ABSTRACT
Ruskin's interest in fairy tales stems from his early exposure to the 1823 translation by Edgar Taylor of the tales from Grimm, and later, in 1868, he wrote an introduction to the reissue of the book, German Popular Stories. Ruskin was a staunch opponent of explicit moralism in fairy tales, and he praised the Grimms' tales for possessing "true historical value;-historical at least in so far as it has naturally arisen out of the mind of a people under special circumstances, and risen not without meaning, nor removed altogether from their sphere of religious faith." According to Ruskin the power of the traditional fairy tales resides in their capacity "to animate the material world with inextinguishable life, to fortify children against the glacial cold of selfish science," and to prepare them to behold "the mystery of the fates that happen alike to the evil and the good." These principles are evidently at work in his own literary fairy tale The King ojthe Golden River, written first for his fiancee Euphemia Chalmers Gray in 1841 and published in 1851 with the illustrations of Richard Doyle. The tale was based on the brothers Grimm's "The Water of Life" and directed against the greed and exploitation that, he believed, was infecting Victorian society. Though it was the only tale he ever wrote for young
readers, it gradually became a classic, and its appeal through the years can be attributed to the manner in which Ruskin combined his personal utopian longings with a social condemnation of cruelty and injustice.
