[In the following essay, Zipes offers a socio-historical perspective on the Grimms' Children's and Household Tales, examining the ways in which these stories depict the social customs and classes of the German people.]

Inevitably [the characters of Grimm's tales] find their way into the forest. It is there that they lose and find themselves. It is there that they gain a sense of what is to be done. The forest is always large, immense, great, and mysterious. No one ever gains power over the forest, but the forest possesses the power to change lives and alter destinies. In many ways it is the supreme authority on earth and often the great provider. It is not only Hansel and Gretel, who get lost in the forest and then return wiser and fulfilled.

Once upon a time there was a prince who was overcome by a desire to travel about the world, and the only person he took with him was his faithful servant. One day he found himself in a great forest when evening came. He had not found a place to spend the night and did not know what to do. Then he noticed a maiden going toward a small cottage, and when he came closer, he saw that she was young and beautiful.

("The Riddle")¹

The boy set out with this letter but lost his way, and at night he came to a great forest. When he saw a small light in the darkness, he began walking toward it and soon reached a little cottage. Upon entering, he discovered an old woman sitting all alone by the fire.

("The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs," pp. 110-11)

The little tailor traveled on and came to a forest. There he met a band of robbers who planned to steal the king's treasure.

("Thumbling's Travels," p. 164)

Once upon a time a forester went out hunting in the forest, and as he entered it, he heard some cries like those of a small child.

("Foundling," p. 189)

Meanwhile, the poor child was all alone in the huge forest. When she looked at all the leaves on the trees, she was petrified and did not know what to do. Then she began to run, and she ran over sharp stones and through thornbushes. Wild beasts darted by her at times, but they did not harm her. She ran as long as her legs could carry her, and it was almost evening when she saw a little cottage and went inside to rest.

("Snow White," p. 197)

Once upon a time there was a man who had mastered all kinds of skills. He had fought in the war and had conducted himself correctly and courageously, but when the war was over, he was discharged and received three pennies for traveling expenses.

"Just you wait!" he said. "I won't put up with that. If I find the right people, I'll force the king to turn over all the treasures of his kingdom to me."

Full of rage, he went into the forest, and there he saw a man tearing up six trees as if they were blades of wheat.

("How Six Made Their Way in the World," p. 274)

When the rooster was ready, Hans My Hedgehog mounted it and rode away, taking some donkeys and pigs with him, which he wanted to tend out in the forest. Once he reached the forest, he had the rooster fly up into a tall tree, where he sat and tended the donkeys and pigs. He sat there for many years until the herd was very large, and he never sent word to his father of his whereabouts.

("Hans My Hedgehog," p. 394)

There was once a poor servant girl who went traveling with her masters through a large forest, and as they were passing through the middle of it, some robbers came out of a thicket and murdered all the people they could find. Everyone was killed except the maiden, who had jumped from the carriage in her fright and had hidden behind a tree.

("The Old Woman in the Forest," p. 440)

Let no one ever say that a poor tailor cannot advance far in the world and achieve great honors. He needs only to hit upon the right person and, most important, to have good luck. Once there was such a tailor, who was a pleasing and smart apprentice. He set out on his travels and wandered into a large forest, and since he did not know the way, he got lost.

("The Glass Coffin," pp. 522-23)

Once the guardian angel pretended not to be there, and the girl could not find her way back out of the forest. So she wandered until it became dark. When she saw a light glowing in the distance, she ran in that direction and came upon a small hut. She knocked, the door opened, and she entered. Then she came to a second door and knocked again. An old man with a beard white as snow and a venerable appearance opened the door.

("Saint Joseph in the Forest," p. 634)

A prince, a foundling, a miller, a miller's daughter, Thumbling, a sorcerer, a brother, a sister, a king, a forester, a princess, three poor brothers, a blockhead, a discharged soldier, a miller's apprentice, a tailor and a shoemaker, a hedgehog/human, a hunter, a poor servant girl, a poor man, a poor tailor, a pious, good little girl, St. Joseph, a hermit, and the Virgin Mary.² These are just a few of the characters in the Grimms' tales whose fates are decided in the forest, and it is interesting to note that the forest is rarely enchanted though enchantment takes place there. The forest allows for enchantment and disenchantment, for it is the place where society's conventions no longer hold true. It is the source of natural right, thus the starting place where social wrongs can be righted. In a letter to Wilhelm on April 18, 1805, Jacob stated:

The only time in which it might be possible to allow an idea of the past, an idea of the world of knights if you will to blossom anew within us and to break away from the norms (Sitten) that have restricted us until now and shall continue to do so is generally transformed into a forest in which wild animals roam about (for example, wolves with whom one must howl if only to be able to live with them). I believe that I would have been naturally inclined to do this. A constant warning against this and my drive to be obedient have fortunately suppressed this inclination. I can only be happy about this since one or just a few individuals would not be able to achieve anything worthwhile by doing this, and I would have easily gone astray.³

The forest as unconventional, free, alluring, but dangerous. The forest loomed large metaphorically in the minds of the Brothers Grimm. In 1813 they published a journal entitled Altdeutsche Wälder (Old German Forests) intentionally recalling the title of Johann Gottfried Herder's Kritische Wälder (Critical Forests, 1769)—Herder being the man who was responsible for awakening the interest in German folklore by the romantics. This journal was to contain traces, indications, signs, and hints with regard to the origins of German customs, laws, and language. It was as though in "old German forests" the essential truths about German customs, laws, and culture could be found—truths which might engender a deeper understanding of present-day Germany and might foster unity among German people at a time when the German principalities were divided and occupied by the French during the Napoleonic Wars. The Volk, the people, bound by a common language but disunited, needed to enter old German forests, so the Grimms thought, to gain a sense of their heritage and to strengthen the ties among themselves.

In her critical biography of the Brothers Grimm,⁴ Gabriele Seitz sees both the Kinder-und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales, 1812, 1815) and the journal Altdeutsche Wälder as part of a political program conceived by the Grimms to reactivate interest in the customs, laws, and norms that bound German people together through language. And, to a certain extent, one could look upon the Grimms' act of developing and collecting the tales as the cultivation of an "enchanted forest," a forest in which they were seeking to capture and contain essential truths that were expressive and representative of the German people—truths that the German people shared with other peoples, for the tales were considered by the Grimms to be Indo-Germanic in origin and to possess relics of the prehistoric past. If one studies the notes to the tales that the Grimms compiled, it is apparent that they wanted to stress the relationship of each tale to an ideal Urvolk and Ursprache while at the same time focusing on German tradition with the express purpose of discovering something new about the origins of German customs and laws.

Historically, the Grimms did indeed succeed in creating a monument in honor of the German cultural heritage, bringing fame and renown to Germany through their tales. But, perhaps they succeeded more than they would have liked in the creation of a peculiar German monument—for the tales have been the subject of ideological debate, attracting both ultraconservative scholars such as Josef Prestel and Karl Spiess, who used them to promote a racist ideology, and radical critics such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and even Antonio Gramsci, who sought to grasp their revolutionary appeal.⁵ Furthermore—and perhaps this is the most questionable aspect of the Grimms' success from their own original viewpoint—their enchanted forest, created to illuminate and celebrate basic truths about German culture, was turned into and still is a pleasure park, where people stroll and pluck their meanings randomly with complete disregard for the historical spadework of the Grimms. Certainly the personal approach and sampling of the tales are legitimate ways of appreciating the tales, but often they have been endowed with more "magical power" than they possess and have been appropriated in a manner that makes them appear ahistorical and juvenile.

To counter the general tendency of dehistoricizing the Grimms' tales, I want to demonstrate how deeply they are entrenched in central European history of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. My purpose is not "historicist" in a narrow philological sense, that is, I do not want to treat the tales as historical texts of a particular epoch whose authorship, chronology, composition, and "truth value" need to be documented. Rather, I am more interested in the complex levels of historical representation that reveal the socio-political relations of a period in a symbolical manner. By reexamining the tales critically as social commentaries that represent aspects of real experience of the past, we can learn to distinguish social tendencies in our own culture and times more clearly and perhaps comprehend why we are still drawn to the Grimms' tales. Some historians like Eugen Weber⁶ and Robert Darnton⁷ have already taken a step in this direction by arguing that the tales are repositories of peasants' social and political living conditions. In particular, Darnton has reconstructed the way French peasants saw the world under the Old Regime by asking what experiences they shared in everyday life and then interpreting the tales as direct expressions of their experiences. Though his interpretations are valid to a certain degree, Darnton simplifies the problem of symbolic representation by assuming that the oral tales of the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries were direct expressions of the common people and not mediated by literate recorders who always played a role in the transmission by altering style and themes. Moreover, he does not even mention that many of the tales that were in the oral tradition between 1700 and 1900 were actually taken from church sermons, educated travelers, and plays written by educated people of a different class.⁸ It became customary during the Baroque period for priests and preachers to include folk tales as exemplary stories in the vernacular when they delivered tales to the peasants to convey their messages just as it was customary for educated travelers to read stories or tell tales about their travels to peasants and artisans gathered in an inn. To be sure, the tales were remembered by their listeners and retold in a different way—but not always, and they were not always altered drastically. The peasants were not always the preservers of the oral tradition. To assume that the viewpoint of a folk tale always equals the viewpoint of the "average" French or German peasant is misleading especially since there were major differences among the peasants themselves.

For instance, this misassumption undermines an interesting historical study entitled "Hessian Peasant Women, Their Families, and the Draft: A Social-Historical Interpretation of Four Tales from the Grimm Collection" by Peter Taylor and Hermann Rebel.⁹ They begin their article by recounting the history of the Hessian draft system and the attitudes of the peasants toward the draft at the end of the eighteenth century. Their intention is to show that some of the Grimms' tales reveal more about the common people's dispositions toward the military and family relations than do contemporary documents. They argue that

a more fruitful approach to fairy tales is to see them in connection with actual social life and social institutions, as a popular (and not elite) ideological product focused on the inherently imperfect and conflicting workings of a given social order. . . . Fairy tales are indeed ideological creations emerging from the folk and often do address themselves to the psychosocial strains in an historically evolving social system; the crucial difference in approach is not to see the tales and their contents as expressions of strain but as objective linguistic and conceptual materials—"symbolic templates"—by which members of a population fashioned for themselves analyses that continually interpreted, and reinterpreted their social politics, (p. 352)

So far, so good. However, as we shall see, their next step in their approach is a wobbly one. On the basis of four tales from the Grimms' collection, "The Twelve Brothers," "Brother and Sister," "The Seven Ravens," and "The Six Swans," they argue that there is a social development in the pattern of these tales that can be related to ultimogeniture and the attitude of sisters toward brothers who were drafted into the army. They stress the importance of the female peasant storytellers, "old Marie" and Dorothea Viehmann, who were allegedly the sources of the tales, for they certainly represent popular viewpoints and were custodians of popular culture. Given the popular origins of the tales, Taylor and Rebel assume that they express a peasant view from below and show how each one, with certain variations, involves brothers who are dispossessed because of their younger sister, sent into exile, transformed into animals, and rescued by their courageous sister, who helps them resolve the question of dispossession. Next Taylor and Rebel supply the historical basis for interpreting the patterns of the tales as they do: ultimogeniture was a common practice in Hessia at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, and, they argue, the tales represent the defense of a a new non-patrimonial inheritance system, in which the youngest daughter is allowed to inherit the family property and maintain it in the family's interests. Taylor and Rebel claim that the

themes of sexual exchange must be tied to the changing social circumstances of inheritance. Here the tales portray strategies that contradict conflicts over narrowly defined access to patrimony, whether matriarchal or patriarchal; they advocate (if indeed they advocate anything) strategies of inheritance that neither dispossess male siblings or force them from the social framework of family life into a world of outlawry and military violence, (p. 367)

Some questions arise. Why was there a change in inheritance practices in Hessia? Why did they become more non-patrimonial? Why, according to the tales, did the youngest sister, who benefited from the new system, want to help her brothers? Taylor and Rebel demonstrate that Hessia had made a business of drafting and selling peasant soldiers to other nations, and that the military was run as a kind of state business. Given the fact that many sons of peasants were obliged to serve in the army and could earn a living through the military, the fathers often preferred to leave their property or the bulk of their property to daughters, whom they could influence. In addition, the laws of preferential partibility allowed the father to control the reconstitution of the property and the services of the son-in-law. So it would seem that daughters in Hessian peasant families might rejoice in becoming the sole heirs of property. However, Taylor and Rebel argue, by inheriting property they were placed under greater stress to follow their fathers' dictates by marrying the right kind of man (if they could find a man in Hessia, for so many were drafted) and producing the right kind of children in accordance with inheritance strategies. Evidence shows that women balked at becoming heirs because of the pressures and because they did not want to remain in Hessia where it was difficult to find husbands and live under restricted circumstances. Many Hessian women chose migration rather than stay in Hessia, and, Taylor and Rebel claim, the four Grimms' tales they selected for analysis provide some explanations for social conditions and changes in Hessia:

In all four tales examined, the sisters sought to bring their brothers back into the world of people, into the social world of families; and to reject the role of "advantaged heir" to accomplish this. In all but one of the tales—in which the simple act of renunciation suffices—reconnection is accomplished by emigrating with a husband through whose family the brothers reacquired their human social shape. If these tales have social validity, then some of the observed female outmigration represents the effort by an unknown number of Hessian women to marry outside the state in order to offer their brothers a place of refuge, a family to which they could attach themselves to escape the calculated and dehumanizing meshes of preferential partibility and the draft, (p. 375)

In conclusion, Taylor and Rebel maintain that, though the tales may have represented other things for the audiences of the early nineteenth century, they

were also symbolic analyses which held up to view the negative social consequences of the existing social and military systems. They were passionate and often violent polemics that not only expressed and took a stand against the dehumanizing and painful experiences arising from a narrow system of property devolution working in conjunction with a draft state; they also advocated alternative action for women. The tales demonstrate a relatively sophisticated but non-revolutionary social consciousness in their advocacy of the riskier path of emigration, one that consciously rejected a system where security and profit were gained at the cost of dispossession and of the destruction of family relations, (pp. 375-76)

As I mentioned before, this "historical" interpretation is certainly interesting if not ingenious, but it is highly flawed because the historians have not done their historical homework. First of all, there is the problem of narrative perspective. Taylor and Rebel claim that the original sources were two peasant women, "old Marie" and Dorothea Viehmann. Yet, in reality none of the tales was told to the Grimms by these women. "The Twelve Brothers" was supplied by the sisters Julia and Charlotte Ramus, daughters of a French pastor; "Brother and Sister" was provided by Marie Hassenpflug, who came from a middle-class family with French origins; "The Seven Ravens" also came from the Hassenplug family; and "The Six Swans" was obtained from Dortchen Wild, daughter of a pharmacist and the future wife of Wilhelm. In other words, not one of the tales emanated directly from the peasantry, and certainly not from the sources given by Taylor and Rebel. Indeed, "The Six Swans" was even printed in a collection of literary fairy tales at that time.¹⁰

Even if one were to give Taylor and Rebel the benefit of the doubt and assume that the tales, despite the bourgeois origins of their informants, were told to the middle-class women by peasant women, there is the problem of changes and transformations by the Brothers Grimm. As I have shown in Chapter Two, in my discussion of "Brother and Sister" and "The Twelve Brothers," it is possible to show a certain disposition on the part of the Brothers to collect and alter the tales according to their ideal sense of family. Interestingly, some of the remarks made by Taylor and Rebel reveal that there was possibly a shared feeling on the part of Hessian women about maintaining family cohesion—but the vision of family in the Grimms' tales becomes more and more bourgeoisified from 1812 to 1857. Unfortunately, Taylor and Rebel do not take this into account.

Finally, from a folklorist viewpoint, the four tales they discuss are tale types that can be found in many different countries and are hundreds of years old. They are not peculiarly Hessian, and it is most unclear as to what they have to do with the draft system in Hessia. They show signs of matrilineal intiation and marital rites that may be pre-Christian. Undoubtedly they were changed over the years and could be connected to Hessia of 1800. But not in the unhistorical and unscholarly manner in which Taylor and Rebel have worked.

In approaching the Grimms' tales from a historical and ideological perspective, we must constantly bear in mind that we are dealing with multiple representations and voices within the narrative structure of each tale. First, depending on the tale, there is the viewpoint of the informant, more than likely often an educated female, who had memorized a tale probably told by a peasant or read in a book. Next, there is the viewpoint of Jacob or Wilhelm, who revised the oral or literary tale that was collected. Not to be forgotten, there is the viewpoint of the submerged creator of the tale—probably a peasant, artisan, soldier, or journeyman—who sought to represent his or her experience through a symbolical narrative at a given time in history. And, finally, there are the viewpoints of intervening tale tellers who pass on the narrative from author to listeners and future tellers. By conserving the material according to narrative formulae that had been cultivated in both an oral and literary tradition in central Europe, the Grimms were maintaining a dialogue about social experience with the anonymous original creator, intervening tellers of the tales, the direct source of the informant, and the informant. In so doing, they contributed to the institutionalization of discursive genres such as the fable, the anecdote, the legend, the magic fairy tale, all of which were in the process of being conventionalized.

It is difficult to define just what a Grimms' tale or Märchen is, for there is very little unanimity among folklorists, literary critics, ethnologists, psychologists, and historians as to what exactly an oral folk tale or a literary fairy tale is. However, among the different endeavors to create a working definition, it appears to me that Dietz-Rüdiger Moser has summarized the major characteristics of the folk tale with clear categories that can enable us to grasp the historical signification of the Grimms' tales. According to Moser,

the fairy tale is a narrative work of fiction that is complete in itself, transmitted, and therefore conservative, and it contains typical figures, properties, situations, and aspects of action that serve the portrayal of how conflicts are solved on the basis of fixed moral notions. Those events that are described in it can leave the immediate realm of experience. Yet, the conflict that it treats is continually anchored in this realm.¹¹

Moser emphasizes that the

portrayal of how conflicts are solved must be recognized as the dominant concern of the genre, and the portrayal is realized in a consequent and uniform way. Accordingly the analysis must distinguish between the immediate initial and internal conflicts that are effective for the action and the central conflict that is constitutive for the particular total message.¹²

Though the Grimms' collection contains numerous tales that that cannot be considered fairy tales (such as anecdotes, fables, and legends), the majority of them do fit Moser's definition: they are definitely concerned with the solution of conflicts, and they contain a moral viewpoint that the Grimms modified according to their own principles. Due to the fact, however, that the Grimms did not always alter the viewpoint of the informants, there are sometimes ambivalent solutions and viewpoints that are depicted because of the gap between the Grimms and their informants. Most important is that the representative conflict and attitudes assumed toward the resolution of this conflict reveal the social and political relations of particular social types in the culture of a nation during a certain historical stage of development.

Given their legal training under the guidance of Karl von Savigny, the Grimms were particularly sensitive toward social types and the theme of justice in their tales, and they tried to connect these types to German customs and law.¹³ Though the Grimms never categorized their tales according to social roles and functions, it is certainly possible to elicit a sociological typology from them. Such a typology can help reveal more than we already know about the social and political purpose behind the Grimms' shaping and revising of their tales. If we were to catalogue the tales according to social types, that is, examine the tales as representative of customary attitudes and patterns peculiar to the major protagonist who carries the action, we would find the following principal types:¹⁴

In addition there are seventy-eight tales in which farmers, poor people, sons and daughters of poor people, and peasants play major roles. Then there are twenty-seven tales about animals. In keeping with the oral tradition, the Grimms referred to their characters in terms of their social class, family standing, or profession. Here and there they used typical names such as Hans, Heinz, Lise, Else, and Gretel to stress the common quality of their protagonist as a type of simple person, everyman, or lazy person.

The Grimms were eager to understand and trace commonalities and peculiar characteristics of their types—both social and tale—and so they very rarely accepted and printed tales that were too similar in theme and structure. Whenever they collected several versions of the same tale type, they would either combine these versions into one or alter the best of the versions—in any event, creating their own synthetic tale. By synthesizing social and tale types, the Grimms hoped to reveal customary behavior, and thereby enable readers to learn about general folk attitudes and draw conclusions about the right way to behave in given circumstances. In light of their empiricalethical bias, it is interesting to see how the forest serves in a majority of the tales as a kind of topos: it is the singular place that belongs to all the people; it levels all social distinctions and makes everyone equal. The forest allows for a change in the protagonist's destiny and enables the social type to distinguish him or herself.

The importance of concentrating on social types rather than on, for instance, tale types and motifs (in the manner often done by folklorists using the Aarne-Thompson type classification¹⁵ and the Thompson motif index¹⁶), is that doing so brings us closer to the historical reality of the Brothers Grimm and enables us to learn more about their personal proclivities in collecting, selecting, and rewriting the tales. Furthermore, it may also help us learn something about the life of particular social types during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, conditions surrounding the type, and different attitudes toward the type. The Grimms spent their early childhood in the country and were strongly attached to the agrarian customs and ways of life which they began studying closely when they were young. Class and legal distinctions were made clear in their home, especially by their magistrate father. The Grimms' tales are filled with depictions of agrarian types, artisans, and townspeople, and their idiomatic expressions and proverbs were noted down by the Grimms and incorporated into the tales.¹⁷ In general, then, their tales tend to blend their ideal notions of the people, their trust in a monarchical constitutional state, and their empirical findings about customs and law that reveal what they believed were basic truths about the origins of language and Gemeinschaft.

To illustrate how they worked with social types and the significance of these types for their tales, I want to concentrate on two different tale cycles that focus on the soldier and the tailor and the normative patterns that evolve from the action of the tales. Often it is obvious that the original teller of the tale must have been a soldier or tailor or someone who shared their experiences, and that their representations formed the basis of the later work done by other storytellers and, eventually, the Grimms. However, I shall not focus on the relationship of the original storyteller or the source of the text as Rölleke often does. This is not because I dismiss this approach but because I feel that the changes, stylization, and subjective selection process of the Grimms is more important for a comprehension of the total meaning of the tales in their socio-historical context. As I have already remarked, the Grimms were more than just midwives; they conceptualized many of the tales and lent them their indelible substantive mark.

There are ten soldier tales in the Children's and Household Tales:¹⁸ "The Three Snake Leaves," "How Six Made Their Way in the World," "Brother Lusting," "Bearskin," "The Devil's Sooty Brother," "The Blue Light," "The Devil and his Grandmother," "The Worn-Out Dancing Shoes," "The Boots of Buffalo Leather," and "The Grave Mound."¹⁹ The sources for these tales vary greatly: Johann Friedrich Krause, a former soldier; Dorothea Viehmann, a peasant woman; the landed-gentry family, the von Haxthausens; literary works published by Friedmund von Arnim and Philipp Hoffmeister. The original sources of all ten tales were evidently soldiers themselves, and the relatively high percentage of soldier's tales in the Grimms' collection is most likely a direct result of the Napoleonic Wars and the vast increase of soldiering as a profession in the European population.

Ever since standing armies became widespread in the seventeenth century, more and more men from the peasantry and lower classes were recruited as common soldiers.²⁰ By the eighteenth century there was a definite shift in the social and economic structure of the German principalities due to the rise of the military as a dominant political force. To keep standing armies and increase their power, the German sovereigns had to levy taxes on the populace at large. As the officer corps developed and played a role in the administration of different regions, the army elite formed a caste that exercised great influence in domestic and foreign policies. Moreover, the code of discipline and punishment and the actual regimentation within the army anticipated the type of control that would be utilized in schools, prison systems, insane asylums, and factories as society became more rationalized and institutionalized. The common soldier's lot was miserable.

As a member of the standing army, the common soldier had few rights and had to undergo long periods of strict drilling and guard duty during peacetime. Although soldiers were allowed to have another trade on the side, their first obligation was to the army, and they were under constant surveillance by the officers to make sure that they would not desert. Corporal punishment was the rule for any offence, and death sentences were common for desertion and at times for disobeying orders. The leisure time of soldiers was generally spent drinking and frequenting taverns where camp followers and easy women were to be found. During wartime, the soldiers suffered immensely because their food and clothing were scant; they were more like canon fodder than anything else. Since the peasantry and the bourgeois town and city dwellers were obligated to house the soldiers and pay for their maintenance, there was a distinct antipathy toward both the military establishment and the soldiers, often considered the dregs of society. Indeed, even the so-called "dregs," the common soldiers, did not like to serve in the army and did not think highly of their military commanders. As soon as a soldier found a good reason to resign or desert, he did. Very rarely did a common soldier have anything good to say about the army as an institution. The major factors that kept most soldiers in a standing army were money (even if it was not much) and the threat of punishment.

Given these general conditions, it is not by chance that most of the Grimms' tales reveal the common soldier's dissatisfaction with the treatment he receives from his superiors. Moreover, the tales also incorporate the general anti-military sentiment common among the peasants and the bourgeoisie. Of the ten tales that focus on the soldier, eight of them deal with discharged or ex-soldiers, who are down and out and want to gain revenge on the king or their former officers. One tale deals with a poor farmer who enlists and becomes a hero for the fatherland (perhaps a reference to the Napoleonic Wars) while another depicts three soldiers who desert. The general purpose in all these tales, the motive of the protagonists that stamps the action, is the struggle to overcome a desperate situation. The ex-soldier wants to survive a bad experience as soldier. None of the protagonists starts with an idealistic goal. The last thing on their minds is rescuing or marrying a princess (although that might occur). On the contrary, the ex-soldiers all want simply to get by and obviously, if possible, raise their social status. They have nothing to lose, and this is the reason that the soldier protagonist is, without exception, fearless. Yet, bravery is not what society demands from a soldier if he wants to be reintegrated and accepted—especially when that society is hostile toward the military and expects correct behavior according to the Protestant ethic. So a soldier's integrity must be tested, and often the forest plays a role in determining his destiny—for it is here that the soldier is not only tempted by evil forces but also given an equal chance to be recognized.

For instance, it is in the forest that the discharged soldier, "full of rage" (p. 274) against the king in "How Six Made Their Way in the World," finds the extraordinary companions who help him gain vengeance on the king. The two discharged soldiers in "The Devil's Sooty Brother" and "Bearskin" meet the devil in the forest, and he enables them to procure money and marry well. The discharged soldier in "The Blue Light" meets a witch in the forest who facilitates his discovery of the light that, in turn, helps him marry a king's daughter and punish the king. One of the soldiers in "The Devil and his Grandmother" must go into the forest to visit the devil's grandmother to solve the devil's riddles and save their souls. The soldier in "The Boots of Buffalo Leather" gets lost in the forest, helps a king overcome robbers, and is rewarded for his fearlessness.

If it is not the forest where the soldiers must prove themselves, then it will still be outside in the fields or a graveyard. With the exception of "The Three Snake Leaves," in which the enlisted soldier fights for the fatherland, all the soldier tales depict ex-soldiers, who must go outside society and make pacts with unconventional figures such as the devil, the devil's grandmother, or a witch to attain their goals. Even in "The Three Snake Leaves," the enlisted soldier, who marries a king's daughter, is murdered by her and can only gain justice through the magic of the snake leaves. Despite the pacts with suspicious creatures, the ex-soldiers, always fearless, remain their own men. That is, they never lose their souls to the devil or witch but outsmart them.

If we were to draw a composite picture of the common soldier in the Grimms' tales, he would be fearless, cunning, virtuous, generous, honest, opportunistic, and ambitious. An exception here is Brother Lustig, who nevertheless possesses many of the above attributes. These attributes are always manifested in a manner that allows the soldier to gain retribution for the mistreatment he received in the army. On one level, it would be possible to argue that the Grimms favored the soldier tales because of the slights they themselves experienced in a rigid class society. From a psychological point of view, it would be interesting to study their fondness for the soldier tales as compensatory narratives; and this would also work on a more social level—for certainly the tales were socially symbolic acts of creation by the original narrators, and they contained their wish—fulfillments to gain revenge against their superiors, even if this meant metaphorically aligning themselves temporarily with the devil. That the soldiers' are good if not better men than their kings and superiors is proven by the way in which the soldiers keep their hearts pure. (It is this basic innocence or purity of heart that permits even Brother Lustig to gain a place in heaven.)

The common lot of the soldiers in the Grimms' tales indicates a definite sympathy for their social condition and the need to improve their treatment, both in the army and in society. After all, they have served their king and country and should be rewarded. Unlike women, who are rarely encouraged in the tales to assume an active role in determining their destiny, the soldiers as men are expected to become socially useful and fight for their goals. Heroines are generally portrayed as domestic figures or figures who need domestication. Heroes are generally adventurers who need experience and a touch of respectability to become successful as public figures. Here the soldier tales reflect the clear nineteenth-century patriarchal notions about gender roles that the Grimms shared with their society at large: the male hero must prove himself by asserting himself and showing through his behavior to what extent he is graced by God. Implicit in the normative behavior of the "good" soldier is a patriarchal reinforcement of the Protestant ethic.

The tales about tailors also exemplify the Grimms' social and religious creed and are closely related to the soldier tales. There are eleven such narratives in all: "The Brave Little Tailor," "The Tailor in Heaven," "The Magic Table, The Gold Donkey, and the Club in the Sack," "Thumbling's Travels," "The Two Travelers," "The Clever Little Tailor," "The Bright Sun Will Bring It to Light," "The Glass Coffin," "Sharing Joys and Sorrows," "The Gifts of the Little Folk," and "The Giant and the Tailor."²¹ Here again the sources used by the Grimms ranged greatly from the Hassenpflug family to publications by Franz Ziska, Emil Sommer, and Jakob Frey. Originally all of the tales were told by journeymen and townspeople. Almost all the tailors in the tales are journeymen or apprentices; none are master tailors. Unlike the soldiers, who are uniquely portrayed as sympathetic and admirable figures, the tailors are more differentiated as protagonists. On the one hand, they appear to be shifty and dubious characters reflecting the attitudes of townspeople toward men who were often out of work and wandered from town to town. (Ever since the middle ages the profession of tailoring was not highly regarded because it did not demand much skill or material. Nor did one have to be exceptionally strong, so that the weaker sons were generally apprenticed to master tailors. In addition, there were so many tailors that a tailor's life was generally one of poverty.²²) On the other hand, the tales also depict some industrious tailors bent on overcoming difficult obstacles and desirous of becoming respected citizens in society. These characters use their wit and skills to try to become master tailors or better and win admiration because of their shrewdness.

Although some of the Grimms' sources date back to the fifteenth century, there is little doubt that the tales tend to characterize the hazards and vicissitudes in the lives of the tailors as they traveled from town to town and job to job in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The eighteenth century saw a change in the structured lives of tailors.²³ Formerly the guilds had exercised great control over employment, prices, and conditions in the trade, but with the growth of manufacturing, the establishment of clothing shops, and the expansion of cities, there was a gradual shift leading to their weakening. This development meant that many apprentices and journeymen did not have to join a guild to find employment. Or, the trade succumbed to the free market and brutal competition for customers. Whereas the guild masters (Zunftmeister) of each town or locality had customarily divided the work among themselves and had provided training and housing for apprentices and journeymen, this system was becoming obsolete by the beginning of the nineteenth century. As Wolfgang Renzsch points out:

A very small group of well-to-do important master tailors faced a large number of tailors who could only make a miserable living. To be sure it was relatively easy to establish oneself as a master tailor because the trade did not demand much of an initial capital investment. But the leap from a type of proletarian existence as craftsman must have been enormously difficult. The medium-sized shops—shops with approximately three to five journeymen—were very scarce.²⁴

In fact, since it was so difficult to make a decent living as master tailor, most remained journeymen for the majority of their lives, and they were constantly looking for better situations. Given the hardships tailors endured, it is no surprise to find them cutting corners and resorting to dubious means to make a profit or to make a living. Consequently, there is an underlying attitude of suspicion and awe toward tailors in the Grimms' Children's and Household Tales: the tailor is not to be trusted. He is often boastful, tricky, and sly. On the other hand, there are also the good souls, the industrious tailors who uphold the good name of their craft and demonstrate that they can do solid work. Yet, whether the tailor be cunning, carefree, or hardworking, he is more often than not portrayed as a wanderer, someone in search of a better situation than tailoring.

Almost all the tales begin with the tailor either on his journey or about to set out on a journey. The plucky fellow in "The Brave Little Tailor" starts out to show the world how brave he is right after he has revealed how stingy he is in his dealings with an old peasant woman. The tailor's sons in "The Magic Table, The Gold Donkey, and the Club in the Sack" must leave their father's house under duress and learn other (certainly more profitable) trades that ultimately free their father from tailoring. The tiny fellow in "Thumbling's Travels" goes out into the world and learns how difficult it is to work as a tailor's apprentice. The tailor in "The Two Travelers" comes to realize that he must give up the carefree life and settle down if he is to be happy and successful. The simpleton tailor in "The Clever Little Tailor" is the one who solves the riddle of the princess and abandons tailoring to marry her. A starving tailor's apprentice kills a Jew on the road in "The Bright Sun Will Bring It to Light" so he can establish himself in a nearby town. A lucky young tailor in "The Glass Coffin" gets lost in a forest and eventually rescues a princess, who becomes his wife. In "The Gifts of the Little Folk" another tailor has luck on a journey and is rewarded with gold by the little folk. Finally, a boastful tailor in "The Giant and the Tailor" leaves his workshop to see what he can see in the forest and is eventually cast out by a giant because he is such a nuisance.

There are two basic motifs in these tales that are related: 1) either the tailor wants to abandon his trade and move on to something better because the trade (perhaps like spinning) is unprofitable and dreary; or, 2) the protagonist learns how to settle down and become an established, more responsible tailor. Here again the forest or the great wide world is the domain where the tailor is given a chance to change and where his fate is decided. For instance, the brave little tailor meets the giant in the forest, demonstrates his skills and courage, and later performs amazing feats in the forest to become king. The tailor's three sons in "The Magic Table, the Gold Donkey, and the Club in the Sack" and Thumbling have adventures in the forest and outside world which test their valor and cunning before they settle down. This is also the case with the tailor in "The Two Travelers," who is sorely tested and loses his eyesight in the forest. It is through the loss of sight that he regains a sense of priorities, and it is in the forest that he learns to see again. The forest also appears in "The Glass Coffin," "The Gifts of the Little Folk," and "The Giant and the Tailor" as the place where the tailors can attain a sense of themselves and acquire fortune if they put their talents to good use. If they fail, as in the case of the tailor in "The Giant and the Tailor," they are severely punished. "The Tailor in Heaven," "The Bright Sun Will Bring It to Light," and "Sharing Joys and Sorrows" are all about tailors who are either cocky or cunning and endeavor to make their way through the world by tricking and exploiting others.

As in the soldier's tales, there is a normative behavior pattern established by the protagonist's comportment. The good tailor is indeed cunning but also compassionate, hardworking, generous, and brave. More often than not he is searching for a secure place in society and must prove he is worthy enough to meet society's demands and win this place, one that is generally above his station. The good tailor is one who becomes a king or gets rich because he makes the best of his talents. The bad tailor is the drunk; the murderer; the arrogant man, who lacks compassion; and who takes little notice of the rights of his fellow human beings.

The appeal of the male protagonists, whether they be tailors or soldiers, is that they demonstrate a distinct willingness to rectify social injustices, particularly when they are class-related. Although the Grimms did believe in a class society and in maintaining distinctions among different groups of people, they also believed in social mobility and universal respect for a person's qualities—no matter what the person's class was or what trade a person plied. In fact, as time passed, their sentiments against class distinctions and the aristocracy grew more radical.²⁵ Such a progressive turn in their politics was merely the logical outcome of their democratic sentiments that were embedded in their folklore projects from the beginning. This is why the forest as a topos is so important in their tales, and it also was evidently important in the minds of the oral narrators—especially when they depicted the soldier or tailor in need of overcoming prejudices or searching for some magical help to bring about a new sense of social justice.

In 1852 Wilhelm H. Riehl, a remarkable political thinker and folklorist, who was a contemporary of the Grimms, wrote a book entitled Land und Leute, in which he discussed the significance of the forest for the German people:

In the opinion of the German people the forest is the only great possession that has yet to be completely given away. In contrast to the field, the meadow, and the garden, every person has a certain right to the forest, even if it only consists in being able to walk around it when the person so desires. In the right or privilege to collect wood and foliage, to shelter animals and in the distribution of the so-called Losholz from communal forests and the like, there is a type of communist heritage that is rooted in history. Where is there anything else that has been preserved like this other than with the forest? This is the root of genuine German social conditions.²⁶

Further on, Riehl stated:

It is generally known that the notion of privately owned forests developed only very late with the German people, and this was a gradual development. Forest, pasture, and water are according to ancient German basic law to be open to common use of all the people in the region (Markgenossen). The saying of Wald, Weide und Wasser (forest, pasture, and water) has not yet been entirely forgotten by the German people.²⁷

Despite the ideological tendentiousness of the above remarks and also in some of Riehl's other studies of social customs, everyday life, and social classes of the German people, he draws our attention here to the manner in which the Grimms accepted and portrayed the forest in their tales and also the manner in which various social types related to the forest. As Urwald, the forest is the seat of tradition and justice, and the heroes of the Grimms' tales customarily march or drift into the forest, and they are rarely the same people when they leave it. The forest provides them with all they will need, if they know how to interpret the signs.

The Grimms themselves were fascinated by the forest and, by extension, all that gave rise to what constituted German culture—language, law, and craftsmanship. They considered the tales that they collected signs and traces of the past and present that enabled them to glean essential truths about the German people. This is ultimately why the social types such as the soldier and the tailor and topoi such as the forest need further study if the Grimms' cultural investment in the Children's and Household Tales is to be fully grasped. After all, it was through their persistent hard work, integrity, cunning, devotion to an ideal of the German people, and their belief in the Protestant ethic that they advanced in society and provided us with an Erziehungsbuch to be used with great care. Yet, even more than an Erziehungsbuch, their collection is historically like an enchanted forest that can illuminate the past while providing hope for the future. We need only learn to read the signs.

Notes

¹ Jack Zipes, tr. and ed., The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm (New York: Bantam. 1987), p. 92.

² See such other tales as "The Girl without Hands," "The Robber Bridegroom," "Fitcher's Bird," "The Six Swans," "The Knapsack, the Hat, and the Horn," "The Golden Goose," "The Miller's Drudge and the Cat," "The Two Traveling Companions," "The Donkey Lettuce," "Simelei Mountain," "The Three Green Branches," "The Hazel Branch."

³ Hermann Grimm, Gustav Hinrichs, and Wilhelm Schoof, eds., Briefwechsel zwischen lacob und Wilhelm Grimm aus der Jugendzeit, 2nd rev. ed. (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus, 1963), p. 49. "Die einzige Zeit, in der es möglich wäre, eine Idee der Vorzeit, wenn Du willst der Ritterwelt, in uns aufgehen zu lassen, und aus den Sitten zu treten, die uns vorund nachher einengen, wird jetzt gewöhnlich in einen Wald verwandelt, in dem wilde Tiere herumgehen, (z.B. Wölfe, mit denen man heulen muss um mit ihnen nur leben zu können.) Ich glaube ich hätte von Natur Neigung dazu gehabt; ein beständiges Warnen davor und mein Trieb gehorsam zu sein, und dankbar—haben sie unterdrückt und ich kann nicht anders als froh darüber sein, da einer oder einige doch nichts Rechtes tun können, oder ich leicht in die falsche Manier gekommen war."

⁴ Gabriele Seitz, Die Brüder Grimm: Leben—Werk—Zeit (Munich: Winkler, 1984).

⁵ See "The Fight Over Fairy-Tale Discourse: Family, Friction, and Socialization" in Jack Zipes, Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion (New York: Methuen, 1983), pp. 134-69; and Lucia Borghese, "Antonio Gramsci und die Grimmschen Märchen" in Brüder Grimm Gedenken, ed. Ludwig Denecke, Vol. 3 (Marburg: Elwert, 1981): 374-90.

⁶ Eugen Weber, "Fairies and Hard Facts: The Reality of Folktales," Journal of the History of Ideas, 42 (1981): 93-113.

⁷ Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 1984). In particular, see "Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose," pp. 9-72.

⁸ Cf. Elfriede Moser-Rath, Predigtmärlein der Barockzeit: Exempel, Sage, Schwank und Fabel in geistlichen Quellen des oberdeutschen Raums (Berlin, 1964); Rudolf Schenda, "Orale und literarische Kommunikationsformen im Bereich von Analphabeten und Gebildeten im 17. Jahrhundert," Literatur und Volk im 17. Jahrhundert: Probleme populärer Kultur in Deutschland, eds. Wolfgang Brückner, Peter Blickle, and Dieter Breuer (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 1985), pp. 447-64; Rudolf Schenda, "Vorlesen: Zwischen Analphabetentum und Bücherwissen," Bertelsmann Briefe, 119 (1986): 5-14.

⁹ Peter Taylor and Hermann Rebel, "Hessian Peasant Women, Their Families, and the Draft: A Social-Historical Interpretation of Four Tales from the Grimm Collection," Journal of Family History, 6 (Winter, 1981): 347-78. Hereafter page references cited in the text.

¹⁰ For information about the sources, see Heinz Rölleke, ed., Kinder-und Hausmärchen, Vol. 3 (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1980), pp. 441-543.

¹¹ Dietz-Rüdiger Moser, "Theorieund Methodenprobleme der Märchenforschung," Ethnologia Bavaria, 10 (1981): 61.

¹² Moser, "Theorieunder Methodenprobleme," p. 61.

¹³ See Alice Eisler, "Recht im Märchen," Neophilologus, 66 (1982): 422-30.

¹⁴ The number in parentheses indicates the total number of tales in which the social type plays the major role in the narrative.

¹⁵ Cf. Antti Aarne, The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography, trans, and enlarged by Stith Thompson, 2nd rev. ed., FF Communications Nr. 3 (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedekatemia, 1961).

¹⁶ Cf. Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature, 6 vols. (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1955).

¹⁷ Cf. Wolfgang Mieder, "Wilhelm Grimm's Proverbial Additions in the Fairy Tales" and "Sprichwörtliche Schwundstufen des Märchens. Zum 200: Geburtstag der Brüder Grimm," Proverbium, 3 (1986): 59-83; pp. 257-71 as well as his book "Findet: so werdet ihr suchen!" Die Brüder Grimm und das Sprichwort (Bern: Peter Lang, 1986).

¹⁸ If one were to include Herr Fix und Fertig, which was part of the 1812 edition (source: Johann Friedrich Krause) and eliminated in 1819, there would be eleven soldier tales. I have translated this tale as Herr Fix-It-Up in my The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, pp. 647-50.

¹⁹ The titles in German are: Die drei Schlangenblätter, Sechse kommen durch die ganze Welt, Bruder Lustig, Bärenhäuter, Des Teufels russiger Bruder, Das blaue Licht, Der Teufel und seine Grossmutter, Die zertanzten Schuhe, Der Stiefel von Büffelleder, and Der Grabhügel.

²⁰ The following remarks about soldiers are based to a large extent on the findings of Jürgen Kuczynski, Geschichte des Alltags des deutschen Volkes, 1650-1810, Vol. 2 (Cologne: Pahl-Rugenstein, 1981).

²¹ The German titles are as follows: Das tapfere Schneiderlein, Der Schneider im Himmel, Tischlein deck dich, Goldesel und Knüppel aus dem Sack, Däumerlings Wanderschaft, Die beiden Wanderer, Vom klugen Schneiderlein, Die klare Sonne bringt's an den Tag, Der gläserne Sarg, Lieb und Leid teilen, Geschenke des kleinen Volkes, and Der Riese und der Schneider.

²² Cf. Frieder Stöckle, ed., Handwerkermärchen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1986), pp. 7-39. For a general picture of the living and working conditions of the artisans in Germany, see Reinhard Sieder, Sozialgeschichte der Familie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), pp. 103-24. This chapter deals with "Die Familien der Handwerker."

²³ Cf. Geoffrey Crossick and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, eds., Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London: Methuen, 1984); and Wolfgang Renzsch, Handwerker und Lohnarbeiter in der frühen Arbeiterbewegung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1980).

²⁴ Renzsch, Handwerker und Lohnarbeiter, pp. 71-72.

²⁵ Cf. Jacob's 1848 speech that he held in the Church of Paul in Frankfurt, "Über Adel und Orden," in Reden und Aufsätze, ed. Wilhelm Schoof (Munich: Winkler, 1966), pp. 63-69.

²⁶ Gunther Ipsen, ed., Die Naturgeschichte des deutschen Volkes (Leipzig: Kröner, 1935), p. 73.

²⁷ Ipsen, ed., Die Naturgeschichte, p. 73.