1792 In England, Mary Wollstonecraft publishes Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the first major feminist document.
1793 The Grimms’ only daughter, Charlotte (“Lotte”) Amalie, is born. France’s King Louis XVI is executed.
1794 Another son, Georg Edward, is born to the Grimms but dies in infancy.
1796 Philipp Wilhelm Grimm dies on January 10, leaving his wife and six children. Jacob, the eldest surviving child, is just eleven.
1798 Through the influence of Harriet Zimmer, sister of Do rothea Grimm and lady-in-waiting to the princess of Hessia-Kassel, Jacob and Wilhelm begin secondary school at the prestigious Lyzeum in Kassel. The brothers dedicate themselves to their schoolwork; each graduates at the top of his class. In England, William Wordsworth’s collection of poems Lyrical Ballads, a central work in the Romantic movement, is published.
1799 Italian physicist Alessandro Volta produces the first bat tery as a source of electricity.
1800 German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schel ling publishes his System des transzendentalen Idealismus (System of Transcendental Idealism), while Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenberg), a novelist and prominent poet, puts out Hymnen an die Nacht (Hymns to the Night); both publications are major works of German Romanticism. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose philosophy has a profound impact on the German Romantic movement, publishes Bestimmung des Menschen (The Vocation of Man). In the United States, the Li brary of Congress is established.
1801 Novalis dies. German philosopher Georg Friedrich Wil helm Hegel and Schelling edit the Kritisches Journal der Philosophie (Critical Journal of Philosophy).
1802 Jacob Grimm enters the aristocratic University of Marburg with the intention of studying law.
1803 Wilhelm follows his brother to Marburg, where he too studies law. While at the university, Jacob and Wilhelm come under the influence of Professor Friedrich Karl von Savigny, the founder of historical jurisprudence. Von Sa vigny teaches that laws are correctly interpreted by tracing their historical and cultural origins. The brothers adapt his methods to the study of linguistics and philology. American explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark begin their expedition from the Louisiana Purchase to the Pacific Coast.
1805 German Romantic writers Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim publish Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magic
Horn), a collection of folk songs. Jacob spends time in Paris with Professor von Savigny. Scottish poet Sir Walter Scott’s epic, The Lay of the Last Minstrel, is published.
1806 Prussia declares war on France. Jacob leaves the university to help support his family in Kassel. He takes a post as secretary for the Kassel War Commission while continuing his studies on the side. Inspired by the work of their friend Clemens Brentano, the brothers begin to collect folktales (in German, Märchen). Napoleéon I’s armies oc cupy Kassel and take Berlin. The Holy Roman Empire ends. American philologist and lexicographer Noah Web ster publishes his first dictionary; it is followed in 1812 by his finest work, The American Dictionary of the English Lan guage, containing some 70,000 words.
1807 Jacob loses his post in the war commission when Kassel becomes part of the kingdom of Westphalia under the authority of Napoleéon I’s younger brother, Jeéroôme Bon aparte. Hegel publishes Phänomenologie des Geistes (The Phenomenology of Spirit), an important work of the German Romantic movement.
1808 Dorothea Grimm dies on May 27, leaving Jacob to care for the family. Although opposed to French rule, Jacob takes a post as royal librarian to Jeéroôme Bonaparte. This position allows him time to pursue his scholarly interests as well as to support his siblings financially. Goethe’s Faust, Part I is published. Ludwig von Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is per formed for the first time on December 22.
1811 Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility is published.
1812 The first edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Stories), volume 1, is published; it comprises eighty-six tales gleaned from oral tradition. In England, George Gordon, Lord Byron, publishes the first two can tos of his narrative poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. The United States declares war on Great Britain; the war ends in 1815.
1813 The French withdraw from Kassel, and Napoleéon’s armies are defeated throughout Europe. Jacob Grimm is named to the Hessian peace delegation and goes to France and Vienna on diplomatic missions. When he returns from his professional travels, Jacob sees that political factions al ready undermine his hopes for a unified Germany. Wil helm becomes secretary to the royal librarian in Kassel.
The brothers publish the first of their three-volume col lection of writings on folklore, linguistics, and medieval studies, Altdeutsche Wälder (Old German Forests). In England, Jane Austen publishes Pride and Prejudice.
1814 Friedrich Karl von Savigny publishes Vom Beruf unsrer Zeit für Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft (The Vocation of Our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence).
1815 The second volume of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Stories) is published, comprising seventy ad ditional tales. The Grimm brothers publish Der arme Heinrich von Harmann von der Aue (Poor Heinrich by Harmann von der Aue), a medieval epic, with their scholarly com mentary; Lieder der alten Edda (Lays from the Elder Edda), a compilation/study of Teutonic folk stories; and volume 2 of Altdeutsche Wälder (Old German Forests). Von Savigny pub lishes the first of his six-volume Geschichte des römischen Rechts im Mittelalter (History of Roman Law in the Middle Ages).
1816 Jacob is granted a position as second librarian in Kassel. The Grimms publish volume 3 of Altdeutsche Wälder and the two-volume Deutsche Sagen (German Legends).
1818 Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein is first published in En gland in 1818.
1819 Jacob publishes the first volume of Deutsche Grammatik (German Grammar), a linguistic study considered the foun dation of German philology; the subsequent three vol umes are published in 1826, 1831, and 1837. Wilhelm takes on primary responsibility for editing future editions of Children’s and Household Stories. Both brothers are awarded honorary doctorates from the University of Mar burg. English poet John Keats publishes “Ode on a Gre cian Urn.”
1820 Sir Walter Scott’s historical romance Ivanhoe is published.
1824 Russian poet, playwright, and novelist Alexsandr Pushkin writes the historical tragedy Boris Godunov.
1825 Wilhelm Grimm marries Henriette Dorothea Wild, a ma jor contributor to the brothers’ collection of folktales; the couple has been acquainted for more than twenty years.
1826 The brothers publish Irische Elfenmärchen (Irish Fairy Tales), a translation, with an introductory essay by the Grimms, of Thomas Crofton Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (1825).
1829 When Jacob is overlooked for an expected promotion, the siblings resign their posts in protest and move to Goöttin gen, where they work as professors of German literature at the university.
1831 Goethe completes Faust, Part II; he dies the following year in Weimar.
1835 Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen publishes his first collection of fairy tales.
1836 In the United States, Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes his essay “Nature,” a major work of Transcendentalist philos ophy.
1837 Ernst August (Ernest Augustus) II is crowned king and suspends the constitution of the German state of Hano ver, dissolves the parliament, and requires an oath of al legiance from all civil servants. The Grimm brothers join in protest against the absolutist monarchy and are dis missed from their university positions. In financial diffi culty, they begin work on the Deutsches Wörterbuch (German Dictionary), a lexicographical history of the German lan guage. In England, Queen Victoria is crowned; Charles Dickens publishes Pickwick Papers. American Samuel Morse invents the telegraph.
1840 Through the influence of friends the Grimms receive pro fessorships at the University of Berlin, where they con tinue their work on the German Dictionary and other works in philology, linguistics, and German literature.
1843 Dickens publish
es A Christmas Carol and Martin Chuzzlewit.
1845 In the United States, Edgar Allan Poe publishes “The Raven.”
1847 In England, Charlotte Bronteö’s novel Jane Eyre is pub lished, as are works by her two sisters, Emily (Wuthering Heights) and Anne (Agnes Grey).
1848 After the German revolution, the Grimm brothers are elected to the civil parliament and attend the National Assembly as representatives. The revolutionary movement is short-lived; the brothers leave politics disappointed. Ja cob publishes the important two-volume philological study Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (History of the German Language) and retires from teaching to do research. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels publish Das Kommunistische Manifest (The Communist Manifesto).
1851 American writer Herman Melville publishes Moby-Dick, or The Whale.
1852 Wilhelm Grimm retires from his university post. In their final years the brothers devote their energies to complet ing the German Dictionary. Unfortunately, the undertaking is too grand even for the Grimms; they die before reach ing the letter G; twentieth-century scholars will complete the dictionary. British polymath Peter Mark Roget pub lishes the first edition of his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases.
1855 American teacher Thomas Bulfinch publishes The Age of Fable, an introduction to Greek, Roman, Celtic, and Scan dinavian mythology.
1858 Work begins on the Oxford English Dictionary.
1859 Wilhelm Grimm dies on December 16. Charles Darwin publishes On the Origin of Species, his theory of evolution by natural selection.
1863 Jacob Grimm dies on September 20. In the United States, President Abraham Lincoln delivers the Gettysburg Ad dress.
Introduction
Originally intended for adults, the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Stories) of the Brothers Grimm has become not only the world’s most important collection of folk and fairy tales, but also the central work in the literary culture of childhood. Paradoxically, the tales have been criticized ever since they first appeared as inappropriate for children—too frank about sex, too violent, too dark. The Grimms themselves began censoring the sex as they brought out successive editions, and subsequent editors and translators have continued the process, modifying the violence as well. But the darkness remains.
These tales of enchantment and ordeal contain terrifying encounters with witches, giants, and devouring beasts. Even the more benign tales usually involve suffering or danger: persecution by a cruel stepmother or abusive father, a battle with a demon, at the very least marriage to a hedgehog or some other strange creature. There are confrontations with death itself, as in “The Three Snake-Leaves” and “The Godfather Death,” and with the enchanted sleep that resembles it, as in “The Glass Coffin” and “Briar Rose,” the Sleeping Beauty story. Yet in spite of these dark and deathly elements, or perhaps even because of them, the Grimms’ tales have a compelling vitality. They are cruder, wilder, more violent, and more fun than the elegant and poignantly beautiful tales of the Grimms’ Danish contemporary Hans Christian Andersen.
Unlike Andersen, the Grimms did not invent new tales but collected old ones, with the intention of preserving the oral tradition of the German peasantry. Whether in fact they fulfilled that intention has been questioned. Their tales do afford a glimpse of a world of castles and forests, nobles and peasants, superstitious beliefs and primitive practices that suggest origins at least as old as feudal Europe, and often much older. Some of the tales have been traced back through the centuries by way of earlier versions until they disappear into prehistoric times.
Residues of the social and material conditions of the societies from which they came can be found in the tales, but transformed, as in a dream, by wish, fear, and fantasy. Indeed, the tales often have the strange logic, the freedom from the constraints of time and space, and the abrupt and violent action that characterize dreams and that Freud attributed to what he called “primary process,” the kind of thinking that prevails in the unconscious and in childhood. The boundary between reality and fantasy is porous and unstable; everything, including inanimate objects, is alive and responds magically to wishes and fears. There are mysteries and secrets everywhere, as in the lives of children, who are kept in the dark about fundamental realities—sex, death, money, and the whole complex mystery of their parents’ desires and disappointments.
The sense of mystery and the belief in the magical powers of thought never go away entirely, but live on in the adult unconscious, accounting for the inexhaustible appeal of fairy tales. They reappear continually in new forms, not only for children but as sophisticated works for adults, such as Jean Cocteau’s classic film La Belle et la Bêete (1946), Donald Barthelme’s ironic postmodern novel Snow White (1967), the unconventional feminist fictions of Angela Carter, the Stephen Sondheim musical Into the Woods (1987), and so on. Most German writers who came after the Grimms tried sooner or later to write a fairy tale. Even the stories of Franz Kafka are like fairy tales gone wrong. The patterns of fantasy and the narrative structures of the tales apparently satisfy profound psychological and aesthetic needs, endlessly generating new versions.
Motifs from the Grimms’ tales also appear in older classic works of fiction and drama, including some that could not possibly have been influenced by them, such as Shakespeare’s plays. In The Merchant of Venice (c. 1595), the riddle of the three caskets posed to the candidates for Portia’s hand is like the “wooer-tests” in many tales. In King Lear (c. 1605), the old king demands from his daughter all her love, including that owed to a husband, like the incestuous king in the Grimms’ tale “Allerleirauh” (“Many Furs”). Lear’s good and loving daughter, Cordelia, is persecuted, like Cinderella, by two wicked elder sisters.
The Cinderella pattern is perhaps the most widespread of all: The transformation of a poor and insignificant girl into a belle is the theme of innumerable novels, plays, and films. In Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818), for instance, Anne Elliot is treated like a servant by her hateful sisters, yet it is she who wins the love of the princely Captain Wentworth. Isabel Archer, in Henry James’s Portrait of a Lady (1881), even has a fairy godmother—as Charles Perrault’s Cinderella does, although the Grimms’ does not—a male one who leaves her a fortune, enabling her, ironically, to choose the poorest but worst of her canonical three suitors. This figure of the mysterious benefactor, like the dwarf in “The Singing Bone,” recurs frequently in the tales, and also in novels, especially those of Dickens—Magwitch in Great Expectations (1860-1861), for instance. Novels and plays differ from tales in many respects, notably in giving their characters rich inner lives, while in tales psychological conflicts are worked out in action. Nonetheless, the parallels at the level of plot between tales and the larger and more fully developed forms are striking and could make a very long list. It seems that the Kinder- und Hausmärchen form a great repository of narrative motifs that have circulated throughout Europe in various forms for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years. How they made their way into the tales is only one of the many unresolved questions associated with the Grimms and their work.
The Brothers Grimm were born a year apart—Jacob in 1785 and Wilhelm in 1786—into the family of a prosperous lawyer in the German village of Hanau. When Jacob was eleven years old and Wilhelm ten, their circumstances changed radically, after a sudden blow of fortune like those that befall children in the tales they would later produce. Their father died, precipitating his wife and six children (there had been nine; three died in infancy) into dire poverty. With the help of relatives, the boys managed to get an excellent education, although they were miserably lodged and fed, and with a kind of bizarre fairy-tale logic were denied financial grants to attend university on the grounds that they were too poor. Nonetheless, like the dogged, resilient heroes of their tales, they persevered.
At the University of Marburg they came under the influence of a distinguished legal scholar, Friedrich Karl von Savigny, who studied German law in the context of its origins in the language and culture o
f the early Germanic peoples, inspiring the Grimms to apply the same methods to their studies in philology and literature. The brothers began collecting and transcribing old tales, believing that these remnants of a vanishing folk culture could offer some understanding of the origins of German poetry. The first volume of their collection was published in 1812, followed by a second in 1815. At first, the Kinder- und Hausmärchen sold modestly, but it went through seven editions during the Grimms’ lifetime, eventually becoming the all-time world best-seller in the German language, second in Germany itself only to the Bible.
After 1815 Jacob left most of the work on the tales to Wilhelm, but both brothers went on to become prodigious scholars, pioneers in the study of the grammar, history, and mythology of the Germanic languages, and in medieval studies. Jacob formulated “Grimm’s law,” a theory of consonant changes in the Germanic languages, and with Wilhelm began the great German dictionary that had reached the letter F at the time of Jacob’s death, and was finally completed only in 1961. All told, Jacob published twenty-one books, Wilhelm fourteen, and the two together eight, in addition to many volumes of essays, notes, and letters. Both Grimms worked as librarians, and both became professors at the University of Goöttingen. In 1837, when the new king of the state of Hanover dissolved parliament and required all state employees to swear allegiance to him, the Grimms declined to do so. They were fired and became known, along with five others who refused, as members of the “Goöttingen Seven.” Jacob was actually exiled from Hanover and was escorted to the border by an enthusiastic band of student supporters. In 1840 the brothers were appointed to the faculty of the University of Berlin.
Both Grimms were elected to the parliament established at the time of the revolution of 1848, but they withdrew from politics after the frustration of their hopes for German unification and democratic reform. They continued to live in the same household even after Wilhelm married and had children, and seem to have been inseparable until the death of Wilhelm in 1859; Jacob died four years later.
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