The Classic Fairy Tales_Norton Critical Edition

by Edited by Maria Tatar

  The changes made from the first to the second edition in “The Magic Table, the Gold Donkey, and the Cudgel in the Sack” show just how keen the Grimms must have been to give added prominence to violent episodes. In the first edition of the Nursery and Household Tales, we read about the encounter between the story’s hero and an innkeeper who confiscates the property of the hero’s brothers.

  The turner placed the sack under his pillow. When the innkeeper came and pulled at it, he said: “Cudgel, come out of the sack!” The cudgel jumped out of the sack and attacked the innkeeper, danced with him, and beat him so mercilessly that he was glad to promise to return the magic table and the gold donkey.2

  The second edition not only fills in the details on the crime and its punishment, but also puts the innkeeper’s humiliation on clearer display.

  At bedtime [the turner] stretched out on the bench and used his sack as a pillow for his head. When the innkeeper thought his guest was fast asleep and that no one else was in the room, he went over and began to tug and pull very carefully at the sack, hoping to get it away and to put another in its place. But the turner had been waiting for him to do exactly that. Just as the innkeeper was about to give a good hard tug, he cried out: “Cudgel, come out of the sack!” In a flash the little cudgel jumped out, went at the innkeeper, and gave him a good sound thrashing. The innkeeper began screaming pitifully, but the louder he screamed the harder the cudgel beat time on his back, until at last he fell down on the ground. Then the turner said: “Now give me the magic table and the gold donkey, or the dance will start all over again.” “Oh no!” said the innkeeper. “I’ll be glad to give you everything, if only you’ll make that little devil crawl back into his sack.” The journeyman answered: “This time I will, but watch out for further injuries.” Then he said: “Cudgel, back in the sack” and left him in peace.

  What the brothers found harder to tolerate than violence and what they did their best to eliminate from the collection through vigilant editing were references to what they coyly called “certain conditions and relationships.” Foremost among those conditions seems to have been pregnancy. The story of Hans Dumm, who has the power (and uses it) of impregnating women simply by wishing them to be with child, was included in the first edition but failed to pass muster for the second edition of the Nursery and Household Tales. “The Master Hunter,” as told by Dorothea Viehmann, the Grimms’ favorite exhibit when it came to discoursing on the excellence of folk narrators, must have struck the Grimms as unsatisfactory. Viehmann’s version, which was relegated to the notes on the tales, relates that the story’s hero enters a tower, discovers a naked princess asleep on her bed, and lies down next to her. After his departure, the princess discovers to her deep distress and to her father’s outrage that she is pregnant. The version that actually appeared in the Nursery and Household Tales made do instead with a fully clothed princess and a young man who stands as a model of restraint and decorum.3

  Pregnancy, whether the result of a frivolous wish (as in “Hans Dumm”) or of an illicit sexual relationship (as in “The Master Hunter”), was a subject that made the Grimms uncomfortable. In fact, any hints of premarital sexual activity must have made Wilhelm Grimm in particular blush with embarrassment. A quick look at the “Frog King or Iron Heinrich” (the first tale in the collection and therefore the most visible) reveals the tactics he used to cover up the folkloric facts of the story. When the princess in that celebrated tale dashes the hapless frog against the wall, he “falls down into her bed and lies there as a handsome young prince, and the king’s daughter lies down next to him.” No printed edition of the Nursery and Household Tales contains this wording. Only a copy of the original drafts for the collection, sent to the Grimms’ friend Clemens Brentano in 1810 and recovered many years later in a Trappist monastery, is explicit about where the frog lands and about the princess’s alacrity in joining him there. In the first edition, the frog still falls on the bed. After his transformation, he becomes the “dear companion” of the princess. “She cherished him as she had promised,” we are told, and immediately thereafter the two fall “peacefully asleep.” For the second edition, Wilhelm Grimm deprived the frog king of his soft landing spot and simply observed that the transformation from frog to prince took place as soon as the frog hit the wall. In this version, the happy couple does not retire for the evening until wedding vows are exchanged, and these are exchanged only with the explicit approval of the princess’s father. The Grimms’ transformation of a tale replete with sexual innuendo into a prim and proper nursery story with a dutiful daughter is almost as striking as the folkloric metamorphosis of frog into prince.4

  Another of the “conditions and relationships” that the Grimms seem to have found repugnant, or at least inappropriate as a theme in their collection, was incest and incestuous desire. In some cases, incest constituted so essential a part of a tale’s logic that even Wilhelm Grimm thought twice before suppressing it; instead he resorted to weaving judgmental observations on the subject into the text. The father of Thousandfurs may persist in pressing marriage proposals on his daughter throughout all editions of the Nursery and Household Tales, but by the second edition he receives a stern reprimand from his court councilors. “A father cannot marry his daughter,” they protest. “God forbids it. No good can come of such a sin.” In later editions, we learn that the entire kingdom would be “dragged down to perdition” with the sinful king. * * *

  When a tale was available in several versions, the Grimms invariably preferred one that camouflaged incestuous desires and Oedipal entanglements. The textual history of the tale known as “The Girl without Hands” illustrates the Grimms’ touchy anxiety when it came to stories about fathers with designs on their daughters. That story first came to the Grimms’ attention in the following form: A miller falls on hard times and strikes a bargain with the devil, promising him whatever is standing behind his mill in exchange for untold wealth. To his dismay, he returns home to learn that his daughter happened to be behind the mill at the moment the pact was sealed. She must surrender herself to the devil in three years. But the miller’s pious daughter succeeds in warding off the devil, if at the price of bodily mutilation: the devil forces the father, who has not kept his end of the bargain, to chop off his daughter’s hands. For no apparent reason, the girl packs her severed hands on her back and decides to seek her fortune in the world, despite her father’s protestations and his promises to secure her all possible creature comforts at home. The remainder of the story recounts her further trials and tribulations after she marries a king. This is the tale as it appeared in the first edition of the Grimms’ collection.

  The brothers subsequently came upon a number of versions of that story, one of which they declared far superior to all the others. So impressed were they by its integrity that they could not resist substituting it for the version printed in the first edition of the Nursery and Household Tales. Still, the opening paragraph of the new, “superior” version did not quite suit their taste, even though it provided a clear, logical motive for the daughter’s departure from home. Instead of leaving home of her own accord and for no particular reason, the girl flees a father who first demands her hand in marriage, and then has her hands and breasts chopped off for refusing him. There is no mention of devils in this version; the girl’s father is the sole satanic figure. The Grimms found it easy, however, to reintroduce the devil by mutilating the folkloric text whose authenticity they so admired. The original introduction detailing the father’s offenses was deleted from the tale and replaced by the less sensational account of a pact with the devil.

  Even without reading Freud on the devil as a substitute for the father, it is easy to see how the devil became mixed up in this tale. Just as God, Saint Peter, and Christ came to stand in for various benefactors in folktales, so Satan in his various guises was available for the role of villain and could incarnate forbidden desire. “The Poor Man and the Rich Man,” “The Devil and His Grandmother,” and “The C
arnation” are among the many other texts in the Nursery and Household Tales that mobilize divinities and devils as agents of good and evil. The Grimms seemed, in general, to have favored tales with a Christian cast of characters over their “pagan” counterparts, although there was no compelling folkloristic reason for them to do so. For “The Girl without Hands,” they chose to graft the introduction from what they considered an inferior version of the tale (but one that had the advantage of demonizing Satan instead of a father) onto a “superior (and complete)” variant. Clearly the Grimms were not particularly enamored with the idea of including plots concerned with incestuous desire in a collection of tales with the title Nursery and Household Tales. Incest was just not one of those perfectly natural matters extolled in their preface to the tales.

  Sex and violence: these are the major thematic concerns of tales in the Grimms’ collection, at least in their unedited form. But more important, sex and violence in that body of stories frequently take the perverse form of incest and child abuse, for the nuclear family furnishes the fairy tale’s main cast of characters just as the family constitutes its most common subject. When it came to passages colored by sexual details or to plots based on Oedipal conflicts, Wilhelm Grimm exhibited extraordinary editorial zeal. Over the years, he systematically purged the collection of references to sexuality and masked depictions of incestuous desire. But lurid portrayals of child abuse, starvation, and exposure, like fastidious descriptions of cruel punishments, on the whole escaped censorship. The facts of life seemed to have been more disturbing to the Grimms than the harsh realities of everyday life.

  How is one to explain these odd editorial practices? The Grimms’ enterprise, we must recall, began as a scholarly venture and a patriotic project. As early as 1811, the brothers proclaimed that their efforts as collectors were guided by scholarly principles, and they therefore implied that they were writing largely for academic colleagues. Theirs was an idealistic effort to capture German folk traditions in print before they died out and to make a modest contribution to the history of German poetry. As Jacob Grimm pointed out during his search for a publisher, the main purpose of the proposed volume was not so much to earn royalties as to salvage what was left of the priceless national resources still in the hands of the German folk. The Grimms therefore were willing to forgo royalties for the benefit of appearing in print. Still, the brothers expressed the hope that the volume in the offing would find friends everywhere—and that it would entertain them as well.

  Weighed down by a ponderous introduction and by extensive annotations, the first edition of the Nursery and Household Tales had the look of a scholarly tome, rather than of a book for a wide audience. Sales, however, were surprisingly brisk, perhaps in part because of the book’s title. Several of the Grimms’ contemporaries had already registered respectable commercial successes with collections of stories for children, and the appearance of the Nursery and Household Tales coincided to some extent with a developing market for collections of fairy tales. By 1815 nearly all 900 copies of the first volume had been sold, and Wilhelm Grimm began talking about a second edition in light of the “heavy demand” for the collection. The Grimms had every reason to be pleased, particularly when one calculates that thirty years later (when literacy was more widespread and the demand for children’s literature greater) a book such as the popular Struwwelpeter had a first printing of only 1,500. With their reputation for “revering trivia” and their endless struggles to get things published, they must also have been growing hungry for a measure of commercial success or at least for some indication of strong interest and support for their literary efforts. Before preparations were even set in motion for publication of the second edition of the Nursery and Household Tales, Wilhelm Grimm had already calculated exactly what the appropriate royalties would be for the first and second editions.

  The projected royalties for the collection were by no means inconsequential. These were lean years for the Grimms, and their letters to each other are sprinkled with references to financial pressures and to indignities visited on them owing to their impecunious circumstances. From Vienna, Jacob grumbled that he was short of cash and that his clothes were shabby and his shoes worn out. In 1815, Wilhelm Grimm complained that there was not a chair in the house that could be used without imperiling the physical welfare of its occupant. Books were often borrowed and copied out by hand because they were too dear an item in a household where the number of daily meals was limited to two. Thus the 500 talers that Savigny and Wilhelm Grimm had established as appropriate royalties for the first edition of the Nursery and Household Tales certainly must have been a welcome prospect. And the 400 talers that Wilhelm Grimm expected to receive for the second edition would have been a substantial addition to the household budget, particularly if we bear in mind that in 1816 Jacob Grimm drew an annual salary of 600 talers as librarian in Kassel, while Wilhelm received an annual salary of 300 talers. It is thus not surprising that the royalties for the Nursery and Household Tales would go a long way toward paying their many debts.

  * * *

  The Grimms may never have made or even hoped to make a financial killing on the Nursery and Household Tales, but the profit motive was certainly not wholly absent from their calculations and to some extent must have guided their revisions of the first edition. Still, the potential financial benefits to be reaped from strong sales of the collection counted merely as a secondary gain. What really mattered, particularly in the years immediately following publication of the first edition, were the views of the larger literary world. Both brothers monitored reviews with special interest, and here one disappointment followed another. Jacob, on the road much of the time from 1813 to 1815 in diplomatic service, repeatedly asked his brother for news about the collection’s reception. But none of the people who counted seemed to take much interest in reviewing the book, and those who actually did review it rarely had anything good to say. * * *

  * * *

  For many observers, the Nursery and Household Tales fell wide of the mark and missed its potential market because the brothers had let their scholarly ambitions undermine the production of a book for children. The Grimms’ seemingly slavish fidelity to oral folk traditions—in particular to the crude language of the folk—came under especially heavy fire. August Wilhelm Schlegel and Clemens Brentano felt that a bit of artifice would have gone a long way toward improving the art of the folk and toward making the tales more appealing. “If you want to display children’s clothing, you can do that quite well without bringing out an outfit that has buttons torn off it, dirt smeared on it, and the shirt hanging out of the pants,” Brentano wrote to Arnim. Arnim candidly told the Grimms that they would be wise to add, in the form of a subtitle, a consumer warning to the collection. Future editions ought to state that the book was “for parents, who can select stories for retelling.” Other readers were less tactful. Heinrich Voß described the collection (with the exception of a few tales) as “real junk.”

  * * *

  * * * In successive editions of the collection, [Wilhelm Grimm] fleshed out the texts to the point where they were often double their original length, and he so polished the prose that no one could complain of its rough-hewn qualities. He also worked hard to clean up the content of the stories. Both A. L. Grimm and Friedrich Rühs singled out “Rapunzel” as a tale particularly inappropriate to include in a collection of tales that children could get their hands on. “What proper mother or nanny could tell the fairy tale about Rapunzel to an innocent daughter without blushing?” Rühs gasped. Wilhelm Grimm saw to it that the story was rewritten along lines that would meet with both critics’ approval. Jacob Grimm may have responded to criticism by asserting that the collection had never been intended for young audiences, but his brother was prepared to delete or revise tales deemed unsuitable for children. He was encouraged in such efforts by his brother Ferdinand, who was all for eliminating anything that might offend the sensibilities (Feingefühl) of the reading public.

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nbsp; * * * Consider the following passage from the first edition of the Nursery and Household Tales (Rapunzel’s daily romps up in the tower with the prince, we learn, have weighty consequences).

  At first Rapunzel was frightened, but soon she came to like the young king so much that she agreed to let him visit every day and to pull him up. The two lived joyfully for a time, and the fairy did not catch on at all until Rapunzel told her one day: “Tell me, Godmother, why my clothes are so tight and why they don’t fit me any longer.” “Wicked child!” cried the fairy.5

  In the second edition of the Nursery and Household Tales, Wilhelm Grimm made the passage less “lewd”—and in the bargain a good deal less colorful. Here, Rapunzel’s “wickedness” has a very different cause.