"What is this Jumble?" For Anthropology and Aesthetics of the Encyclopedia of the Tale in Comparison

By comparing the Enzyklopadie des Marchens with the Grimm brothers' Deutsches Worterbuch and the French Encyclopedie by D'Alembert and Diderot, I argue for the former's premier rank among the most distinguished of such projects in history. In order to establish a comparative framework, this article discusses Kurt Ranke's anthropological and aesthetic arguments. Encyclopedias, I suggest, must be examined as modern expressions of a particular narrative pathos, one that can be traced back to mythos. Three aspects are seen as especially important to the core argument: the circular mode of encyclopedic thinking, the dominant frame of the alphabet and the vision of a comprehensive approach.