First of all, to begin with our paper we will introduce the topic we are going to deal with, which is the aspect of time in the hypertext we are going to analyze, called "THE GRIMM TALE", which is written by the author of french origin, Marianne Rodríguez Petit, and it has been programmed by John Neilson. The text is an adaptation of the popular folktale "The Youth Who Went Forth To Learn What The Fear Was" (Summary and Full version in English and in German), written by the Brothers Grimm (Chronology of the Brothers Grimm) in the early 19th century, from which the first edition was published in 1812 titled "Good Bowling and Card Playing".  

The text is classified as a folktale because it has several of the typical characteristics of folktales, such as the use of a similar phrase to "Once upon a time", e.g.: "There once was a father(...)"(Chapter 1). It also has the number three present in the story, the King offered his daughter in marriage to the brave man who would spend three nights in a haunted castle, and the castle is also a characteristic of folktales (supernatural). Furthermore, we observe the repetition of phrases, especially the one the main character always says : "If I could but shudder..."(from chapter 3 onwards). In addition to that, the tale has good and bad characters, the bad ones would be the spirits, ghouls, cats, and other monsters the youth will find inside the haunted castle and the good ones would be the man who helps the youth walking him to the nearby inn, and also, making reference to the cats, we see another characteristic of a folktale, the presence of animals. Moreover, we observe also the main character has a problem to solve (he wants to discover what shuddering is), and there is a happy ending, in which the boy will understand what to shudder is. And finally, it also has a characteristic we will approach in our analysis of time, which is the folktale is timeless to an extent, is set in a medieval time, but specific time messages are not given.

Secondly, we will give a summary of the story to have an overview of the tale:

 The story follows the path of a young man (apparently in his teens) who does not know the meaning of shudder, and when he is asked about what he would like to be to earn his bread, he asks he wants to discover what shuddering is and earn his own life with it. The sexton offers himself to help the youth, and he tells him to go to the churchtower and ring the bell. When he is there, the sexton appears dressed as a ghost in front of the kid, who kicks him down the stairs. When the boy's father discovers what happened, sents his son away from home. After a failed attempt of discovering what shuddering is, a man takes the youth to an inn, and the innkeeper tells him the King is looking for somebody to marry his daughter, and the wedding will be the reward for spending three nights inside of a haunted castle. The boy sees his opportunity to learn what to shudder is and spends three consecutive nights in the castle, without getting to know the meaning of shudder. Finally, he marries the princess, and one night, she grabs a bucketful of cold water with cold gudgeons inside it, and empties it on the youth's naked body, making him learn by heart what shuddering is.

In third place, we want to take a look at the structure of the website, which is divided in:


-    A Table of contents, in which we will be able to access to every section of the site.

-    The story divided in 14 chapters, each one of them accessible from the Table of contents.

      Chapters:    1    2    3    4    5    6    7    8    9    10    11    12    13    14

-    A section called "Grimm Thoughts", in which a number of questions are asked to the visitors of the site  in order to create an archive of experiences dealing with fear.

-    Another section called "Take the Poll", in which the visitors can vote for any of the options given about "What gives you the fear" or to write something that scares them.

-    The "Credits", in which we can see the authors of the site and people who helped in any way to develop it.

-    The Requirements to run properly the website. We recommend to use Windows Internet Explorer instead of Mozilla Firefox, because with Firefox we were unable to hear the music (in Midi format) present in the chapters.

And last but not least, and before continuing to our analysis of time, we will give our first impressions of the hypertext before even reading it:

The impression the text gives us in a first approach is that its aim is to make the journey through the different sections of the book very enjoyable and accessible, and the inclusion of music (in Midi format) and dynamic images (.gifs) and the static ones (.jpegs) in the different pages of the website helps in creating an appropriate environment to the tale.



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