SOURCE: "New Misconceptions about Old Folktales: The Brothers Grimm," in The Brothers Grimm and Folktale, edited by James M. McGlathery, University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 91-100.

One occasionally encounters the contention that the Brothers Grimm were guilty of manipulative deception when they added elements of cruelty to the tale of Cinderella that were not in their sources. The reference is typically to the bloody scene of the stepsisters cutting off their heels and toes in the attempt to make the slipper fit. I find this contention to be somewhat strange, for one merely needs to look up tale type 510 in the Aarne-Thompson index,¹ which leads one, in turn, to the monograph by Marian Roalfe Cox² that documents this motif in scores of variants disseminated from India to Iceland, so that it is immediately evident that the Grimms scarcely could have invented the motif. One could, of course, also consult a more recent monograph, The Cinderella Cycle by Anna Birgitta Rooth,³ which on this particular point would lead one back to the earlier monograph by Cox.

In a recent essay by one of America's finest folklorists, Alan Dundes, one reads, too, that the Grimms were guilty of deception in portraying their main informant for the second volume of the Kinder-und Hausmärchen as a Hessian peasant woman. "Dorothea Viehmann," writes Dundes, "was an educated, literate, middle-class woman whose first language was French not German."⁴ It is true enough that Katharina Dorothea Viehmann née Pierson (1755-1815) belonged to a fourth-generation Huguenot family. She probably knew French, but it is almost certain that her first language was German. She was of Huguenot descent only on her father's side. Her mother was Martha Gertrud Pierson née Spangenberg (1736-1804), a member of a long line of Hessian innkeepers. Frau Viehmann was brought up, as was her German mother, in a village tavern in which German was necessarily one of the languages in use. Even in regard to the Huguenot side of the family, the French connection was somewhat tenuous. The paternal great-grandfather, who himself was born in Holland, had emigrated to Hesse in 1686, 128 years before the Grimm brothers met Frau Viehmann. More interesting still is the fact that he came to Hesse from Metz, a city in the Alsace-Lorraine, which had been a part of Germany until the year 1648 when France laid claim to the region in the confusion that reigned at the end of the Thirty Years' War. The city remained decidedly German for many years after the French takeover, so it is safe to assume that the great-grandfather had emigrated from a German city to Hesse just thirty-eight years after the French takeover. Because of this background it is almost certain that even the Huguenot side of Frau Viehmann's family had been as German as they were French. As stated, Frau Viehmann's mother came from a long line of Hessian innkeepers, and she, like her daughter, had grown up in an inn where they must have had ample opportunity to hear many tales told by imbibing guests. Indeed, a number of the tales the brothers collected from Dorothea Viehmann, some of which they chose not to include in the second volume, were of the Schwank-like variety that were (and are) told in taverns. The father, who belonged to the Huguenot branch of the family, was named Johann Friedrich Isaak Pierson (1734-98). The thoroughly German names would seem to indicate that even he was ethnically more German than French, although the German names may have merely reflected bureaucratic necessity. The claim, moreover, that Frau Viehmann was "middle class" is also open to question. Frau Viehmann was married to the tailor Nikolaus Viehmann (1755-1825), who had a small shop in the village of Niederzwehren, at that time a farming village. From what we know, the tailoring enterprise was not very successful and the Viehmanns lived in poverty. Frau Viehmann earned additional income by growing vegetables on their small farm, and she carted her wares daily into Kassel, where she sold them door to door.

From all of this information it is evident that Dundes was mistaken in his assessment of the identity of the Grimm informant. How did he arrive at this mistaken information? Dundes, as well as some of the scholars I referred to at the beginning of this essay, cite the same source for their inferences, namely, the recent work by John Ellis, One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales.⁵ It is a work that is going to mislead many a scholar unless the situation is clarified in emphatic terms.

The most unfortunate aspect of the work is that it is virtually the only thorough investigation of the Grimms' methods of collecting, editing, and publishing the tales that is available in English, and thus scholars who do not read German will depend on it for their information on the topic. The work is clearly intended to be provocative, as the very title recalls the exposé of Field Marshal Montgomery's flawed strategy in World War II, A Bridge Too Far. In my opinion, it was a mistake to choose for a work that purports to be serious scholarship a title that is reminiscent of a journalistic exposé; but the choice is chiefly a matter of taste, and it is not in the title of this work that the problem lies. Nevertheless, the provocative title does indicate a zeal on the part of the author to produce a sensational exposé, a task he accomplishes with a vengeance. If it was Ellis's goal to leave his readers standing aghast at his "revelations," then it can be asserted that he was eminently successful in achieving this. The "fairy story too many" is the Grimm collection of Kinder-und Hausmärchen (hereafter referred to as KHM) itself. It is, according to Ellis, in its claim to be something it is not, as wildly fanciful as the most imaginative of fairy tales.

The most valuable contribution of this book is that it makes available to English readers a wealth of scholarship on the Brothers Grimm that has gone virtually unnoticed in the U.S. for years. Indeed, virtually all of Ellis's material is based upon the research of others. He apparently did not engage in any kind of primary research, did not consult archival materials nor manuscripts or letters. Even though Ellis acknowledges his secondary sources in footnotes, he often does so as a kind of afterthought, giving at least the impression that much of the research is his own. This practice is most disturbing when Ellis compares the manuscript materials with subsequent editions, something he could not have done without the splendid synoptic edition of Heinz Rölleke. Indeed, Rölleke is the author upon whose research Ellis relies throughout his book, a fact that does not, however, preclude him from criticizing this scholar from whose works he draws upon so liberally. The only truly original contribution Ellis has to offer is his tone of indignation at the alleged "fraud and forgery"⁶ perpetrated by the Grimms. Alas, it is in this original part of his work where Ellis goes far astray.

Ellis places great stress upon the programmatic statement included in the Grimms' prologue to the first edition of KHM. In it the brothers state their goals in the idealized and effluent expressions so characteristic of the Romantic Age. They claim to have collected the material from the simple people of Hesse and maintain that the stories are the survivals of ancient German myth. Moreover, they insist that they treated their sources with all the reverence they deserved, and that they had tried to collect the tales as faithfully as possible: "No particular has been added through our own poetic recreation, or improved or altered, because we should have shrunk from augmenting tales that were so rich in themselves."⁷ Ellis then attempts to establish that the tales were neither purely German nor collected from the simple folk. He furthermore argues that the tales were thoroughly altered both in content and in form during the many redactions. Most of his inferences here are valid enough, but none of this is in any way new.

Ellis places special importance on the fact that, by the time the second edition of KHM appeared in 1819, the brothers had retreated from their original plan and now freely admitted the fact "that the expression [of the tales] largely originates with us."⁸ In subsequent editions, Wilhelm Grimm even carries this admission further, stating that they were responsible for both "the expression and the execution of the individual tales."⁹ These statements are nothing less than an honest admission that the brothers, or at least Wilhelm Grimm, had abandoned the original plan of not "augmenting" the tales in any way as stated in the prologue to the first volume. But with an indignation that defies understanding, Ellis sees these admissions as evidence of "fraud and deception" on the part of the Grimms. It may well be that the original program for publishing the tales as stated in the first volume of the first edition was somewhat misleading, but the open admission of a revision of these standards in subsequent editions was impeccably honest. Ellis, in his zeal to create an exposé, not only distorted the situation, he either overlooked or suppressed information that explains why it was necessary for the Grimms to change their plans. Important for an understanding of Wilhelm Grimm's editing methods is the degree to which the second edition of the KHM of 1819 was a brand-new work. A total of thirty-four tales from the first edition of 1812-15 had been deleted from the collection, including both "Puss-in-Boots" and "Bluebeard" (because they were obviously derivative from Perrault). Moreover, forty-five new tales which the brothers had located in intervening years were added to the collection and eighteen tales had undergone substantial revision on the basis of more complete variants that they had since encountered.

Ellis also seems to have forgotten or ignored the fact that the Grimms were working in an era not only before the availability of recording devices, but also even before shorthand notation had been invented, and were thus forced in many cases to work with fragmentary notes. It is also known that many of the tales they collected were found in fragmented form, and that these either had to be abandoned altogether or expanded on the basis of other materials. In a communication that accompanied some tales he had sent to his mentor, Carl von Savigny, in 1808, for example, Jacob Grimm commented specifically that the beginnings of tales were most appealing because that was the part the narrators remembered best, and that the endings, by contrast, frequently disintegrated into incomprehensible gibberish.¹⁰ It is apparent that, already in 1808, the Grimms were working with a dying oral tradition.

All of these factors occasioned a change of plans for the Grimms. They, and especially Wilhelm, who from the second edition on assumed primary responsibility for the KHM, abandoned the hope of presenting the tales in pure form exactly as they had been found. He said as much in the prologue to the second edition and, as has already been pointed out, he intensified this admission in subsequent editions. Had Wilhelm Grimm not revised and restored the tales, no one other than a handful of philologists and narrative researchers would have heard of them today.

Wilhelm, now more than ever, intended the book as a collection of Kindermärchen; and he outlined this goal in the prologue to the second edition, stating further that "we have thus eliminated in this edition any expression that is not suitable for childhood."¹¹ One could well argue that taking such liberties with the material is not in keeping with the rigorous practices of narrative research. To accuse the Grimms of not living up to the rigorous demands of the discipline is an easy trap to fall into. So many later scholars have championed the Grimms as the founders of the study of folklore and of folk narrative research that it is easy enough for one to believe that they had indeed created a rigorous discipline at that time. Ellis not only falls victim to this trap, he falls in head over heels. Throughout the work he criticizes the Grimms for not adhering to the rigorous demands of folkloristic research and the principles of critical text-editing, apparently unaware that the academic world had yet to develop any methods in these areas at that time. At one point Ellis calls attention to the Grimms' sources and remarks that "the overwhelming predominance of references to the Hessian district . . . as the sources of the tales might by itself have raised doubts as to their seriousness as folklorists."¹² How could one harbor doubts as to their "seriousness as folklorists" when there existed at that time not the semblance of a field of folkloristic study? In short, Ellis criticizes the Grimms for not adhering to the rigorous demands of scholarship that in that day did not exist!

Ellis also exaggerates the influence that the Perrault collection had on the Grimm tales, accusing the Grimms of hiding the fact that many of their informants, Dorothea Viehmann among them, were educated men and women of Huguenot-French background, all of whom knew their Perrault quite well. In so doing, he conveniently ignores, or even suppresses, the fact that there are all together eight narratives in the Perrault collection, only seven of which qualify as Märchen. The Grimms, by contrast, worked with a corpus of over 250 tales (including those that were deleted, others that were not published, and others that were variants of the published tales). Thus, even if the Grimm variants to these seven tales were directly attributable to the Perrault collection, this would account for only a small fraction of their total.¹³ Moreover, only two or three of the nearly fifty tales that Frau Viehmann told the brothers can be seen as related to the Perrault stories. Many of the stories she contributed are relatively coarse Schwänke that she obviously had heard in the family tavern.

Ellis also takes the Grimms to task frequently for not identifying their sources—Frau Viehmann being the exception. But Ellis himself completely ignores the existence of known sources for the KHM who certainly could qualify as members of the "folk" (that this designation is itself highly problematic, and that its use is avoided by most scholars of narrative today is another fact of which Ellis is apparently unaware). There was, for example, the retired Sergeant of the Dragoons, Friedrich Krause,¹⁴ the shepherd of Köteberg, the rag-collector of Eichsfeld, the "Märchen-Frau" of Marburg (Brentano also had collected narratives from the latter), among others, all of whom are never mentioned by Ellis. Moreover, he makes no reference to the so-called Bökendorfer Märchenkreis, which included members of the Haxthausen and Droste-Hülshoff families, who, although among the educated and middle-class acquaintances of the brothers, nevertheless provided stories in Low German dialect that were obviously from oral tradition.

Ellis also takes the Grimms to task for not revealing the identity of each and every informant, and he attacks Heinz Rölleke for making the apology that the Grimms were silent about the identity of their informants because "they wanted to give the impression that the collective origin of the fairy tales . . . required as it were a collective tradition."¹⁵ Ellis characterizes this explanation as "a highly unconvincing argument." First, it must be pointed out that, at that time, there was absolutely no precedent for identifying sources. Who was around then to demand of the Grimms that they provide information about where they acquired their tales when no such demands had ever been voiced or written before? Secondly, if Ellis had been aware of the Grimms' many writings regarding the bearers of tradition, then he would have known that Rölleke's argument is in no way "highly unconvincing." It is based on a thorough familiarity with the thinking of the Grimms on this issue as it has been expressed in many of their writings.

Ellis also attacks Rölleke on another issue. Rölleke had once "warned against conclusions that are too extreme," stating that "one cannot, just from the fact that some of the main contributors were of Huguenot origin, simply conclude that the Grimms' Fairy Tales originate in France."¹⁶ Ellis accuses Rölleke of using here "a trick of argument." He asserts that the question is not whether the tales are essentially "all French but whether they are essentially all German. If we keep our eyes on the real issue, rather than on the red herring which substitutes for it here, we shall still have to go on being disturbed by the fact that there is very considerable French presence and influence in a collection which the Grimms tried to pass off as German through and through, knowing that not to be the case."¹⁷ If it were really true that the Brothers Grimm had tried to "pass off the collection "as German through and through," Ellis might have a point. The fact is, however, that it is Ellis, and not Rölleke, who is on shaky ground because of his lack of knowledge about the Grimms' notions regarding the provenience of Märchen. It is true that in their prologue to the first volume of the first edition, they voiced pride in the German nature of the collection.¹⁸ I do not think an apology is needed for the Grimms' national pride, though, for in 1812 Hesse was still under French occupation, and they clearly felt the need to stress the German component of the work. The significant point here is that they altered their viewpoint considerably by 1819, when the second edition appeared. It was, incidentally, the same year that the first volume of Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik appeared. Much had happened in the intervening years: The War of Liberation had been successful, and the Napoleonic occupation of the homeland had ended. Rasmus Rask had also published his Untersuchung über den Ursprung der alten nordischen oder isländischen Sprache in 1818, in which he made the first systematic phonology of the Germanic languages showing their relationship to other Indo-European languages. He thus posited the existence of a proto-Indo-European language and thereby anticipated some of the findings Jacob Grimm was to make independently in his Deutsche Grammatik. Moreover, scholars from over much of Europe and Asia, inspired by the work of the Grimms, began to discover narrative traditions that were clearly related to the Grimm corpus.

The situation that the Grimms had suspected earlier that led them to avoid the word deutsch in the title of the KHM (cf. Deutsche Sagen, Deutsche Mythologie, Deutsche Rechtsaltertümer, Deutsche Grammatik, and Deutsche Heldensage) was now beginning to emerge with clarity. It is to the credit of the Grimms that they fully acknowledged, in the prologue to the second edition, that the Märchen were by no means exclusively of German provenience:

Not merely do we encounter these tales in the diverse regions where German is spoken, but also among related Nordic and English peoples. Especially striking is their similarity with Serbian tales, for no one could fall victim to the notion that the tales could have been transplanted into a remote Hessian village by Serbians, any more than the other way around. Finally, there are agreements in individual traits and expressions as well as in the plots of complete tales with oriental (Persian and Indic) tales. The relationship that emerges in the languages of all these peoples and which Rask has recently proven with scholarly acuity is thus repeated precisely in their traditional poetry, which is nothing more than a higher and freer language of man.¹⁹

The Grimms thus considered the Märchen to be an Indo-European inheritance—an argument Wilhelm Grimm repeated in both the 1850 and 1857 editions of the KHM—and he certainly gave up the notion of a "purely German" nature of the collection. Ellis, however, ignores all this information. By concentrating on remarks that were made in the first edition during the French occupation of Hesse, he creates his own windmill that, for him, represents the programmatic methods of the Grimms, and that he then attacks with Quixotic self-righteousness.

There is certainly much more that can be said about the methods of the Brothers Grimm. In spite of scores of valuable studies by German scholars in recent years, there remains much work in the way of a truly critical analysis of the sources used by the Grimms, not merely for the KHM but for many of their works. In regard to the Deutsche Sagen, for example, I have noted that the Grimms had a proclivity for labeling a legend mündlich (oral) in cases in which they had clearly acquired the text from a written source.²⁰

If we look objectively at the methods of the Grimms in the context of Western intellectual history, we find the same situation that can be encountered again and again in the history of scholarship. Investigators who are on the frontier of a new wave of ideas let their judgment be dominated by their enthusiasm for the importance of the new mode of thought. This situation was intensified in the case of the Grimms by the great political and social turmoil that was occasioned by the Napoleonic wars. The problem has also been exacerbated by those who virtually deified the Grimms. Such worship, in turn, led subsequent generations into a near frenzy of demythologizing the Grimms and their work. Neither group of scholars has served the Grimms well. An honest and objective assessment is still needed for a genuine appreciation of the contributions of the Grimms to our understanding of human creativity.

Notes

¹ Stith Thompson, The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography: Antti Aarne's Verzeichnis der Märchentypen, Translated and Enlarged by Stith Thompson, FFC 184 (Helsinki: Suomaiainen Tiedeakatemia, 1961).

² Marian Roalfe Cox, Cinderella: Three Hundred and Forty-Five Variants of Cinderella, Catskin, and Cap o'Rushes, Publications of the Folk-Lore Society, 31 (London: The Folklore Society, 1893).

³ Anna Birgitta Rooth, The Cinderella Cycle (Lund: C. W. K. Gleerup, 1951).

⁴ Alan Dundes, "Nationalistic Inferiority Complexes and the Fabrication of Fakelore: A Reconsideration of Ossian, the Kinder-und Hausmärchen, the Kalevala, and Paul Bunyan," Journal of Folklore Research, 22 (1985), 5-18; see esp. pp. 8-9.

⁵ John M. Ellis, One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

⁶ Ibid., p. 103.

⁷ Ellis's translation, pp. 13-14.

⁸ Ellis's translation, p. 17.

⁹ Ellis's translation, p. 19.

¹⁰ Dieter Hennig and Bernhard Lauer (eds.), Die Brüder Grimm: Dokumente ihres Lebens und Wirkens (Kassel: Weber & Weidemeyer, 1985), p. 537.

¹¹ "Vorrede" to the second edition; quoted from Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Kinder-und Hausmärchen, nach der zweiten vermehrten und verbesserten Auflage von 1819, ed. Heinz Rölleke, 2 vols. (Cologne: Eugen Diederichs, 1982), II, 542.

¹² Ellis, p. 27.

¹³ See the essay by Heinz Rölleke in this volume for a more detailed discussion of the repertoires of the Huguenot informants.

¹⁴ See the contribution by Gonthier-Louis Fink in this volume for a discussion of this informant and of the tales he contributed.

¹⁵ Ellis, p. 28.

¹⁶ Quoted from Ellis's translation, p. 107.

¹⁷ Ellis, p. 107.

¹⁸ "Vorrede" to the first edition of Kinder-und Hausmärchen (Berlin: Reimer, 1812); quoted from Wilhelm Grimm, Kleinere Schriften, ed. Gustav Hinrichs (Berlin: F. Dümmler, 1881-87), 1, 332.

¹⁹ "Einleitung: Über das Wesen der Märchen," in Kinder-und Hausmärchen, 2d ed., 2 vols. (Berlin: Reimer, 1819), I; quoted from Wilhelm Grimm, Kleinere Schriften, I, 337f (my own translation).

²⁰ Rudolf Schenda, of the University of Zurich, has lately been investigating the sources of the Swiss narratives that appeared in the Grimms' Deutsche Sagen and has noted a proclivity on the part of the brothers for attributing oral sources to legends of diverse origins. See for example Rudolf Schenda, "Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm: Deutsche Sagen Nr. 103, 298, 337, 340, 350, 357 und 514: Bemerkungen zu den literarischen Quellen von sieben Schweizer Sagen," Schweizerisches Archiv für Volkskunde, 81 (1985), 196-206.