[identity profile] nightspore.livejournal.com 2012-01-21 08:17 pm (UTC)(link)
Or more accurately, I refer to them as theGrimms's fairy tales.

[identity profile] steepholm.livejournal.com 2012-01-21 08:32 pm (UTC)(link)
Surprisingly few editions use the plural form at all. Wilhelm seems to fall by the wayside.

[identity profile] malkhos.livejournal.com 2012-01-22 04:56 am (UTC)(link)
That's a monstrosity there: adding both the plural and possessive 's'.

Disagree!

[identity profile] nightspore.livejournal.com 2012-01-22 06:27 am (UTC)(link)
In the US, we tend to add both plural and possessive s for proper names, since otherwise you can't tell whether the word is plural or possessive in speech. If I mention the Grimms tales, someone might thing I am referring to the tales collected by a certain Grimms, as the Yeats poems in "The Wind Among the Reeds" are the poems written by a certain Yeats. "The" plus possessive apostrophe s indicates that "Grimms" is plural (without the "the" it could still be singular: Yeats's poems). "The" pluralizes by itself, as in French, where we speak of "les Thibauld." The pluralizing s merely confirms it, and the 's which follows makes the name possessive and not attributive. The old rule that you don't need an apostrophe-following s after an ancient name is loosely connected to this point: ancient names are treated as commanding universal recognition, and in that sense as being like common nouns, and not more obscure proper nouns.