The grimm brothers’ fairy tales--10/17/25

17 Oct 2025

The grimm brothers’ fairy tales--10/17/25

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Today's selection -- from The Brothers Grimm by Ann Schmiesing. In 1812, Jacob and Wilhem Grimm published Children’s and Household Tales which popularized such stories as Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, and Snow White.

“Based on the preface, a reader would likely assume that the Grimms had personally collected the ensuing tales from the mouths of the common people—and not, as was actually the case, primarily from educated young women. This incorrect assumption was perpetuated in numerous works of scholarly and popular literature in the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries. According to a popular English edition published in the late nineteenth century, the Brothers Grimm had ‘travelled through Hesse and other parts of Germany for thirteen years, persuading the poor people to tell them all the stories that they had heard from their grandparents, and then writing them down.’ The idea for Children's and Household Tales ‘seems to have come to them almost without thinking,’ a scholar wrote in 1915, since ‘folk tales could be picked up anywhere in Hesse, at their very doors.’ Another specified in 1951 that the Grimms ‘obtained their folk tales from the lips of peasant women, shepherds, waggoners, vagrants, old grannies, and children in Hesse, Hanau, and other areas.’ As these and other erroneous pronouncements indicate, the Grimms' silence over when, by whom, and from whom their tales had been collected through oral transmission made this transmission appear more connected to the ordinary rural people than it actually was.

“While omitting such identification supported the Grimms' claim that no tale could be attributed to a single voice, it also enabled them to skirt the fact that they did not collect most of their tales from peasants. Together with the Grimms' substantial editing of the tales—which becomes pronounced after the first edition-this led some twentieth-century scholars to accuse them of deliberate fabrication and even to dub the Grimms' tales ‘fakelore.’ A neologism coined in 1950 by folklorist Richard M. Dorson, ‘fakelore’ is ‘the presentation of spurious and synthetic writings under the claim that they are genuine folklore’; it applies to texts ‘not collected in the field but [ … ] rewritten from earlier literary and journalistic sources in an endless chain of regurgitation.’ But branding the Grimms' tales ‘fakelore’ is misleading and reductive. Folklore as a scholarly enterprise was too new in the nineteenth century to constitute a discipline with established scientific norms (as under scored by the fact that the English word ‘folklore’ was first coined in 1846 to describe the various 'stories and traditions collected by the Grimms and their contemporaries). Moreover, denigrating Children's and Household Tales as fakelore might erroneously imply a standard of folkloric purity that did not in reality exist, regardless of the Grimms' own efforts to differentiate authentic from adulterated dies. Despite long-standing attitudes that oral folk tellings needed stylistic enhancement to attain literary worth, for centuries high culture and low culture had been produced not in entirely separate silos, but on a dynamic spectrum. Oral and written traditions had been interdependent, with oral tellings influencing written versions and vice versa.’ As for the versions the Grimms' informants provided, it is difficult to know whether or how much the Grimms revised these for the first edition, because they did not retain manuscript versions for most of their published tales. But even in cases where a manuscript for a particular tale does exist, as for example in the Olenberg manuscript, the manuscript version may simply be an abbreviated sketch and not intended as a word-for-word transcription. That is, deviations from a manuscript source may signal an effort to restore the richness of a storyteller's rendition.

"Hansel and Gretel" (1909), illustrated by Arthur Rackham, was a "warning tale" for children.[29]

“In any case, the Grimms' notion of authentic folklore rested on unstable demarcations between oral and written traditions, the ‘folk’ and educated classes, and natural and artistic poetry. Although they shied from providing details that would have complicated their account of the tales' rootedness in peasant environs, to accuse them of falsifying folklore misses the point that/ folklore was already built on tenuous assumptions.

“It is notable that, after discussing questions of authenticity with Jacob during the creation of Children's and Household Tales, Achim von Arnim revisited these topics when the Grimms surprised him with a copy to give as a Christmas gift to his wife, Bettina. Arnim wrote to the brothers to thank them for dedicating the volume to his wife and son and to share some observations. Although he did not regard the tales as falsifications, he was skeptical of the Grimms' claim in the preface that there had been no substantive editorial interventions. He found it impossible that they could not have exerted any such influence on their tales, while judging this influence as not negative, but productive. As he had done in rebutting Jacob's harsh criticisms of Brentano, Arnim implied that the Grimms, too, were part of a rich storytelling tradition; they should neither claim nor aspire to be detached observers and recorders of this tradition but instead view themselves as active participants in it.

“Jacob retorted that storytelling is not mathematical, so of course a tale will change from one recounting to the next. To retell a tale with flawless fidelity to the original is as challenging as breaking open an egg without leaving any white on the shell; what matters is keeping the yolk intact. In keeping with the Grimms' preference for natural poetry over artistic poetry, Wilhelm for his part told Arnim that any influence he had had on the tales was spontaneous rather than deliberate. While it is true that the Grimms did not use the tales they collected as a springboard for their own literacy creations (in contrast to their Romantic contemporaries and eighteenth-century forebears), their admission of such influence suggests that they did shape and rework the tales even in the first edition.

“As for Clemens Brentano, he asserted that the Grimms' had engaged in far too little editing. In his view, their insistence on remaining true to the form in which they received their tales produced tedious and impure narration. Insisting that he and Arnim were far superior in their editing of The Boys Magic Horn, he compared the effect of the Grimms' volume to dirty children's clothing: ‘If you want to display children's clothes, you can do that with fidelity without bringing out an outfit that has all the buttons torn off, dirt smeared on it, and the shirt hanging out of the pants.’ Given that most of the Grimms' tales did not come to them from old women or children, it is ironic that Brentano also claimed that Jacob and Wilhelm should have prefaced each tale with a psychological account of the child or old woman who had, in his view, told the story so negligently.'’

“Brentano also criticized the appendix, which struck him as an assemblage of posthumously discovered notes that a hapless heir had thrown together. Far more useful, in his view, would have been a learned treatise, or what he called ‘a physiology of the fairy tale’---an interesting criticism given the Grimms' refusal to write a treatise on the folk song for Brentano a few years earlier. In fact, the Grimms' appendix deserves more credit than Brentano gave it: in addition to indicating the specific source for tales that had already appeared in print, the Grimms' notes to each tale typically point to parallel themes and motifs in myths, legends, sayings, songs, and chapbooks and provide information about regional and international variants, including French, Italian, Nordic, Scottish, and Jewish tales. The appendix, like the Grimms' preface, was thus original for its time in approaching fairy tales from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective. To Jacob, the variants referenced in the appendix enabled the reader to appreciate the fairy tale's widespread and long-standing oral tradition; moreover, it lent scholarly respectability to tales whose publication might otherwise be dismissed.

“Whereas Jacob worried that scholars would not see the tales as worthy of serious study without the appendix, Arnim feared that the book's contents were too scholarly to appeal to a popular audience. In his feedback to the Grimms, he conveyed his dismay over the edition's lack of visual appeal. Pointing out that illustrations would have supplied a needed counterbalance to the scholarly preface and appendix, he fretted that the public would not regard Children's and Household Tales as a children's book, despite its title. The Grimms agreed with the need for at least a frontispiece and asked that Reimer add one with their brother Ludwig as the suggested artist) during work to rectify the omission of ‘The Fox and the Geese.’ Reimer demurred, meaning that the first volume remained without illustrations.

“Arnim worried, too, that the book's appeal would be limited by its more gruesome tales. He cited a mother who had complained that she could not share the volume with her children because the tale ‘How Some Children Played at Slaughtering’ depicted siblings who see their father butchering a pig and then imitate this, with one child butchering the other. Similarly, he expressed concern over the implied obscenities in ‘Of Mrs. Fox,’ in which an old fox with nine tails, suggestive in folklore of penises, tests his wife's fidelity. In light of such tales, Arnim advised that Jacob and Wilhelm should have subtitled the volume ‘For Parents to Select for Retelling’ or something similar, to indicate that adults should use discretion in choosing which tales to read to children.

“Unfazed, Wilhelm acknowledged that parents might object to some of the tales, but he underscored that his mother had herself told him 'How Some Children Played at Slaughtering'’ when he was a boy. Rejecting Arnim's cautious subtitle, Jacob countered that anyone so afraid that children's innocent eyes could fall on something they might dangerously imitate might as well just blindfold them so they could not see at all. As for the tale about the fox with nine tails, he swore that it was innocent and should not be interpreted as obscene; he also noted it was among his most favorite tales from childhood. Above all, he insisted that the collection's tales were not solely for children, and that even the oldest and most serious readers would find them captivating. If children were more responsive to fairy tales than adults were, it was because their innocence made them more open to the natural poetry rooted in ancient epics. Jacob's stance differs starkly from that taken by A. L. Grimm, an author of no relation to Jacob and Wilhelm who had published a volume of children's tales just a few years before. Addressing parents in his preface, A. L. Grimm had written of the tales in his collection, ‘I deliver them to you, because I would rather see them in your hands than in the hands of children.’”