”The Annotated Brothers Grimm” treats the stories as something important — not, in the end, because of what they tell us of the buried roots of Germanic myth, or because of the often contradictory and intermittently fashionable psychoanalytic interpretations, or for any other reason than that they are part of the way we see the world, because they should be told. That’s what I took from it, anyway. But fairy tales are magic mirrors: they show you what you wish to see.
These collections can be eye-opening if you only remember fairy-tales from your youth: Gaiman mentions “the Juniper Tree” which I just for the first time a month or two back in another Grimm collection. Gory, grisly, and not at all for children but still an insight into the human psyche, warts and all.