by Jacob Grimm
Contrary to your viewpoint, I am firmly convinced that all the tales in our collection without exception had already been told with all their particulars centuries ago. Many beautiful things were only gradually left out. In this sense all the tales have long since been fixed, while they continue to move around in endless variations. That is, they do not fix themselves. Such variations are similar to the manifold dialects that should not suffer any violation either.2
Then, in another letter, written on January 28, 1813, Jacob wrote in support of Wilhelm’s views:
The difference between children’s and household tales and the reproach we have received for using this combination in our title is more hair-splitting than true. Otherwise one would literally have to bring the children out of the house where they have belonged forever and confine them in a room. Have children’s tales really been conceived and invented for children? I don’t believe this at all just as I don’t affirm the general question, whether we must set up something specific at all for them. What we possess in publicized and traditional teachings and precepts is accepted by old and young, and what children do not grasp about them, all that glides away from their minds, they will do so when they are ready to learn it. This is the case with all true teachings that ignite and illuminate everything that was already present and known, not teaching that brings both wood and fire with it.3
Though the Grimms made it clear in the preface to the second volume of the first edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen, published in 1815, that they would follow the agenda of their first volume, they also explained the important difference they made between a book for children and an educational primer (Erziehungsbuch):
In publishing our collection we wanted to do more than just perform a service for the history of Poesie. We intended at the same time to enable Poesie itself, which is alive in the collection, to have an effect: it was to give pleasure to anyone who could take pleasure in it, and therefore, our collection was also to become an intrinsic educational primer. Some people have complained about this latter intention and asserted that there are things here and there [in our collection] that cause embarrassment and are unsuitable for children or offensive (such as the references to certain incidents and conditions, and they also think children should not hear about the devil and anything evil). Accordingly, parents should not offer the collection to children. In individual cases this concern may be correct, and thus one can easily choose which tales are to be read. On the whole it is certainly not necessary. Nothing can better defend us than nature itself, which has let certain flowers and leaves grow in a particular color and shape. People who do not find them beneficial, suitable for their special needs, which cannot be known, can easily walk right by them. But they cannot demand that the flowers and leaves be colored and cut in another way.4
Though mindful of the educational value of their collection, the Grimms shied away from making their tales moralistic or overly didactic. They viewed the morality in the tales as naïve and organic, and readers, young and old, could intuit lessons from them spontaneously because of their essential poetry. As André Jolles has demonstrated in his book Einfache Formen, the Grimms responded to the paradoxical morality of the miraculous in fairy tales. Jolles writes that the basic foundation of the fairy tale derives from the paradox that the miraculous is not miraculous in the fairy tale; rather it is natural, self-evident, a matter of course. “The miraculous is here the only possible guarantee that the immorality of reality has stopped.”5 The readers’ interpretations of fairy tales are natural because of the profound if not divine nature of the tales, and in this sense, the Grimms envisioned themselves as moral cultivators or tillers of the soil; they viewed their collection as an educational primer of ethics, values, and customs that would grow on readers, who would themselves grow by reading these living relics of the past. Here it should be pointed out that the Grimms tales are not strictly speaking “fairy tales,” and they never used that term, which, in German, would be Feenmärchen. Their collection is a much more diverse and includes animal tales, legends, tall tales, nonsense stories, fables, anecdotes, and, of course, magic tales (Zaubermärchen), which are clearly related to the great European tradition of fairy tales that can be traced back to ancient Greece and Rome. It is because their collection had such deep roots and a broad European heritage that the Grimms firmly believed that reading these tales would serve as an education for young and old alike. In some ways their book was intended to be part of the European civilizing process, and to a certain extent, the formative body of their tales, which have been translated into 150 languages, has become an international educational primer.
After the publication of the second volume in 1815, however, the Grimms were somewhat disappointed by the critical reception. They were convinced that reviewers and readers were misunderstanding the purpose of their collection. Although they did not abandon their basic notions about the “pure” origins and significance of folk tales when they published the second edition in 1819, there are significant indications that they had been influenced by their critics to make the tales more accessible to a general public and more considerate of children as readers and listeners of the stories. Altogether, there had been 156 tales published in the two volumes of the first edition, intended primarily for scholars and educated readers, and the number grew to 170 in the second edition of 1819 without the extensive scholarly notes, which appeared later in a separate volume in 1822. Wilhelm did most if not all of the editing and often made changes to downplay overt cruelty, eliminated tales that might be offensive to middle-class taste, replaced tales with more interesting variants, added some Christian homilies, and stylized them to evoke their folk poetry and original virtues. Yet, despite these changes, it was clear that the Grimms continued to place great emphasis on the philological significance of the collection that was to make a major contribution to understanding the origins and evolution of language and storytelling.
Restituting the Significance of the Unknown Tales of the First Edition
As I have already stated, most readers of the Grimms’ tales throughout the world are familiar mainly with the seventh edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen published in 1857, considered the standard if not definitive edition. Most people are not even aware of the fact that there were seven editions that Wilhelm, for the most part, kept amending and changing after 1815. Nor are most readers aware that there was a smaller edition of fifty tales intended more for children and families and published ten times from 1825 to 1858. Some contemporary critics have reprimanded the Grimms or even denigrated their work because they kept transforming oral tales into literary stories and often appealed to Christian and puritanical standards. In fact, several scholars have accused the Grimms of lying to their readers and making it seem that the tales in their collection were from the mouths of peasants and represented an authentic folk tradition.
Though there is some truth to these claims, they are misleading and disregard the fact that the Grimms were transparent about their editorial principles and never purposely deceived their readers. If anything, their romantic idealism and devotion to the German people led them to exaggerate the “genuine” folk qualities of the tales. In this regard, the Grimms were very much a part of the romantic movement in Germany. Ironically, the contradictions in their method of collecting and shaping the corpus of their tales—that is, the seven editions that they kept altering—stem from their profound belief that their tales were like gems, thousands of years old and part of a vast Indo-European oral tradition. Wilhelm, sometimes with the aid of Jacob, chiseled and honed their tales, often comparing multiple versions of the same tale type to make their tales glisten and to uncover their deep-rooted philological significance. It did not matter who their informants were because they regarded them only as mediators of the treasures of ancient storytelling of ordinary people. What mattered was that their informants took the tales seriously and made every effort to preserve the simple orality and naïve morality of the tales. As I have mentioned
before, the Grimms envisaged themselves—and their collaborators—as moral cultivators of these tales, or tillers of the soil. Their mission was to excavate them, study them, sort them carefully, and to keep shaping them so that they remained artistically and philologically resilient and retained their primal essence.
In the first edition of 1812/1815 the Brothers relied on all sorts of people who either told folk tales to them that they recorded or correspondents who wrote them down as they themselves had heard them and sent written copies to the Grimms; they also relied on their research and discoveries in ancient manuscripts and books. There was a group of middle-class young women in Kassel consisting of Marie, Jeanette, and Amalie Hassenpflug and Lisette, Johanna, Gretchen, Mimi, and Dortchen Wild, and other members of these families, who provided over twenty stories. These young women often gathered in social circles and recited the tales, or in other places such as gardens or homes, where the Brothers recorded them. The young women were well-educated and had either read or heard the tales from their nannies and servants. Nearby, in Allendorf, Friederike Mannel, a minister’s daughter, was a talented storyteller and writer who sent several unusual tales to Wilhelm. In another nearby city, Treysa, the teacher and later pastor Friedrich Siebert provided eight important tales that he had collected in the region, as did the pastor Georg August Friedrich Goldmann in Hannover. Then there were the members of the aristocratic von Haxthausen family in Münster: August, Ludowine, and Anna along with Jenny von Droste-Hülshof, who contributed approximately sixty stories, some of which they heard from peasants or soldiers. Sometimes the tales were told and written down in the local dialect and printed in dialect. The Grimms visited the Haxthausens and recorded many of the tales that stemmed from people who lived on August von Haxthausen’s estate Bökerhof in Westphalia.
However, the most consummate storyteller was Dorothea Viehmann, a tailor’s wife, who lived in the village of Niederzwehren outside Kassel and told them about forty tales. She was the mother of six children, and since the family was poor, she sold vegetables at a market in Kassel and would go to the Grimms’ home for a few hours of storytelling on market days. The Grimms portrayed her as the exemplary peasant storyteller. Though there has been a debate about her status as a “peasant,” it is quite clear that she belonged to the lower classes and had a much different perspective on life than the young women of Kassel or the aristocrats of Münster. Another important contributor was the retired soldier Johann Friedrich Krause, who exchanged seven tales for some leggings. He told several stories that involved discharged soldiers who upset kings or heroes and gained revenge after being mistreated. Aside from collecting oral tales, many of the Grimms’ narratives were taken from books dating back to the sixteenth century and were adapted. The Grimms were familiar with all the major European collections of folk and fairy tales. They knew the Italian works of Giovan Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Basile and the French collections of Charles Perrault, Mme Catherine d’Aulnoy, and Mlle de la Force. They were also aware of recent German anthologies of folk and fairy tales by Benedikte Naubert, Johann Gustav Büsching, Otmar, Adalbert Grimm (no relation), the anonymous Feen-Mähchen, and other collections. Moreover, they transcribed tales from such authors as Johannes Praetorius (Der abentheurliche Glücks-Topf, 1668), Johann Karl August Musäus (Volksmährchen der Deutschen, 1782), and other authors and collectors. Consequently, the first edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen is an unusual mix of diverse voices and tales conveyed by peasants, craftsmen, ministers, teachers, middle-class women, and aristocrats. As Heinz Rölleke, the foremost German scholar of the Grimms’ tales, has explained in his important book, Es war einmal . . . Die wahren Märchen der Brüder Grimm und wer sie ihnen erzählte (Once Upon a Time . . . The True Tales of the Brothers Grimm and Who Told Them to Them, 2011),6 the tales in the first edition tend to be more raw and stamped by an “authentically” oral tradition than the tales published in later editions because the Grimms did not make vast changes at the beginning of their work. These tales are fascinating because they bear the imprint of their informants and are largely unknown to the general public. To grasp the historical significance of these first-edition tales, it is important to know something about the background of the informants and sources as well as the sociocultural context in which they were gathered. Yet it is somewhat difficult to gain this knowledge because the Grimms and other collectors at the beginning of the nineteenth century did not pay much attention to the storytellers and the social context of the storytelling. They were more interested in the tales per se, and the tradition of the tales. Clearly, the oral tradition of storytelling was strong and deep in all social classes, but very few historians or scholars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries wrote in detail about how and why the tales were transmitted and about the lives of the storytellers. It was only in the latter part of the nineteenth century that researchers began providing and recording information about the informants, storytellers, and sources. Nevertheless, there are some clues in the Grimms’ tales themselves and their styles that provide background information about the views of the tellers of the tales and the sociohistorical context.
Here it is important to stress that the tales of the first edition are often about “wounded” young people, and many of them were told to illustrate ongoing conflicts that continue to exist in our present day. For instance, the tales frequently depict the disputes that young protagonists have with their parents; children brutally treated and abandoned; soldiers in need; young women persecuted; sibling rivalry; exploitation and oppression of young people; dangerous predators; spiteful kings and queens abusing their power; and Death punishing greedy people and rewarding a virtuous boy. While many of these tales were a few hundred years old before they were gathered and told by the Grimms’ informants, they bear the personal and peculiar marks of the storytellers themselves, who kept them in their memory for a purpose. Despite the unusually different styles of each of the tales—and eleven were told and written down in the local dialect—they are all notable because of their terse and frank qualities. As I have already stressed, these tales were not told for children, nor can they be considered truly children’s tales, though children heard them, and some perhaps read them. If anything, they are about children, as can be seen in “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering,” “Death and the Goose Boy,” or “The Stubborn Child.” The beginning of “Good Bowling and Card Playing” is indicative of the spirit and perspective of many tales: “Now, there was a young man from a poor family who thought to himself, ‘Why not risk my life? I’ve got nothing to lose and a lot to win. What’s there to think about?’ ”
Throughout all the tales of the first edition, there is what I call an “underdog” perspective. That is, there is almost always a clear hostility toward abusive kings, cannibals, witches, giants, and nasty people and animals. There is always a clear sympathy for innocent and simple-minded protagonists, male and female, little people, and helpless but courageous animals. Kings often renege on their promises or abuse and exploit their subjects, including their daughters, and they are either exposed, dethroned, or killed. The majority of the protagonists are innocents. Some are aristocrats, but most are farmers, tailors, servants, smiths, fishermen, soldiers, shoemakers, spinners, poor children, and little animals. Innocence is never enough by itself to be rewarded. Innocence is always tested, and the protagonists must prove their integrity and demonstrate virtues such as kindness to be worthy of a reward, whether it be wealth, marriage, bliss, or peace. There are a number of tales in the first edition in which young men are called simpletons, such as “Simple Hans,” “The Simpleton,” and “The Poor Miller’s Apprentice.” Inevitably, these bumpkins turn out to be much smarter than they appear, have a great deal of courage, and use their wits to overcome oppression. They achieve their goals through humility and kindness. This is also true of the tales about persecuted young women, such as “The Three Little Men in the Forest,” “Maiden without Hands,” “The Robber Bridegroom,”
“Princess Mouseskin,” and “The Clever Farmer’s Daughter.” Though patriarchal notions flourish in most of the tales, there are subversive tendencies that can be seen in the resistance of young women, who are not satisfied with their positions in life.
The Grimms’ tales that are not their own enable other voices to be heard. Indeed, whether folk or fairy tale, the miraculous makes self-evident what is wrong in the “real” world. There is a wide spectrum of tale types and genres in the first edition of 1812/15—fables, legends, jokes, farces, animal stories, and anecdotes—that are connected to events of the times and the personal experiences of the tellers. The descriptions are bare; the dialogues, curt; and the action, swift. The storytellers get to the point quickly, and there is generally a fulfillment of social justice or naïve morality at the end. What is justly fulfilled in all these tales was certainly lacking at the time they were told and is still lacking today.
