Google Doodle celebrates 200th anniv of Grimm Brothers’ Tales

The Google Doodle today is definitely worth checking out especially if you are one of those who loved your fairy tales. It celebrates the 200th anniversary of the first publication of Grimm Brothers’ Die Kinder und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales). The Doodle shows the story of one of the most loved of those stories, The Little Red Riding Hood.

For the uninitiated, The Little Red Riding Hood, is the story of a girl, who were a red coloured hood and goes to visit her grandmother who is sick. She meets a wolf on the way and unsuspecting that she tells him about her poor grandmother. The wolf runs ahead, eats her grandmother, and waits for her. When Red Riding Hood comes the wolf devours her as well. Luckily a woodcutter comes and kills the wolf and two are saved.

Screengrab of today’s Google Doodle.

The story is often seen as an analogy warning young girls of the perils of talking to strangers and the perils it carries. By the way, there’s also a modern version of the classic tale as well where it is Red Riding Hood who shoots the wolf with a gun and turns him into a fur coat.

The Google Doodle today has several panels. You click on the forward button on the right hand side of the panel and you move on to the next page of the story. Each page shows a different chapter of the story.

According to this piece in the Guardian Germany is celebrating the 200th publication of Grimm’s tales as well. Academics from around the globe, meeting this week in the central German city of Kassel, close to the brothers’ birthplace, are kicking off the 2013 celebrations with a Grimm brothers’ congress. Participants, ranging from lexicographers to psychoanalysts, will focus on everything from the book’s enduring legacy to the brothers’ impact on German grammar and how they shaped the nation’s erotic imagination.

Well, the Google Doodle was a fun way to start the celebrations.