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Germanic Fairy Tales

Talena asked this question on 5/20/2002: Who wrote many of the Germanic fairy tales (i.e. Little Snow-White, Hansel & Grethel, etc.)? I read that they were written by peasants, but I am not too sure if that is right...help! Thanx :) ============ beainsc gave this response on 5/20/2002: Those Fairy Tales were compiled and written by the Grimm Brothers, folktales told to them mostly by women, young and old. Looking for a sweet, soothing tale to waft you toward dreamland? Look somewhere else. The stories collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the early 1800s serve up life as generations of central Europeans knew it—capricious and often cruel. The two brothers, patriots determined to preserve Germanic folktales, were only accidental entertainers. The Brothers Grimm - By Thomas O’Neill Once upon a time there lived in Germany two brothers who loved a good story—one with magic and danger, royalty and rogues. As boys they played and studied together, tight as a knot, savoring their childhood in a small town. But their father died unexpectedly, and the family grew poor. One brother became sickly; the other, serious beyond his years. At school they met a wise man who led them to a treasure—a library of old books with tales more seductive than any they had ever heard. Inspired, the brothers began collecting their own stories, folktales told to them mostly by women, young and old. Soon the brothers brought forth their own treasure—a book of fairy tales that would enchant millions in faraway places for generations to come. The Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, named their story collection Children’s and Household Tales and published the first of its seven editions in Germany in 1812. The table of contents reads like an A-list of fairy-tale celebrities: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel, the Frog King. Dozens of other characters—a carousel of witches, servant girls, soldiers, stepmothers, dwarfs, giants, wolves, devils—spin through the pages. Drawn mostly from oral narratives, the 210 stories in the Grimms’ collection represent an anthology of fairy tales, animal fables, rustic farces, and religious allegories that remains unrivaled to this day. Grimms’ Fairy Tales, as the English-language version is usually called, pervades world culture. So far the collection has been translated into more than 160 languages, from Inupiat in the Arctic to Swahili in Africa. In the United States book buyers have their choice of 120 editions. As a publishing phenomenon the Grimms’ opus competes with the Bible. And the stories and their star characters continue to leap from the pages into virtually every media: theater, opera, comic books, movies, paintings, rock music, advertising, fashion. The Japanese, perhaps the most ravenous of all the Grimms’ fans, have built two theme parks devoted to the tales. In the United States the Grimms’ collection furnished much of the raw material that helped launch Disney as a media giant. Cinderella and Snow White easily hold their own with the new kids on the block, whether Big Bird or Bart Simpson. As for the brothers, they are recognized as pioneers in the field of folklore research. Their crystalline fairy-tale style—the Grimms extensively edited and rewrote drafts of the narratives—has influenced generations of children’s writers and paved the way for other masters of the genre, from Hans Christian Andersen to Maurice Sendak. But the Grimms’ stories do not speak only to the young. “The age for hearing these fairy tales is three years to death,” says Elfriede Kleinhans, a professional storyteller in Germany. “Our world can seem so technical and cold. All of us need these stories to warm our souls.” Such lasting fame would have shocked the humble Grimms. During their lifetimes the collection sold modestly in Germany, at first only a few hundred copies a year. The early editions were not even aimed at children. The brothers initially refused to consider illustrations, and scholarly footnotes took up almost as much space as the tales themselves. Jacob and Wilhelm viewed themselves as patriotic folklorists, not as entertainers of children. They began their work at a time when Germany, a messy patchwork of fiefdoms and principalities, had been overrun by the French under Napoleon. The new rulers were intent on suppressing local culture. As young, workaholic scholars, single and sharing a cramped flat, the Brothers Grimm undertook the fairy-tale collection with the goal of saving the endangered oral tradition of Germany. For much of the 19th century teachers, parents, and religious figures, particularly in the United States, deplored the Grimms’ collection for its raw, uncivilized content. An American educator in 1885 railed: “The folktales mirror all too loyally the entire medieval worldview and culture with all its stark prejudice, its crudeness and barbarities.” Offended adults objected to the gruesome punishments inflicted on the stories’ villains. In the original “Snow White” the evil stepmother is forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes until she falls down dead. In “The Goose Maid” a treacherous servant is stripped, thrown into a barrel studded with sharp nails, and dragged through the streets. Even today some protective parents shy from the Grimms’ tales because of their reputation for violence. Despite its sometimes rocky reception, Children’s and Household Tales gradually took root with the public. The brothers had not foreseen that the appearance of their work would coincide with a great flowering of children’s literature in Europe. English publishers led the way, issuing high-quality picture books such as Jack and the Beanstalk and handsome folktale collections, all to satisfy a newly literate audience seeking virtuous material for the nursery. Once the Brothers Grimm sighted this new public, they set about refining and softening their tales, which had originated centuries earlier as earthy peasant fare. In the Grimms’ hands, cruel mothers became nasty stepmothers, unmarried lovers were made chaste, and the incestuous father was recast as the devil. Americans fell in love with the Grimms’ tales when Walt Disney in 1937 released his animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first of three wildly popular Disney adaptations. In converting a short story into an 80-minute musical, the Disney studio sweetened the material, giving the dwarfs names like Sneezy and Happy. In Cinderella (1950) Disney frosted the plot by adding a carriage that turns into a pumpkin at the stroke of midnight. The Grimms’ texts have undergone so many adaptations and translations, often with the intent of censoring objectionable material such as the violence meted out to villains or of making the themes more relevant to contemporary tastes, that most of us know them only in their sanitized versions. The dust-jacket copy of a recent translation plaintively wonders if all the retellings don’t “greatly reduce the tales’ power to touch our emotions and intrigue our imaginations.” In a fourth-grade classroom in Steinau, Germany, the town where the Grimms spent part of their childhood, I listened as the storyteller Elfriede Kleinhans, an opponent of prim retellings, asked the boys and girls how the princess managed to turn a frog into a prince at the climax of the “The Frog King,” the first tale in the Grimms’ collection. “She kissed it,” the children sang out. “No,” said Kleinhans. “She threw the ugly frog at the wall as hard as she could, and it awoke as a prince. That’s what the real story says.” The children looked as if they didn’t believe her. Scholars and psychiatrists have thrown a camouflaging net over the stories with their relentless, albeit fascinating, question of “What does it mean?” Did the tossing of the frog symbolize the princess’s sexual awakening, as Freudian psychologist Bruno Bettelheim asserted, or does the princess provide a feminist role model, as Lutz Röhrich, a German folklorist, wondered, by defying the patriarchal authority of her father, the king? Or—maybe—a frog is just a frog. The tales have also fallen prey to ideologues and propagandists. Theorists of the Third Reich in Germany turned Little Red Riding Hood into a symbol of the German people, saved from the evil Jewish wolf. At the end of World War II, Allied commanders banned the publication of the Grimm tales in Germany in the belief that they had contributed to Nazi savagery. On campuses across Europe and the United States during the 1970s, the Grimms’ tales were scorned for promoting a sexist, authority-ridden worldview. “Madness Comes From Fairy Tales” was scrawled on walls in Germany. Some of the stories were rewritten to accommodate certain political tastes. A revision of “Cinderella,” for example, has the heroine organizing a union of local maids, prompting the king to arrest her, after which she emigrates to the U.S. to escape the tyranny of kings and queens. Altogether some 40 persons delivered tales to the Grimms. Many of the storytellers came to the Grimms’ house in Kassel. The brothers particularly welcomed the visits of Dorothea Viehmann, a widow who walked to town to sell produce from her garden. An innkeeper’s daughter, Viehmann had grown up listening to stories from travelers on the road to Frankfurt. Among her treasures was “Aschenputtel”— Cinderella. With the exception of Viehmann, the brothers rarely identified their correspondents. Their names and the tales credited to them were learned in most cases only after careful study of the margin notes in the brothers’ personal copies of the Tales. The true identity of one of the most important informants—a certain “Marie”—came to light only in the mid-1970s. Marie was credited in the notes with narrating many of the most famous tales: “Rotkäppchen” (Little Red Riding Hood), “Schneewittchen” (Snow White), and “Dornröschen” (Sleeping Beauty). Herman Grimm, the oldest son of Wilhelm and guardian of the Grimms’ legacy after the brothers’ deaths, contended for many years that the Marie in question was the old housekeeper of Wilhelm's in-laws. It took a close reading of the annotations by Heinz Rölleke of the University of Wuppertal to reveal that the storytelling Marie was in fact Marie Hassenpflug, a 20-year-old friend of their sister, Charlotte, from a well-bred, French-speaking family. Marie’s wonderful stories blended motifs from the oral tradition and from Perrault’s influential 1697 book, Tales of My Mother Goose, which contained elaborate versions of “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Snow White,” and “Sleeping Beauty,” among others. Many of these had been adapted from earlier Italian fairy tales. In the second edition of their own collection the Grimms acknowledged the deep international roots of many of their tales. Included in their notes are references to variants from many other cultures, including Russian, Finnish, Japanese, Irish, and Slavic. Long before the Grimms’ time, storytelling thrived in the milieu of roadhouses, barns, and, perhaps most energetically, in the Spinnstuben, the spinning chambers of peasant women. During winter nights women softened the long hours of spinning flax into yarn by entertaining themselves with tales spiced with adventure, romance, and magic. The Grimm tales feature many spinners, most famously in “Rumpelstiltskin,” in which a poor miller’s daughter, ordered by a king to spin straw into gold—failure means death, success a royal marriage—enlists the aid of a devilish little man, Rumpelstiltskin. Given that the origins of many of the Grimm fairy tales reach throughout Europe and into the Middle East and Orient, the question must be asked: How German are the Grimm tales? Very, says scholar Heinz Rölleke. Love of the underdog, rustic simplicity, sexual modesty—these are Teutonic traits. The coarse texture of life during medieval times in Germany, when many of the tales entered the oral tradition, also colored the narratives. Throughout Europe children were often neglected and abandoned, like Hänsel and Gretel. Accused witches were burned at the stake, like the evil mother-in-law in “The Six Swans.” “The cruelty in the stories was not the Grimms’ fantasy,” Rölleke points out. “It reflected the law-and-order system of the old times.” Possibly the most German touch of all is the omnipresence of the forest, the place where fairy-tale heroes confront their enemies and triumph over fear and injustice. Rural German society traditionally depended on the Wald. The forest was where farmers grazed their pigs on acorns, royals hunted deer, and woodcutters selected logs for the massive beams still seen in the half-timbered barns and houses of Hessian towns. Storytellers knew that to place characters in a dark trackless woods would stir up associations of danger and suspense. “The forest was not seen as a safe place. Townspeople would avoid it,” forester Hermann-Josef Rapp told me as we drove wet logging roads through the Reinhardswald, a large forest in the hills of northern Hesse. “There were outlaws and illegal hunters. And Germans have always been afraid of wolves.” Nowadays the Reinhardswald is thick with beech and introduced spruce, serving local sawmills. But to behold those mighty oaks that were the preferred species in most Grimm fairy tales, one has to visit a remnant forest near Sababurg Castle. Rapp, a trunk of a man in a green oilskin jacket, led me into that forest one day in a pouring rain. Here massive, arthritic-looking oaks, some of them 400 years old or more, loomed like Gothic ruins. I spooked myself staring at the thick, grasping limbs, the wild hairlike mosses, the knobby eyes, the holes that gaped like mouths. How could Little Red Riding Hood’s mother ever have let that sweet little girl go into such woods as these? Despite the strong Germanic flavoring of the tales, the first edition sold poorly. At the Grimms museum in Kassel, director Bernhard Lauer placed the brothers’ personal copy of the first edition in front of me, handling it as if it were a Fabergé egg. “It’s the most valuable thing in the museum,” he said, “Only a few of the original 900 copies still exist. The paper quality was very poor.” Mild commercial success did not come until 1825, when the Grimms published the Small Edition, a condensed collection of 50 stories with illustrations by their brother Ludwig. The 1825 volume, of which 1,500 copies were printed, is even rarer than the 1812; only four or five copies survive in libraries. With the debut of the cheaply priced Small Edition, the Grimms had at last figured out who their true audience was: children. By the second edition in 1819 Wilhelm had taken over the lead responsibility for the fairy tales, Jacob having turned his attentions to a scholarly exegesis on German grammar. Wilhelm proved an inspired editor. By streamlining plots to emphasize action, weaving into the narrative old proverbs and folk poems, and using poetic language to set scenes, Wilhelm created a style that remains a model for fairy-tale writing. Wilhelm continued to polish and reshape the tales up to the final edition of 1857. Comparisons of the various editions reveal that in his effort to make the stories more acceptable to children and their middle-class parents, Wilhelm removed any hint of sexual activity, such as the premarital couplings of Rapunzel and the prince who climbed into her tower. He also added Christian motifs, accented the child-rearing lessons of the tales, and emphasized gender roles. Though the brothers implied that they were mere recorders of tales, such literary and moral restylings of oral narratives were apparently crucial to bring the tales into the mainstream. “Yet despite all Wilhelm’s additions,” Rölleke said, “the cores of the stories were left untouched.” The editorial fingerprints left by the Grimms betray the specific values of 19th-century Christian, bourgeois German society. But that has not stopped the tales from being embraced by almost every culture and nationality in the world. What accounts for this widespread, enduring popularity? Bernhard Lauer points to the “universal style” of the writing. “You have no concrete descriptions of the land, or the clothes, or the forest, or the castles. It makes the stories timeless and placeless.” The tales allow us to express “our utopian longings,” says Jack Zipes of the University of Minnesota, whose 1987 translation of the complete fairy tales captures the rustic vigor of the original text. “They show a striving for happiness that none of us knows but that we sense is possible. We can identify with the heroes of the tales and become in our mind the masters and mistresses of our own destinies.” Fairy tales provide a workout for the unconscious, psychoanalysts maintain. Bruno Bettelheim famously promoted the therapeutic value of the Grimms’ stories, calling fairy tales the “great comforters.” By confronting fears and phobias, symbolized by witches, heartless stepmothers, and hungry wolves, children find they can master their anxieties. Bettelheim’s theory continues to be hotly debated. But most young readers aren’t interested in exercising their unconscious. My 11-year-old daughter, Lucy, thinks it’s cool that witches cast spells and that heroines always seem to get their man. Boys I know go for stuff like the cloak that makes a hero invisible and a rifle that never misses. The Grimm tales in fact please in an infinite number of ways. Something about them seems to mirror whatever moods or interests we bring to our reading of them. This flexibility of interpretation suits them for almost any time and any culture. Jacob and Wilhelm moved on from their jobs as librarians in Kassel to teach at universities in Göttingen and Berlin. Between them they published more than 35 books. The brothers also made a name for themselves as patriots, risking their livelihoods by speaking out in favor of democratic reform. But in their last years they retreated from politics and teaching to concentrate on writing the German Dictionary, one of the most ambitious scholarly projects of 19th-century Europe. The brothers did not live to finish the dictionary or to see the fulfillment of their abiding dream: the founding in 1871 of the German nation. Wilhelm died of an infection in 1859 at the age of 73. Jacob in his eulogy bestowed upon his beloved Wilhelm the name Märchenbruder, the “fairy-tale brother.” Jacob died four years later. He had just finished writing the dictionary definition for Frucht, or fruit, a fitting end to a fertile life. The Brothers Grimm, for the final fairy tale in their collection, chose a short, parable-like tale called “The Golden Key.” A poor boy goes out into a wintry forest to collect wood on a sled. In the snow he finds a tiny key and near it an iron box. The boy inserts the key. He turns it. He lifts the lid. That is where the story ends. For once the brothers avoid a tidy ending. Instead, they have issued a golden invitation, since accepted by countless readers, to open the brothers’ books with the key of the imagination. Only then can readers discover what wonderful things await them. Once they saw how the tales bewitched young readers, the Grimms, and editors aplenty after them, started “fixing” things. Tales gradually got softer, sweeter, and primly moral. Yet all the polishing never rubbed away the solid heart of the stories, now read and loved in more than 160 languages. What they wrote: In addition to the works listed below, the Grimms (especially Jacob) wrote many substantive articles, reviews, forewords, and chapters, and published numerous editions and translations. Their achievements as pioneering folklorists, linguists, and medievalists are astounding by any measure. Major joint publications of the "Brothers Grimm": The Grimms' first collection of folktales was not published during their lifetime. It was a manuscript containing 53 stories, some written out in detail, others sketched in brief outline form. In December 1810 they submitted this collection to Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim for inclusion in a planned third volume to their successful collection of folk poetry entitled Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy's Magic Horn, 3 volumes, 1806, 1808, 1808), which was to be dedicated to folktales. This fairy-tale volume never materialized, and the manuscript was not returned to its authors, but the Grimms' interest in collecting and editing folklore did not die. In 1812 they came out with their own fairy-tale collection. Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales), vol. 1, 1812; vol. 2, 1814 (pre-dated 1815). 2nd edition, 1819. volume 3, Anmerkungen (Commentary), 1822. 3rd edition, 1837. 4th edition, 1840. 5th edition, 1843. 6th edition, 1850. 7th edition, 1857. This final version is the basis for most editions and translations published after the Grimms' death. The final version of this pioneering collection consists of 200 numbered stories plus ten "Children's Legends." The standard abbreviation for the collection is KHM, from the German title. Altdeutsche Wälder (Old German Forests), 3 volumes, 1813, 1815, 1816. Miscellaneous writings on linguistics, folklore, and medieval studies. Der arme Heinrich von Hartmann von der Aue (Poor Heinrich by Harmann von der Aue), 1815. An edition with commentary of an important medieval German epic. Lieder der alten Edda (Lays from the Elder Edda), 1815. Deutsche Sagen (German Legends), 2 volumes, 1816, 1818. Irische Elfenmärchen (Irish Fairy Tales), 1826. This is a translation, with a long and insightful introductory essay, of Thomas Crofton Croker's book Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (London, 1825). Deutsches Wörterbuch (German Dictionary), 32 volumes, 1852-1960. The Grimms themselves saw only the entries A through Forsche of this monumental historical dictionary published during their lifetime. The remaining parts were published by several generations of scholars over a 100 year span. Major individual works of Jacob Grimm: Deutsche Grammatik (German Grammar), 4 volumes, 1819, 1826, 1831, 1837. Deutsche Rechtsaltertümer (German Legal Antiquities), 1828. 2nd edition, 1854. Deutsche Mythologie (German Mythology -- also translated as Teutonic Mythology), 1835. 2nd edition, 2 volumes, 1844. 3rd edition, 1854. Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (History of the German Language), 2 volumes, 1848. 2nd edition, 1853 Major individual works of Wilhelm Grimm: Altdänische Heldenlieder, Balladen und Märchen (Old Danish Heroic Lays, Ballads, and Folktales), 1811. A translation. Über deutsche Runen (On German Runes), 1821. Die deutsche Heldensage (The German Heroic Legend), 1829.

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