By Sara Simon
Today it is widely known that the original stories inspiring most modern fairy tales and children's movies are generally much darker than their current retellings. Despite this, not as much is known about the Grimm Brothers, the duo attributed with collecting the stories that inspired many modern fairy tales. This post will tell the history of the Grimm Brothers themselves, while dispelling some myths about what is often called “The Grimm Brothers Fairy Tales.”
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were born in 1785 and 1786 respectively in the Germanic Region of the Holy Roman Empire in Central Europe. Throughout their lives this area saw the occupation of the Napoleonic French army, as well as the transformation of the Holy Roman Empire into the German Confederation. While they are often referred to as German writers, this refers to their ethnic background, as the unification of the German State occurred after both of their deaths in the late 1850s and early 1860s. The brothers began collecting the tales that would come to make up their collections in their teens, recording the oral histories of household tales across the Germanic region. Additionally, both brothers worked in varying libraries in their lives, allowing them to generate a meager income to aid their family that had fallen into poverty in the aftermath of their fathers' death. Throughout their lives the Grimm Brothers published multiple copies and versions of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children and Household Tales), the collections that would come to be known as “The Grimm Brothers Fairy Tales.” The first version, published in 1812 included just under 70 stories, with later versions including over 200 tales. In spite of the hundreds of stories formally published it is suspected that they collected many more than this that never saw publication due to their incomplete nature or the existence of varying versions of similar stories.
While it is known that these folk tales were much darker in nature, the dramatic nature of these stories are often understated. The Grimm’s collections did not solely consist of bleaker versions of modern stories, with the first editions of the collections included stories such as “The Children of Famine,” in which a starving family eats each other, and “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering.” Other stories had similarly disturbing themes and plotlines, such as “Bluebird,” in which a wife discovers the bodies of her husband's prior wives in the basement of their home. Many of these gorier stories were not included in later versions of the collection, as these versions were often edited and modified to be more appealing to the public. The gritter first versions often included magic and fantastical elements that were edited to be less prominent in later versions, reflective of their origins in often rural and impoverished areas before their altercation to be consumed by more urban educated society. These stories normally included moral lessons and ethical considerations highly relevant to rural Germanic areas, evident in the rawness of the original works. The Brothers Grimm mostly acted as compilers, collecting word of mouth stories before making them more appealing to the larger populations.
Linked below is a directory to the English translations of some of the later publications of the tales, with reference to the easiest versions of the tales included to demonstrate the differences between the versions. The website includes stories such as “Rapunzel,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and “The Poor Miller's Boy and the Cat.”
LINK TO STORIES: https://sites.pitt.edu/~dash/grimmtales.html
References
“Grimm’s Fairy Tales.” CMU. https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~spok/grimmtmp/.
Zipes, Jack, Danny Heitman, and Laura Wolff Scanlan. “How the Grimm Brothers Saved the Fairy Tale.” The National Endowment for the Humanities. https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2015/marchapril/feature/how-the-grimm-brothers-saved-the-fairy-tale.
Image Used
Popova, Maria. “Arthur Rackham’s Rare and Revolutionary 1917 Illustrations for the Brothers Grimm Fairy Tales.” The Marginalian, November 21, 2021. https://www.themarginalian.org/2016/02/29/arthur-rackham-brothers-grimm/.