Once upon a time ...

Children learn lessons from the stories they read, said Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but “when they are in a position to apply them, they almost always do so in a way opposite to the author’s intention.” With tales from the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, Joseph Jacobs and others, Maria Tatar’s “Annotated Classic Fairy Tales” serves as a rich elaboration of that idea.

Tatar’s choice of stories is indeed “classic”: nothing that would not have been part of the basic nursery library of any educated Western home at mid-century. But by entwining those almost-too-familiar stories with historical notes, multiple interpretations and illustrations by a variety of artists, she shows not only how individuals but also societies, classes, eras and bickering gaggles of scholars have drawn endlessly various meanings from the same narratives. In the process she leads us to see that the very search for “meaning” is a diminution of the mysterious and contradictory powers of storytelling.

Tatar is a folklorist and professor of Germanic languages at Harvard, and most of her notes concern historical backgrounds or parallels among folk traditions, but here and there she allows us a Freudian, Jungian, Marxist or lit-critical interpretation. So, as we explore even as simple a narrative as “Jack and the Beanstalk,” we can read it as a symbol of the end of the oral phase of early childhood or of the British exploitation of the colonies, connect it to the stories of Aladdin and the Buddha, and consider why Jacobs chose to reject an earlier, more moralistic version and tell the story as he did.

The accompanying illustrations help us experience the story simultaneously as dreamy idyll (Maxfield Parrish), rustic humor (Arthur Rackham) and frightening adventure (an anonymous Victorian who took his giants quite seriously). And we can engage with our children, as Tatar suggests, in questioning whether Jack was a hero whose slaying of the giant and liberation of his property was justified or if he was really just a very bad boy.

Tatar demonstrates that efforts to reduce such narratives to ethical how-to manuals for the preschool set are nothing new. The Grimms’ first collection was assailed by 19th century audiences as “tasteless” and full of material “unsuitable for children,” and so in their second edition the brothers added moral messages and rewrote everything that could be seen as troubling to parents. At the time that meant mainly sexual references: their first version of “Rapunzel” outed the long-tressed heroine when she asked the enchanted warden of her tower why her clothes no longer fit after her lover knocked her up; the slip of the lip that has betrayed her in every telling of the story for the last 180 years (“Why are you so much heavier than the king’s son?”) was a Grimm invention. (The shift in parental jitters over the last two centuries can be measured by the fact that, while cleaning up the sex, the Grimms exaggerated the violence and gore, apparently feeling that horror would drive the moral points home more vividly for children.)

More recently, cultural conservatives such as William J. Bennett have tried to hijack the stories for the promotion of their simple ethical templates, an effort that Tatar dismisses as “mindless.” The author of “The Book of Virtues,” she says, “fails to recognize the complexities of reading, the degree to which children ... become passionate about vices as well as virtues.” What fascinates in these tales are not the acts and consequences that proceed to happy endings but the transformations, killings, abandonments, agonies and sudden boons on the twisting forest paths along the way.

Tatar thus allies herself more with Bruno Bettelheim, who argued in “The Uses of Enchantment” that the violence and horror of fairy tales can be therapeutic for children. But even he fell prey to the reductionism that seduces anyone who tries to make the stories serve a “use.” “Goldilocks and the Three Bears,” he fretted, failed to provide the “promise of future happiness awaiting those who have mastered their oedipal situation as a child.”

Tatar’s comment is a bit decorous: “Bettelheim’s reading is perhaps too invested in instrumentalizing fairy tales,” but simply by placing the quote against the suspense and delight of that naughty little girl’s narrow escape from the consequences of poking around where she shouldn’t, she exposes even that psychoanalyst as a prig who couldn’t quite bear to let a child pursue the lure of fantasy off the predetermined path.

Tatar makes clear, however, that the eternal warfare between the tales and their interpreters is not one between folk purity and educated folly. The biographical sketches at the back of the book emphasize the extent to which these fairy tales are the works of individual authors. Andersen openly invented his own stories. Perrault reworked peasant tales into parables for the aristocrats of Versailles. Even the Grimm brothers, while insisting that their intention was to record folk literature, relied extensively on literary sources and rewrote their stories progressively over many editions.

Nor were the yarns as we know them spun by cultural insiders: Andersen was a social outcast whose work was generally disdained in his native Denmark until long after he’d achieved fame abroad; Jacobs, the first great collector of English fairy tales, was an Australian Jew who taught in New York; the Grimms’ principal source was Dorothea Viehmann, no peasant crone from the Schwarzwald but the daughter of an innkeeper of French Huguenot descent -- an outsider to every nation, raised on polyglot travelers’ tales.

These authors’ versions of the tales became “classic” because of the universalism, prettiness and sense of an authorial voice that they bring to what would otherwise be rustic peculiarities.

In an appendix, Tatar gives us the opportunity to read a genuine folk version of “Little Red Riding Hood” called “The Story of Grandmother.” As a contrast, it’s illuminating: The girl is not devoured and freed from the wolf’s death belly by a paternal savior but slips away by pretending she needs to relieve herself. As a story, however, it strikes the modern reader as ill-proportioned, slight and good for little but a drunken chuckle around the bonfire. It was the reworking of such folk tales by urbane authors that created the mesmerizing and eternal “fairy tales.”

“The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales” is itself a bit of a frog prince. The stories are lovely, most of them retranslated by Tatar with a sensitive inflection toward being read aloud; but the marginal notes tease us repeatedly out of their spell, while never coalescing into a coherent narrative.

The illustrations are too small and redundant to serve as evocative visual partners to the narrative (especially if one imagines holding up the page to show a child); nor are they systematic enough to guide us intellectually. While the tales derive mainly from the 17th to the mid-19th century, when the rude facts of peasant life were still vivid to most Europeans, the illustrations are drawn from the industrialized Europe of the late 19th and early 20th centuries--pre-Raphaelite, Art Nouveau, Neo-Gothic--reinventing old Europe as (in Edward Burne-Jones’ phrase) “a beautiful romantic dream ... a land no one can define, or remember, only desire.”

At times the anthology feels more like a scrapbook, but maybe that’s how it should be: The almost random smattering of images and diversity of notes suggest many unfollowed paths of interpretation, reminding us of Tatar’s central argument that each story is many things at once.

Tatar (“The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales”) has shown that she can mount a coherent folkloric investigation. Here she chooses not to do so, suggesting even that too much coherence diminishes the tales. Here she scatters information like bread crumbs in the forest, which might lead us back to familiar territory or might be carried willy-nilly by birds of thought to unsuspected adventures in the forest of stories.