Grimm's Fairy Tales by Brothers Grimm

First published:Kinder- und Hausmärchen, 1812, 1815; revised, 1819-1822 (English translation, 1823-1826)

Type of work: Short fiction

The Work:

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, commonly known as the Brothers Grimm, were not primarily writers but philologists whose names are still as well known in the field of linguistics as they are to readers of fairy tales. Grimm’s Law is a basic rule in the study of Indo-European languages, and the dictionary of the German language is largely their work. Although the fairy tales were always intended to be read by children, they were also meant to represent German culture at its most fundamental level. The Grimms thought that culture at the level of the common people exists in its purest form and is the least influenced by foreign traditions.

During the late eighteenth century, after centuries of cultural stagnation, Germany experienced a cultural renaissance, which brought with it a pride in all things German. The fairy tales were the Grimms’ contribution to that flowering. Theirs remains one of the largest, and certainly the most famous, of national collections. Among the best-known stories are “Hansel and Gretel,” “Snow White,” “The Golden Goose,” “The Goose Girl,” “Rumplestiltskin,” “The Frog Prince,” “The Juniper Tree,” and “Snow White and Rose Red,” and these and many others have become the unquestioned property of childhood in the Western world. In many instances, popular children’s books quickly become dated or are crowded into the background by more recent books, but Grimm’s Fairy Tales remains as popular as when it was first published. New editions of single stories or of the whole collection continue to appear every year.

The term fairy tale is used both for children’s stories that have been created and transmitted orally and for literary stories such as those by Hans Christian Andersen, which imitate the folktale form. The stories of the Brothers Grimm are genuine folktales and as such have certain characteristics. They are inevitably short, they involve obvious parallels and repetitions in structure and language, descriptions are brief and stylized, characters are obvious stereotypes, the setting in place and time is usually vague and generalized, animals can talk, and magic is commonplace. Because they are so stylized, very little practice is needed to learn to tell any folktale effectively. The Grimms refined the language of the stories extensively in the course of the seven editions that were published in their lifetimes, but the fact that the stories remain highly tellable shows their essentially oral nature.

The tales reveal little about the external world, history, culture, class, or politics. They are, however, close to the human unconscious, and they have much to say in symbolic terms about sibling rivalry, intergenerational hostility, human sexuality, ambivalence about the opposite sex, fear of parental desertion, and much else. Because fairy tales usually end happily, the term “fairy tale romance,” came into being, but even the prettiest of fairy tales touch on the darker sides of human nature. Snow White is menaced by her mother’s murderous sexual jealousy, and her triumphant marriage coincides with the mother’s death. It takes no great depth of psychological sophistication to see in the wicked witch, with her pretense of maternal concern covering treacherous intentions and her welcome house that proves to be a death trap, the malign image of the mother, or to see in the noisy, brutal, and stupid giant who seems always to be coming in from outdoors, the malign image of the father. It is this quality of psychological tension that gives the tales their power, not the quaint trappings of the story—castles, beautiful princesses, and talking frogs. It is this quality that also makes them a little uncomfortable. Literary imitations nearly always emphasize the quaintness and avoid the dangerous quality that underlies the stories, thereby producing fairy stories that are pretty but lifeless.

The Grimms were meticulous scholars and obeyed exacting standards for the collection and transmission of folktales. They have been generally credited with being the creators of folktale studies, and they have been held up as the model of what a folktale collector should be. There is, however, increasing evidence that their practice was not quite as meticulous as they implied. Part of the problem was their mixed motives. A work cannot be a scholarly piece of field research, a socially acceptable and appealing children’s book, and a patriotic monument to German culture all at the same time. As a result, there came to be increasingly critical views in the decades that followed.

No two people tell a folktale in exactly the same words, and any collection that remains faithful to its sources will vary greatly in language. The Grimms, however, gave their whole collection a smooth, cohesive style. They also significantly lengthened most of the stories by adding small details, snatches of dialogue, and smooth transitions. The result is more satisfying as literature but no longer the pure voice of the people.

An examination of the Grimms’ sources shows that the stories were not after all discovered through extensive fieldwork among the peasantry. In fact, the sources for most of the stories were thoroughly educated, middle-class friends and relatives of the Grimms. If, as the Grimms implied, the ideal storyteller is an old and illiterate peasant woman sitting before her humble hearth telling the ancient stories to children and grandchildren, this is a person the Grimms never encountered.

From a patriotic viewpoint, too, the Grimms’ sources are somewhat dubious. Their prime example of an ideal storyteller, Dorthea Viehman, not only came from a prominent middle-class family but also was of French extraction and fluent in that language. Other sources were also French, and clearly several of the stories derive at no very distant date from French written sources rather than from ancient Germanic tradition. It would be difficult in any case to show a clearly national character in a collection of folktales, for in their plots, motifs, and mannerisms folktales are international. Most of the stories in Grimm have close parallels in other European languages, and many show similarities with cultures as far away as India and Japan. Poor woodcutters, handsome princes, wicked witches, animal brides, miniature children, and all the other characters of folktales are a universal currency. Gradually it came to be seen that it is only the high literary quality of the Grimms’ retelling of these stories, not their national character, that made them a monument of German literature.

The tales frequently have been criticized for being violent and bloody, and the more gruesome scenes could be considered as evidence that the Grimms were faithful to their sources. In fact, however, they made a number of changes in detail. They carefully sidestepped suggestions of incest and softened hostility or violence within the family by such devices as making at least one of a pair of cruel parents well-intentioned or substituting a stepmother for a biological one. On the other hand, in several cases the Grimms added cruel punishments for the wicked that did not exist in the original sources. It is not clear whether those changes reflect the Grimms’ sense of justice or whether the purpose was that of creating a neat antithesis between the contrasting fates of the good and the evil characters. Certainly, however, the Grimms in a number of cases made the stories more obviously and conventionally moral than their original sources. Overall, the Grimms tended to make the fairy tales even more fairy tale-like and more stylized through repetition and parallelism that did not exist in the original source.

Between the first edition in 1812 and the seventh in 1857, the Grimms often discovered variants of the same tale, or what they and others called “better” versions. As a result, some stories were replaced with other versions, and some tales were revised with elements taken from other versions. This procedure is not uncommon in editing folktales for publication, but the intention is obviously literary rather than scholarly. There is no more reason to believe that any tale once existed in a state of perfection and was corrupted in the telling than there is to believe that an originally feeble tale improved in the telling. What the Grimms accomplished is not what they are usually credited with: They did not transmit the actual tales in the actual words of the peasantry, but instead they fashioned versions of the tales corresponding to what the Grimms conceived to be the ideal stories.

The earlier French stories of Charles Perrault are generally classed as literary fairy tales, whereas those of the Grimms are thought of as authentic folktales. Both collections, however, are based on folk material, and the Grimms apparently reworked their stories as extensively as Perrault did his. The difference is that Perrault’s stories are filled with the atmosphere of the eighteenth century and of the French court, while the Grimms’ stories seem timeless. The Grimms did modify their stories to suit their own attitudes and those of their age, but never in an obvious way. Although stories from an oral tradition do have a collective and impersonal quality, any given telling is usually noticeably colored by the personality and educational level of the teller. Perrault’s “Cinderella,” for example, is marked by its courtly and aristocratic tone, whereas “The Snow Queen” by Hans Christian Andersen reflects nineteenth century sentimentality and an idiosyncratic whimsicality. The Grimms’ tales, by contrast, achieve a collective and impersonal voice that represents a great accomplishment in the history of the folktale.

Bibliography

Bottigheimer, Ruth B. Grimm’s Bad Girls and Bold Boys. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1987. Attempts to explain the tales in terms of their nineteenth century context.

Ellis, John M. One Fairy Story Too Many. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. A needed but perhaps overly harsh reappraisal of the Grimms’ methods and intentions.

Kudszus, W. G. Terrors of Childhood in Grimms’ Fairy Tales. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Kudszus has translated four of the tales, and these translations are published here. She also analyzes the stories from a linguistic perspective, describing how their plots often cover up a “deeply rooted violence.”

Mallet, Carl-Heinz. Fairy Tales and Children. Translated by Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Schocken Books, 1984. A psychological approach to several of the tales, with special emphasis on the interaction between children and parents.

Murphy, G. Ronald. The Owl, the Raven, and the Dove: The Religious Meaning of the Grimms’ Magic Fairy Tales. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. A close examination of five of the fairy tales: “Hansel and Gretel,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Cinderella,” “Snow White,” and “Sleeping Beauty.” Murphy demonstrates how these stories are Christian fables.

Sexton, Anne. Transformations. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. A verse adaption of a number of the tales in modern idiom. Sexton brings the tales into the twentieth century idiom without losing any of the Grimms’ magic or wonder.

Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. 2d ed. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003. Tatar’s interpretation focuses on the “dark side” of the tales, examining such elements as murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide, and incest.

Zipes, Jack. The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World. New York: Routledge, 1989. A traditional discussion of the Brothers Grimm and their tales.