Brothers Grimm

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Brothers Grimm published their first collection of folk tales in 1812, and the world has never quite looked at fairy stories the same way since. Jacob Grimm, born on the 4th of January 1785, and Wilhelm Grimm, born on the 24th of February 1786, were not storytellers by nature. They were German academics, linguists, and cultural researchers. They wanted to build a science. What they built instead was a mythology that now stretches across more than 160 languages and 120 editions available for sale in the United States alone.

  The tales they gathered and shaped, "Cinderella", "Snow White", "Rapunzel", "Hansel and Gretel", have become so embedded in childhood that most people assume they have always existed in more or less the same form. They have not. The original versions contain a biological mother who orders her daughter killed so she can eat the child's lungs and liver. A princess throws a frog against a wall. A servant girl is pushed naked into a barrel studded with inward-pointing nails and rolled down a street.

  How did two brothers from a minor German city, orphaned of their father at an early age and excluded from the social life of their university, produce one of the most influential works in the history of world literature? And what were they actually trying to do when they sat down to collect those stories? The answers involve a French occupation, a king who demanded loyalty oaths, and a dictionary that took more than a century to finish.

• 2. Poverty and Purpose

  ›

  Philipp Wilhelm Grimm died of pneumonia in 1796, leaving his wife Dorothea and nine children in sudden poverty. Jacob was the eldest living son at the time, and he was eleven years old. He and Wilhelm were forced to assume adult responsibilities almost immediately, depending on their grandfather and on an aunt who served as first lady-in-waiting at the court of William I, Elector of Hesse.

  The aunt arranged and paid for both brothers to attend the Friedrichsgymnasium in Kassel in 1798. Their grandfather died that same year, removing the last male provider from the family entirely. The two brothers had only each other. Wilhelm wrote in his autobiography that their shared study of Old German helped them "overcome the spiritual depression of those days."

  At the University of Marburg, which enrolled around 200 students, the poverty that had shaped their childhood became a structural barrier. The brothers were initially disqualified from admission because of their social standing and had to petition for a dispensation to study law. Wealthier students received stipends; the brothers were excluded even from tuition aid. In a letter to their aunt, Wilhelm described eating only three portions among five people, and only once a day.

  Their law professor Friedrich von Savigny changed the direction of their lives. Savigny awakened in them an interest in history and philology, and through his circle of friends including Clemens Brentano and Ludwig Achim von Arnim, the brothers encountered the ideas of Johann Gottfried Herder. Herder argued that German literature should return to simpler forms, what he called Volkspoesie, or natural poetry, as opposed to Kunstpoesie, artificially constructed art poetry. That distinction would anchor everything the brothers did for the rest of their careers.

• 3. Collecting the Stories

  ›

  When Jacob returned from Paris in 1806, where he had worked as Savigny's research assistant, Brentano asked both brothers to help add to his own collection of folk tales. They began gathering stories in an organized fashion, inviting storytellers to their home and transcribing what they heard. By 1810 they had produced a manuscript of several dozen tales.

  The brothers have long been credited with collecting stories directly from German peasants, but that reputation does not hold up to scrutiny. Many of the best-known tales came from middle-class or aristocratic acquaintances. Wilhelm's future wife, Henriette Dorothea Wild, known as Dortchen, and her family along with their nursery maid provided stories including "Hansel and Gretel" and "Sleeping Beauty". Wilhelm collected other tales after visiting August von Haxthausen in Westphalia in 1811. Marie Hassenpflug, an educated woman of French Huguenot ancestry, told the brothers tales of French origin, and it is likely she was familiar with Charles Perrault's collection published in Paris in 1697.

  At Brentano's request the brothers printed and sent him copies of the 53 tales they had gathered for inclusion in his third volume of Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Brentano either ignored or forgot about the copies, which were left in a church in Alsace. They were found there in 1920 and became known as the Ölenberg manuscript. The manuscript was published in 1927 and again in 1975, and it remains the earliest surviving version of the Grimms' collection.

  One of the tales, Gevatter Tod, the story known in English as Grim Reaper, was provided by composer Wilhelmine Schwertzell, with whom Wilhelm maintained a long correspondence. Scholar Maria Tatar, professor of German studies at Harvard University, argues that the oral tradition gave folk tales important mutability: versions shifted from region to region, picking up local color, a turn of phrase from a song, or a character detail drawn from the audience present at the telling.

• 4. Shaping and Revising

  ›

  Jacob established the overall framework of Kinder- und Hausmärchen. From 1815 onward, Wilhelm assumed sole responsibility for editing and rewriting the tales, a task he continued until his death. He made the tales stylistically consistent, added dialogue, removed elements that might detract from what he called a rustic tone, and incorporated psychological motifs. Ronald Murphy argues in The Owl, the Raven, and the Dove that Wilhelm also drew on fragments of old Germanic faiths, Norse mythology, Roman and Greek mythology, and biblical stories.

  The sexual content visible in the earliest editions was progressively removed. In the first edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen, "Rapunzel" makes the romantic relationship between the prince and the girl in the tower explicit; later editions eliminate it. In another revision, a king's regret was inserted into the scene in which his wife is about to be burned at the stake. Tatar notes that even the vocabulary was Germanized: every fairy, prince, and princess, all words of French origin, was replaced with more Teutonic-sounding terms such as enchantress, king's son, and king's daughter.

  Children were not initially considered the primary audience. After 1819, Wilhelm began writing original tales specifically for children and adding didactic elements to existing stories. He polished the language for a bourgeois readership in later editions and eliminated further sexual content while adding Christian elements. Emil Grimm, the brothers' younger brother, illustrated the Small editions of the collection and added Christian symbolism throughout, including depicting Cinderella's mother as an angel and placing a Bible on the bedside table of Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother.

  Between 1812 and 1864, Kinder- und Hausmärchen was published seventeen times: seven Large editions containing all the tales with extensive scholarly annotations, and ten Small editions for children with only 50 tales. The seventh and final Large edition of 1857 contained 211 tales, 200 numbered folk tales and 11 legends.

• 5. Language and Nationhood

  ›

  The Grimms saw culture and language as inseparable. At Marburg they came to believe that the purest cultural expression resided in the grammar of a language itself. They moved away from Brentano's practice of converting oral folk styles into something more literary, which they considered artificial. Their goal was to recover stories from the oral tradition without losing the original qualities of oral language.

  This philological commitment had a political dimension. The brothers shared their professor Savigny's desire to see the some 200 German principalities unified into a single state. They believed that German national identity could be discovered in popular culture, in the stories of the common Volk. The tales they collected, they argued, contained kernels of mythologies and legends essential to understanding the essence of German culture.

  Between 1816 and 1818 the brothers published Deutsche Sagen, a two-volume work consisting of 585 German legends organized by region and by historical subject. Jacob did most of the collection and editing. Unlike Kinder- und Hausmärchen, Deutsche Sagen sold poorly, but Zipes calls it a vital source for folklorists and critics. The collection was translated into French and Danish during the 19th century but not into English until 1981.

  As early as 1812 they published the oldest known German heroic song, the Song of Hildebrand and Hadubrand, alongside the Wessobrunn Prayer, a ninth-century German text. The same philological drive eventually produced the Deutsches Wörterbuch, the German Dictionary, which the brothers began in 1838. It was meant to trace the history and analysis of every word in the German language. The first volume did not appear until 1854, and the dictionary's 32 volumes were not completed until 1960, nearly a century after Jacob's death.

• 6. Protest and Exile

  ›

  In 1830 the brothers were passed over for the post of chief librarian in Kassel, which disappointed them deeply. They relocated their household to Gottingen in the Kingdom of Hanover, where Jacob became a professor and head librarian at the University of Gottingen and Wilhelm became a professor. For seven years they continued to research, write, and teach, and the discipline of German studies gained legitimacy around them.

  The 1830s brought political upheaval across Germany and the rise of a movement for democratic reform known as Young Germany. The brothers were not directly aligned with the Young Germans, but in 1837 Ernest Augustus, King of Hanover, dissolved the Hanoverian parliament and demanded oaths of loyalty from civil servants, including university professors. Jacob, Wilhelm, and five colleagues refused. The group became known as the Gottingen Seven. The brothers lost their university posts, and three of the seven professors were deported from Hanover. Jacob was among those expelled. He went to Kassel, and Wilhelm followed later with Dortchen and their four children.

  Stripped of income and facing serious financial difficulty again, the brothers in 1838 began what would become the defining work of their final decades: the Deutsches Wörterbuch. They depended once more on friends and supporters for money and for help finding employment. It was Savigny, their old professor, and Bettina von Arnim who appealed to Frederick William IV of Prussia on their behalf. In 1840, the brothers were offered posts at the University of Berlin and stipends from the Academy of Sciences to continue their research.

  After the revolutions of 1848, both brothers were elected to the civil parliament, and Jacob became a member of the National Assembly at Mainz. Their hope for German unification faded, and their political activities were short-lived. Jacob resigned his university position in the late 1840s and published The History of the German Language. Wilhelm remained at his post until 1852.

• 7. Legacy and Afterlife

  ›

  Kinder- und Hausmärchen was not an immediate bestseller. Early editions received lukewarm reviews, and the brothers revised the collection in response. By the 1870s the tales had grown popular enough to be added to the teaching curriculum in Prussia. In the 20th century, the work held the status of being second only to the Bible as the most popular book in Germany.

  During the Third Reich the Nazi government decreed that Kinder- und Hausmärchen was a book every household should own, using the tales to foster nationalism. Later, in occupied Germany, the same book was banned for a period. The collection had become a political object regardless of what the brothers intended.

  In the United States, the 1937 release of Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs drew directly from the Grimms' material. Disney returned to the well in 1959 with Sleeping Beauty. Zipes argues that both films repeat a popular theme of good triumphing over evil and innocence over oppression. The Cinderella motif, the story of a poor girl finding love and success, has since recurred across mainstream films including Pretty Woman, Ever After, Maid in Manhattan, and Ella Enchanted.

  Wilhelm died of an infection in Berlin on the 16th of December 1859. Jacob, deeply affected by his brother's death, became increasingly reclusive. He continued working on the German Dictionary until he died on the 20th of September 1863. Zipes notes that the last word the brothers had reached in the dictionary before their deaths was Frucht, the German word for fruit. The university library at the Humboldt University of Berlin now bears their names as the Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Center, and it houses a substantial portion of their private library.