The Brothers Grimm published important studies of German tales and mythology, as well as philological works recognized for their importance to the study of the German language.

The tales collected and edited by the Brothers Grimm are the defining instances of Märchen, a term only approximately translated by “fairy tale.” At a time when the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution threatened to make the traditions of oral storytelling disappear, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were able to preserve these tales in written form. Now, in the Anglo-Saxon world at least, the tales recounted by the Brothers Grimm are more familiar than any stories except those of the Bible. The literary influence of the collection has been considerable: It has shaped much of subsequent children’s literature and has inspired a great many sophisticated fictions, particularly among the German Romantics, the English Victorians, and the so-called Fabulators of the mid-twentieth century. Most important, however, has been the direct human influence of the tales. The collection epitomizes the psychological wisdom of generations of storytellers, and the tales themselves provide for nearly every child in the West a first map of the territory of the imagination.

Early Lives

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were born to a rather well-to-do family in a small village in what is now central Germany. Their father was a lawyer, judge, and public servant; however, he died suddenly at the age of forty-four, leaving his widow and his eleven-year-old son Jacob to take care of the other five children. Though times were financially difficult, Jacob and Wilhelm advanced academically, and by 1803 they were both studying law at the University of Marburg. Under the influence of a professor of legal history, the Grimm brothers became interested in the origins of the law and its growth and development in a cultural context. They also took up the study of philology (the investigations of ancient languages and texts) and began a serious inquiry into German folklore and linguistics. In 1825 Wilhelm married Dortchen Wild (who, along with other members of her family, provided the brothers with many of the folktales they would later use in their collections); Jacob never married.

In 1813, after the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte, Jacob became a member of the local parliament. However, the local German princes regained their power, ending German reunification and democratization. The Grimm brothers took jobs as librarians and, from around 1815 to 1830, produced several books on German legends, legal history, and grammar. However, both brothers lost their librarianships and university teaching opportunities after failing to take loyalty oaths to the local monarchs. By 1840, however, their fortunes had changed, and both were appointed professors at the University of Berlin, where they continued the work they had already begun on their massive Deutsches Wörterbuch (1854; German dictionary). Both became involved in politics again during the German revolution of 1848 and were elected to the local legislature, only to resign when the revolutionary movement collapsed.

Life’s Work

The work of the Grimm brothers cannot adequately be appreciated without some understanding of the intellectual and political climate of early nineteenth century Europe. By this time, most of the people and places of the world had been “discovered” by Westerners, though to be sure, much of the details still needed to be filled in. What European scholars at the time faced was a world of almost infinite variety in terms of cultural customs, races, languages, and religious beliefs. The task, then, was to try to put order into this apparent chaos: Why was the world so diverse? Why did people look so different? Why were there so many different languages? Previous answers, often based on biblical stories (such as the Tower of Babel to account for linguistic heterogeneity), were proving inadequate in light of new data coming in from ethnology, geology, and biology.

The American and French Revolutions had also called into question the notion of the monarch state, the role of the governor and the governed, and the nature of the political unit. Who should govern whom? What constitutes a “country”? Does every different group of language speakers deserve to be a separate nation? The work of the Grimm brothers was informed by all these questions.

In 1786 (the year of Wilhelm’s birth), the British legal scholar and Asian specialist William Jones shocked the world by claiming that Sanskrit (the ancient holy language of India) was related to Greek and Latin, having “sprung from a common source which, perhaps, no longer exists.” It had already been well known that many European languages shared a common ancestor in the past (for example, modern Romance languages such as French, Spanish, and Italian were derived from classical Roman Latin). What was startling about Jones’s hypothesis was that he claimed that most of the languages of Europe were also connected to many other languages hitherto thought to be quite dissimilar. This supposed common parent language was termed “Proto Indo-European,” and much of linguistic scholarship in the nineteenth century centered on trying to prove or disprove the Indo-European hypothesis. The Grimm brothers, particularly Jacob, made some important discoveries in this field and helped to establish the now commonly accepted view that the languages of today in the Indo-European family are actually all descendant from a common source.

The Indo-European hypothesis was one of the most critical issues of the nineteenth century. At stake were some of the deepest and strongest convictions held by Europeans: If linguistic affinity between Europe and India could be shown, notions of culture, race, and national identity would have to be reevaluated. Also, European scholars began to wonder just who these Indo-Europeans were, where they might have come from, and what some of their customs and beliefs might have been. It was an attempt to address some of these issues that prompted the Grimm brothers to begin their collection of fairy tales around 1806. They argued that the folktales they were finding had ancient Indo-European origins, and that the Märchen (magic fables or fairy tales) they were finding were survivals from old classical mythology. The characters in the folktales they gathered, then, were the modern remnants of old Teutonic gods and goddesses.

Also, the German Volk (people) in their folklore studies were always the primary focus for the Grimm brothers. In their time, the German-speaking people in northern and central Europe had not yet come together to form a nation-state. Thus, as one translator put it, “from the beginning [the Grimm brothers’] principal concern was to uncover the etymological and linguistic truths that bound the German people together and were expressed in their laws and customs.” In other words, people with a common tongue, a common mythology, and a common set of customs constituted a distinct culture or race deserving their own sovereignty; therefore, the Grimms sought to demonstrate the unity and origins of the Germans through their linguistic and folklore studies.

The Grimm brothers spent about forty years gathering their stories, though the first volume of their Kinder- und Hausmärchen (German Popular Stories, 1823-1826; best known as Grimm’s Fairy Tales) was published in 1812 when the brothers were still in their mid-twenties. A second volume appeared in 1815. These first two books contained scholarly annotations and 156 stories, fables, legends and the like. These initial collections were not primarily intended as mere children’s entertainment, but were to be read by educated lay adults and specialists who were interested in German folklore and culture. However, as time wore on, it became clear that children were as interested in these fairy tales as scholars. In 1819, the second (one-volume) edition appeared with 170 stories, and the annotations were purged and published separately. By the time of the final 1857 seventh edition, the collection contained 211 tales, now highly refined and revised. This is the version upon which most English translations are based, and it contains some of the most well-known stories in Western literature, including “Snow White,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Cinderella,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “The Frog Prince,” “Hansel and Gretel,” “Rapunzel,” and “Rumpelstiltskin.”

Contrary to popular belief, the Grimm brothers did not actually gather their stories from peasants in the field. Many informants were actually bourgeois friends or acquaintances who told stories to the Grimms at their leisure in their homes. Also, a number of stories were taken directly from earlier written sources, including a few Latin poems of the fourteenth century. In all cases, however, the Grimm brothers greatly expanded and edited the tales for dramatic and stylistic effect. Indirect speech was put into direct quotation, colorful language was embedded, and motivations of the characters were sometimes expanded upon or created. Chronologies were improved, and details that might detract from a story’s flow were eliminated. The Grimm brothers, then, were interested in the literary quality of the tales as much as anything else. Also, as time went on and it became apparent that children were reading the stories as often as adults, pains were taken by the brothers to make them more palatable for young middle-class Christian German sensibilities. Sexual innuendo and coarse language were eliminated, and the Grimm brothers spent an increasing amount of effort emphasizing morals in their tales.

Summary

Jacob Grimm retired from his university post in 1848, as did Wilhelm in 1852. Throughout their lives, the brothers worked in consort and lived near or with each other. Jacob wrote twenty-one books during his lifetime, while Wilhelm wrote fourteen. They also produced eight books together. Jacob was noted for his linguistics work, while Wilhelm spent much of his energy as the primary editor and author of the fairy tales. When Wilhelm died in 1859, Jacob took the loss very hard but continued to carry on their work until his own death in 1863.

Each generation seems to have to reassess the Grimm brothers in the context of their own times. By the 1870’s, in Prussia and much of the rest of the German principalities, the Grimm tales had been incorporated into the school curriculum. Their popularity in the late twentieth century English-speaking world has been attested by the number of film adaptations that have been based on Grimm tales. There have been very few academic disciplines that have not had something to say about these fairy tales. Psychologists have searched them for universal archetypes and symbols of the human psyche and have sometimes seen commentaries being made on human development. Educators and philosophers draw attention to how the human morality play becomes manifested in these seemingly simple fables. Marxists point out how the Protestant work ethic and bourgeois values underlay most of the lessons found in the Grimm stories. Feminists argue that patriarchal notions of sex roles are reinforced by the Grimm brothers and sometimes even try to retell these fairy tales using their own vocabulary. Literary critics of all persuasions have analyzed them for tropes, stylistic features, and motifs of all kinds.

The Grimm brothers reinvented—or at least highly refined—a special genre: the literary folk tale. While the Grimms no doubt believed that their collection revealed the genius and essence of the German-speaking people, they also believed that their stories contained certain universal (or at least Western) truths that spoke to everyone from a culture or cultures long past. Yet they felt that the messages and wisdom they conveyed were still very much contemporary. In this sense, Grimm’s fairy tales join some of the world’s other great story collections—such as The Arabian Nights’ Entertainment from the Middle East, The Pañcatantra from India, and Aesop’s Fables from Greece—as exemplars and depositories of literary drama, human wisdom, and creativity, and as reflections of the human spirit. It is probably for these reasons that the stories are still read today and will likely be read for quite some time.

Bibliography

Bettelheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. New York: Random House, 1976. Bettelheim’s book discusses the major motifs and themes of fairy tales from a Freudian psychological perspective, focusing on their meanings for the growing child. He discusses many of the tales collected by the Brothers Grimm and in part 2 examines in detail eight of the stories still popular today. He includes a useful bibliography, though many of the books listed are in German, and an index.

Dollerup, Cay. “Translation as a Creative Force in Literature: The Birth of the European Bourgeois Fairy-Tale.” The Modern Language Review 90 (January, 1995): 94-102. Discusses the European bourgeois fairy tale’s development as the result of translation of the stories of the Brothers Grimm into Danish and the stories of Hans Christian Andersen into German; claims this is important because children were not familiar with foreign languages. Argues that the Grimms and Andersen were adapted to European middle-class values.

Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Edited and translated by Jack Zipes. New York: Bantam, 1992. This is perhaps the best of the many translations in English. The introduction is informative, and data is also given on the informants the Grimm brothers used in their research. Also included are thirty-two tales that the Grimms dropped from earlier editions, as well as eight variants showing how the Grimms edited and recreated tales as they were compiling their collection.

Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Edited and translated by Padraic Colum. New York: Pantheon, 1972. This edition is famous for a fine thirty-page commentary by the renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell.

Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. Grimm’s Tales for Young and Old: The Complete Stories. Edited and translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1977. Another standard translation.

Haase, Donald, ed. The Reception of Grimms’ Fairy Tales: Responses, Reactions, Revisions. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993. Valuable essays on public and critical opinions of the Grimms’ tales.

Kamenetsky, Christa. The Brothers Grimm and Their Critics: Folktales and the Quest for Meaning. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1992. Surveys the Grimms’ lives, theories and practices, critical appraisals of their folktales, and extensive bibliographical resources.

McGlathery, James M. Grimm’s Fairy Tales: A History of Criticism on a Popular Classic. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1993. Examines critical response to the works. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Michaelis-Jena, Ruth. The Brothers Grimm. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. Michaelis-Jena has written a thorough biography of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and she includes a chapter called “The ‘Nursery and Household Tales’ and Their Influence,” which provides information on early reactions to the collection and its translations, noting that the tales spurred an interest in collection of other national folktales. Contains an index and bibliography.

Murphy, G. Ronald. The Owl, the Raven, and the Dove: The Religious Meaning of the Grimms’ Magic Fairy Tales. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Examines the religious aspects of the tales. Includes bibliographical references and an index.

Paradiz, Valerie. Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales. New York: Basic, 2005. An examination into the source of the Grimm brothers’ collection of fairy tales, specifically, Paradiz argues that many of the tales were contributed not by peasants from the German countryside but rather by educated and aristocratic German women.

Tatar, Maria. The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1987. Tatar provides close readings of many of the tales, mostly from a psychological perspective, though the book is aimed at a more scholarly audience than Bettelheim’s. She examines typical motifs and situations and attempts to bring in the perspectives of folklorists, cultural anthropologists, and literary critics, as well as that of the psychologists. Notes, index.

Ward, Donald. “The German Connection: The Brothers Grimm and the Study of ‘Oral’ Literature.” Western Folklore 53 (January, 1994): 1-26. Discusses the influence of the Brothers Grimm on German storytellers; argues that print and oral tales have not joined into a homogeneous mixture.

Zipes, Jack. The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World. New York: Routledge, 1988. Zipes’s book arose out of talks he gave at various conferences. The work is quite scholarly, and many of the chapters examine the effects of the tales on modern society and place them in a sociohistorical context. Supplemented by notes, a good bibliography, and an index.

Explain how the differing talents of the Brothers Grimm enabled them to work together effectively.

Offer an explanation of the Grimms’ successful admixture of linguistic study and the creation of fairy tales.

What besides gathering interesting folk material did the Grimms have to do to create fairy tales?

Implausibility does not seem to be a defect in fairy tales. Why not?

Examine the beginnings of several Grimm fairy tales to determine how they avoid clichés.

Do fairy tales need to have morals attached to them? If not, why not?