine and her knight: her uncle Kühlborn and the lady for the love of whom the knight had gone into the forest where he found Undine. There is, of course, a magical taboo that is broken, with tragic consequences. Like "The Little Mermaid," the story is a bittersweet version of the Pygmalion story.

10 cent score ( )