SOURCE: "The Brothers Grimm and Their Collection of Kinder und Hausmärchen," in Theoria, Vol. XLV, October, 1975, pp. 41-54.

The stories now known as Grimm's Fairy Tales appeared in English translation during the nineteenth century as Popular Stories¹ or Household Tales.² These titles correspond closely to the original German Kinder-und Hausmärchen. When nowadays we refer to the Fairy Tales, or in German to the Märchen, we use a one-sided and inadequate term which applies only to a certain part of the collection (to approximately 60 out of 210 tales).

The men who recorded these stories, the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, were just one year apart in age, and were particularly close to one-another from childhood. To understand their work, it is necessary to consider not only the men themselves, but also these bonds between them,³ and beyond that the social and political conditions of the times in which they lived.⁴

Jacob, the older of the two, was in appearance a little man, slightly built, but with an impressive head and a characterful clearcut profile. He did not find it easy to make contact with other people. He had no wife—and so he clung all the more to his brother Wilhelm who remained his loyal friend throughout. Jacob was an unusually gifted man with a bold approach to problems which he formulated for himself, thereby laying the foundations for the new discipline of Germanistics, which is the study of the development of the Germanic languages and their creations both in oral and written tradition.

He had started his studies at the University of Marburg in the Faculty of Law. He soon attracted the attention of a truly creative scholar, Friedrich Karl von Savigny. Savigny taught that legal science should be both historical and systematic, and opposed all attempts at codifying German civil law before the content of the existing law had been established through historical research. He appointed Jacob Grimm as his assistant, although the latter had not yet completed his studies with a university qualification. Together they went to Paris to search in the National Library there for medieval legal documents. That set Jacob on his way not as a jurist but as the founder of Germanistics. He concerned himself mainly with the systematic and critical study of the history of the Germanic languages and the ways in which their creative spirit manifested itself.

The list of his published works is formidable—too vast to be given here. All that can be offered is a glimpse of the range of his knowledge. He published a collection of ancient legal documents;⁵ he edited a number of older texts and added his own commentaries (e.g. two Anglo-Saxon legends,⁶ Latin poems of the tenth and eleventh centuries,⁷ and old Spanish ballads⁸); he translated Serbian folksongs and a Serbian grammar;⁹ and he wrote two volumes on German mythology.¹⁰

His main claim to fame, however, is based on his German Grammar which appeared in four volumes. The title is misleading, for Jacob Grimm concerns himself here not only with the German language but with a whole group of related Germanic languages.

The first volume¹¹ is dedicated to Savigny. It deals with the sound system and contains the principles now known as 'Grimm's Laws'. The first of these explains the difference between certain sounds in the Germanic languages on the one hand and the related Indo-European languages on the other. The second accounts for the differences within the Germanic languages between High German on the one hand and Low German and English on the other. It explains certain regular correspondences like: High German Wasser = Low German and English water, or High German Pfeife = Low German or English pipe.

The second volume¹² investigates word formation, one of Jacob Grimms favourite topics; the third,¹³ dedicated to his brother Whilhelm, deals with gender; and the fourth¹⁴ analyses syntax.

Of greater importance than these details is the linguistic modernity of Jacob Grimm's approach. Through his careful analysis of the historical development of linguistic forms he revealed also the underlying structure of the history of society and of the mind.

His contribution to our knowledge of the development of German culture (mythology, folklore, law, language and literature) was such that many universities tried to persuade this self-made scholar to join their faculties, and honorary doctorates were bestowed on him by several universities. He was made a member of the French Legion of Honour and he was also one of the first to be decorated with the newly created Prussian 'Pour le mérite'.

His brother Wilhelm always had to stand in the shadow of Jacob. However, he never showed any signs of resentment or jealousy, and why should he? He led a humanly much richer life. He was an attractive man of impressive stature. It is said that Jacob was peeved that he was made to stand when the photograph (one of the early daguerreotypes) was taken for the first volume of their German Dictionary, because the photographer was trying to balance the difference in height between him and his brother. Wilhelm easily made friends and led a happy family life with his wife and children in a comfortable home which provided shelter for Jacob too. And as far as academic achievement is concerned, he could hold his own. He had finished his university studies with a degree in law, but like his brother he had changed direction and turned to the new discipline of Germanistics. His contribution to knowledge was recognised. He was held in high esteem by his students. His old University of Marburg honoured him with a doctor's degree in philosophy.

He had his specialised area of research, and published a number of works under his own name, amongst them a collection of old Nordic epics, ballads and tales,¹⁵ a voluminous work on Runic characters (a form of Germanic script),¹⁶ and a history of rhyme.¹⁷ In addition he published critical and annotated editions of a number of medieval texts.

The careers of the two brothers ran absolutely parallel from their thirtieth year on. Before that, Jacob held several public offices where he could apply his remarkable legal knowledge and his command of foreign languages, notably French. But in the end he decided to become a librarian in Kassel, like Wilhelm, who by then had already held such a position for two years. Together they moved to Göttingen—still as librarians but also accepting teaching commitments at the university, Jacob as full professor, Wilhelm as associate professor. When, for reasons which will be explained later, they had to leave Göttingen, they moved together to Kassel, Jacob as exile and Wilhelm to be near him. From there they were called to Berlin to the University and the Prussian Akademie der Wissenschaften, and it was in Berlin that they died, Jacob outliving Wilhelm by almost four years.

So far not a single date has been mentioned, but if the social and political situation in which they found themselves is to be examined, dates become essential.

The brothers were born during the last decades of the eighteenth century, Jacob in 1785, and Wilhelm in 1786. There were six children in the Grimm family: five brothers and one sister. They spent their youth in Steinau, a small town in Hessen where several generations on their father's side had lived before them. Their grandfather had been a parson. Their father was a jurist; he held the highest administrative office in the area and was also a judge in the court of law. Their childhood was a happy one; they felt secure among people whom they loved and respected. The early death of their father came as a deep shock to them, and although their mother succeeded in securing for them an education at school and university as was in keeping with the family tradition their place in society was no longer ensured by their father's position, and Jacob, particularly, reacted to the humiliations they encountered.

At the time when the brothers were born, Germany consisted of a number of small sovereign states. The political power was in the hands of the aristocracy. All the inhabitants—whether they were educated or not, whether they were rich or poor—were politically minors, 'subjects' of a higher Will. To quote just one example, Frau Grimm had to apply to the ruler of Hesse for permission to send her sons to university.

The call of the French Revolution for liberty, equality and fraternity was heard in Germany too. Even Napoleon's rule over the German lands to the left of the river Rhine brought a breeze of freedom. So it is not surprising that Jacob accepted a position with Napoleon's brother, Jérôme, who had become King of Westphalia. He first served him as a librarian, then as auditor and assessor member in the Conseil d'état. This, however, did not prevent him from joining his brother in donating the considerable proceeds from their edition of a medieval text to the cause of the freedom fighters of Hesse who took part in the wars of liberation (1813). For, while he appreciated the contact with individual, civilised, congenial Frenchmen, he did not approve of the domination of his fatherland by a foreign power, and he resented the oppression by the French army of occupation.

It is a little more difficult to understand why he and Wilhelm should have been so enthusiastic about the return of the Elector of Hesse-Kassel that they joined the crowds for a rousing welcome. For they knew as everyone else did how this princely house had sold their subjects as soldiers to England and had bled them dry with taxes and duties. But too firmly engrained in them still was the conviction that these rulers held their office by divine right and that their failings as human beings did not testify against the need for this God-willed order.

In 1813 Jacob became secretary of the legation to the minister for Hesse at Paris and later served at the Congress of Vienna. However, he resigned in 1815 and took on the humble and unpolitical position of librarian in Kassel. But, when it was necessary to make a stand, e.g. in the question of censorship, he proved himself to be a man with a marked sense of right and wrong and a great respect for individual freedom.

This became evident in particular when he and his brother Wilhelm joined five other professors of Göttingen in a protest against the new King of Hanover. This king, Ernst August, formerly Duke of Cumberland, an ultra-Tory, had declared as invalid the existing—for that time relatively liberal—constitution of 1833. In his decree he replaced the acceptable designation 'civil servants' by 'royal servants' and demanded that they should be sworn in under the old reactionary constitution of 1819. This caused general concern and opposition but very few people had the courage to voice their protest. However, the seven professors signed a statement in which they rejected the action of the king on ethical and legal grounds. This they submitted to the university authorities, who were directly concerned as the professors belonged to the class of 'royal servants' who had to swear loyalty to the king and the constitution. The authorities advised caution and patience and suggested a withdrawal of the document. The seven, however, remained adamant; they were prepared to bear the consequences. And these followed faster and firmer than expected: all seven were immediately dismissed from office by the king; three of them, among them Jacob, had to leave Hanover within three days. But the way across the border was not very far—and the students of Göttingen, who by an order from above were forbidden to hire horses and vehicles, accompanied their professors' coaches on foot, and celebrated their exile in a rousing function on the other side of the border. The whole world took note, and funds were set up in and outside Germany to assist the professors and their families who overnight had lost their livelihood. That was in 1837.

In 1840 the brothers Grimm went to Berlin. There they joined other leading German scholars both at the University, which had been founded in 1810, and in the Prussian Academy, which had been in existence since 1700. Many of these men spent their energies in the pursuit of knowledge in various fields of specialisation because this was the only outlet they had in a political situation like theirs. However, in the end this led to a 'politicization' of what originally had been academic pursuits: law, history, language and literature, they all became political. What is meant by this can be demonstrated by the role that the brothers Grimm and Germanistics began to play in the political sphere.¹⁸

In 1846 the first 'Germanistentag' was held in Frankfurtam-Main, an old imperial city which was still politically independent. Lawyers, historians and philologists gathered to discuss problems of common concern which turned out to be political in nature. It was the same in 1847 when the professors gathered in Lübeck, another of the free cities. Jacob Grimm was elected chairman of both conferences. A third meeting, planned to take place in Nürnberg in 1848, became superfluous. The revolution of March 1848 had led to the National Assembly in St. Paul's Church in Frankfurt. The delegates had been elected by the people to draw up a constitution for Germany. Most of the political professors—among them Jacob Grimm—found themselves members of this National Assembly. This was the highlight of Jacob Grimm's political life. That the Professoren-Parlament did not fulfil the high hopes men had set on it was hardly his fault, since after some active participation, he resigned his mandate during 1848.

Wilhelm was less active in politics and possibly also a little more conservative than his brother, but he shared Jacob's basic convictions. He would have subscribed to the preamble which his brother had suggested for Paragraph 1 of the new constitution: 'The German people are a free people. German soil does not suffer slavery. Such foreigners as are in bondage are liberated when they set foot on German soil'.¹⁹ It also casts some light on the political attitude of the brothers that—showered with honours as they were—they were never offered the elevation above their bourgeois rank to that of the nobility. Both Goethe and Schiller had seen nothing wrong in accepting the distinguishing von in front of their names—while the family of Wilhelm's wife had renounced the privileges of the aristocracy and dropped the trappings that went with it—like the von before the family name.

Against this background of private and public life of the Brothers Grimm, their collection of Popular Tales takes on a new significance. There are various reasons why they collected and published these Popular Tales, 'popular' meaning here 'of the people and liked by the people'.

First of all, there existed at that time among men of letters a general and lively interest in the poetic creations of the unlettered people of the lower classes. In the 18th century Bishop Percy had published Relics of Ancient Poetry, mainly old Scottish ballads. Then James Macpherson had mounted various traditional bits and pieces into a creation of his own and claimed that it was the work of a blind Gaelic bard from the third century A.D., called Ossian. Herder collected folksongs and published them; his collection became known as The Voice of the Nations in their Songs. Goethe kept a little book into which he entered ballads which he heard in Alsace.²⁰ In the 19th century Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim published their famous collection of folk songs. All this was part of a movement which had its philosopher in the Frenchman, J. J. Rousseau, who taught that only a turn away from civilisation and a return to nature would restore decadent mankind to new vigour and creativity.

The brothers Grimm shared this conviction and they began to look for what so far had not yet been collected and put down in writing, namely the stories which were told by the simple folk mainly in the rural areas where traditions tend to survive longer.

The term Märchen is a diminutive of the noun Mär. Martin Luther used this word for the good news of Christ's birth. Goethe still knew it in the sense of news, but in his time it began to take on the connotation of fiction, though not yet of fanciful fiction in which fairies and magic play a part.

The collection of the brothers Grimm consists of tales from the nurseries, the spinning rooms, the village inns. The stories were told in order to educate, to warn, to shock, to frighten, to escape from reality, to indulge in dreams, or to have a good laugh.

In making their collection, the brothers were also motivated by a certain kind of nationalism. They believed that in these folk tales, which were passed on from mouth to mouth and from generation to generation, the spirit of the nation itself had become creative and found expression. That is why they regarded it as urgent to write down these stories before they were forgotten. They hoped too that through this work they might make the German people aware of their common heritage and promote the spiritual, if not the political, unification of the whole nation. With these tales they hoped to reach across the artificial borders of the innumerable little sovereign states and break down the barriers between the sophisticated bourgeoisie and the simple people.

The prototype of the story teller was, for them, Dorothea Viehmann, the wife of a village tailor. That is why in the second edition of their collection her picture appears in the place which at that time was usually reserved for a portrait of the author. Dorothea Viehmann was, however, not the only person they consulted and amongst the others were some educated well-read women, one of whom was responsible for the inclusion of the tales found in Les contes de ma mère l'oye by the Frenchman Charles Perrault (1697).

As scholars the Grimms looked upon their collection as a contribution to knowledge, as a source for further investigations. History proved them right; even today, more than 150 years after the first appearance of their collection, there can be no discussion on any aspect of fairy tales without some reference to the brothers Grimm. Jacob undertook to write the commentary. He noted the name of the person who had told them a particular story, frequently also the place and hour of the recording. He made careful comparisons between the different versions of the same story which they discovered in various regions inside and outside Germany. He revealed links with customs, legal traditions, beliefs and superstitions as they existed outside the world of the tales. Originally, his commentary was included with the individual stories but ultimately it was published as a separate third volume.

To safeguard the authenticity of the story, they set themselves the task of keeping close to the words of the story teller. If one considers that they had neither a tape recorder nor even shorthand, this alone seems a formidable task.²¹

A comparison of the manuscript with the final printed version reveals, however, that the brothers too took the liberty of the story teller by embellishing the story, by inserting a bit of verse here and there, by adding detail, by rounding off the story, or even by twisting the plot to give it a new ending. Wilhelm was particularly good at that, and this is possibly the reason why Jacob stuck to the more academic task of annotator.

By writing down the stories, Wilhelm Grimm created the classic style of the Märchen -language. Since the collection appeared in print in 1812 and 1815, the Household Tales have been read again and again with the same words and phrases, and the plots, having been fixed in the mind, resist attempts at changing. The impact and the influence became even greater when a selection of 50 fairy tales, especially prepared for children, became available.²² Then night after night in bourgeois homes all over Germany nannies and aunts, grandmothers and mothers read these fairy tales as bedtime stories to the children—and once the children had mastered their letters, they pored over the same stories in their illustrated copies or came across them in their school readers.

Nowadays the original language of the brothers Grimm has a slightly antiquated tone but also something almost sacred like the language of the Bible.

Translations into other languages are easier to modernise. In this connection it is interesting to observe that many of the translations into other languages are based on an English version. The Grimms' fairy tales are available in 70 languages from Afrikaans right through the alphabet to Vietnamese and Welsh, and also in Braille and Esperanto.

The men who have had this extended influence lived, as we have seen, in stirring political times; and one is left wondering what influence the political convictions of the brothers Grimm might have had on the stories, or at least some of the stories, which they wrote down. It has been suggested, for example, that 'Little Red Riding Hood' has very clear and obvious political implications. I have in mind in particular an article with the title: Did Rotkäppchen wear a Jacobin cap?'²³ Well, did she?

To answer this question one must also consider two earlier versions of the same story: viz. that by Perrault (seventeenth century) and the dramatised version by Ludwig Tieck²⁴ which is a kind of skit on the political situation at the end of the eighteenth century. We find some striking similarities and revealing differences if we compare the three versions—'Rotkäppchen' by the brothers Grimm being the third one. The main figures are the little girl with the red cap—Chaperon rouge in French, Rotkäppchen in German—and then the wolf.

The wolf tempts Rotkäppchen to disregard warnings about the big bad wolf because he is so suave and so convincing when he tells her of the beauties of nature. The little girl is punished for her naïve trust in the wolf by having to end up in his belly. Perrault stops here—but he adds a few lines of verse with the 'moral': little girls must not trust wolves, especially not those who are suave, because they are the most dangerous; they follow the little demoiselles right into the house and into the ruelle, the narrow passage between bed and wall! One cannot help feeling that Perrault told the story for the children and wrote the 'moral' for the nanny.²⁵

Tieck added the hunter. However, he made him turn up too late and Tieck's Rotkäppchen finds the same end as Perrault's Chaperon rouge.

Grimm, however, lets the hunter succeed. He turns up in the knick of time, but he does not kill the wolf outright. He first rescues both Rotkäppchen and her grandmother from the belly of the wolf. Then the wolf gets his deserts—stuffed with rocks he cannot move and drops dead there and then. To prove that Rotkäppchen learnt her lesson Grimm relates a second incident. Another wolf attempts to enter the house where Rotkäppchen and her grandmother are. This time they need no hunter. They are able on their own to lure the wolf to his death.

Because of the interest the brothers Grimm took in mythology it has been suggested that the cycle of the seasons, of death and rebirth, is re-enacted here. Rotkäppchen's resurrection from the dark belly of the wolf is interpreted as the triumph of spring over winter. The hunter—in this context—would represent the sun or another life-giving force. 'Rotkäppchen' thus would fall into the large group of fertility stories which have been told by many nations since time immemorial.²⁶

While there is something appealing and convincing in such a reading of 'Rotkäppchen', there is also another possible interpretation which in our context is of greater interest and relevance. We return to the question, did Rotkäppchen wear a Jacobin cap of liberty? We need not go into details of the signal character of the colour red. We all know that the red pointed cap of liberty was worn by the Jacobins as a sign of their revolutionary mood; we also know that the pole of liberty was usually topped with a red cap, and that there were some provocative and progressive German papers which included the word red in their names: e.g. Das rote Blatt (1791 Regensburg, 1798 Koblenz).

Less well known is the fact that at the beginning of the nineteenth century 'wolf was not just another name for a powerful cunning enemy, but very specifically for the French under Napoleon. Tieck in his political skit calls the wolf monsieur wolf,²⁷ and Kleist,²⁸ a very well-known German dramatist of the time, also speaks of the wolf and the hunt of the wolf and means Napoleon and the French and the war against them.

If we now note that the brothers Grimm had been collecting these folk tales since 1806, and that the two volumes appeared in 1812 and 1815, then we realise that their version of 'Rotkäppchen' belonged to the period of the Napoleonic wars and the wars of liberation from the Napoleonic yoke. Within this framework it is possible, without straining credibility, to answer the question of the political significance of the red cap in the affirmative. The interpretation then would go something like this: Rotkäppchen represents Germany; like Rotkäppchen Germany allowed herself to be persuaded by the cunning wolf—the French revolutionaries—to seek the beauty of nature and the freedom of the forest. Like Rotkäppchen, she is lured to her doom in the belly of the insatiable wolf (the Napoleonic Empire). However, through the timely intervention of the hunter she ultimately is saved and able to help the hunter to send the wolf to his death. Far-fetched?—no. Ingenious?—yes, and very likely true, not in the sense that Wilhelm Grimm was consciously looking for a parable, but rather in the sense that while he set the tale down he allowed his own fears and hopes to shape it in the same way as the story tellers before him had done.

'Fear' and 'hope' are key words when one interprets some of the better known tales in the social setting of the times during which they came into being. The brothers Grimm were inclined to look upon these stories as relics of a past long gone by. In that they were mistaken—some of the stories were of relatively recent origin, reflecting the oppression of the common people by the aristocracy.²⁹ Just think for a moment of the main fairy tale figures: there is the frustrated youngest son who is always missing out where his brothers just make it; there is the stepdaughter who is deprived of what is by right hers; there is the lad who appears to be a nitwit only because he has no scope to show his true talents. Nearly all of these are vindicated in the tales, mostly by magic intervention.

Is it unreasonable to assume that the Grimms, frustrated by their rôle as bourgeois, identified themselves to some extent with these fairy tale figures or at least sympathised with them? Were they not themselves in an unbearable position as permanent minors', never coming of age politically? Were they too not deprived of rights which they regarded as birthrights? Were they not in a similar situation to those who could not employ their talents fully in the society in which they were forced to live? And if that is so, would they not have noted with a sense of satisfaction how, in these folk tales, so often justice triumphs and the underdog comes out on top, while the oppressors get what they deserve?

As far as the moral of the story is concerned, there is nearly always a clear demarcation line—not quite as harsh and uncompromising as with Brecht and other Marxist-inspired writers, but still noticeable, namely a line that divides the lowly, powerless poor, who are basically good, from the high and mighty rich, who are basically wicked or become wicked in their positions of power.

There is one last question which must be dealt with, namely: why should these tales with their political, social and moral implications be of interest to children?

It was Wilhelm Grimm himself who became aware of the great appeal which these folk tales had in the nursery. Following the example of Perrault, who had addressed himself in the first instance to children, Wilhelm selected fifty stories and retold them with children in mind. Today these are available not only in beautifully illustrated books but also on discs and tapes with and without music; they are shown on television, and produced on the stage as seasonal entertainment at Christmas time. Why?

Here we can forget the political issues. The social aspects, however, seem to be very relevant, as much for the children of the period of the brothers Grimm as for the children of our own time. It is true that conditions have changed since feudal times, when some of these stories originated, and also since the times of the brothers Grimm, when they were retold. Modern children, growing up in towns in an industrialised society, are confronted in the folk tales with an unfamiliar world, in which there are figures which they will never come across in real life, for instance, not only kings and queens, princes and princesses, but also woodcutters, millers, tailors and goose girls, most of whom are visualized only from the illustrations or from their costume on television and the stage. Nevertheless, the society in which they function is very simply structured and the underlying pattern is as easily grasped by a child as is the rôle allotted to a certain figure in this order.

The child's own world is much more complex. In the child's own experience society is organised as a hierarchy, children occupying the lowest rung of the ladder with the grown-ups right on top. There are all kinds of pressures from above—demands made by teachers and preachers, by parents and neighbours, by older brothers and sisters. So it is perhaps not really surprising that children, feeling helpless and sometimes inadequate in situations which they do not understand, should experience a vicarious satisfaction when, in the fairy tale world, the handicapped, the deprived and the frustrated ultimately get what is their due. That this comes about by magic does not matter. Because children do not see through the mechanisms of their own society they have learnt to accept the inexplicable with equanimity.

As far as the moral implications are concerned, children like the radical division between good and evil, and reward and punishment. They accept the cruel castigation of the wicked not with a sense of childish sadism but with a sense of satisfaction that justice is done fairly and squarely. They feel involved and identify themselves with the moral judgment of the story teller. If poor lovable Cinderella gets her prince then that is in keeping with her good and virtuous nature—and it is also the right compensation for the humiliations she has had to go through. If the wicked stepsisters, on the other hand, have their eyes pecked out by the birds, and if the witch is roasted in her own oven, they only get what they have brought upon themselves.

To the amazement of adults most children show no evidence that they fear something equally horrible might happen to themselves. Children are shrewd enough to realize that they never will be quite as good as the really good people in fairy land nor quite as bad as the wicked ones. Fairy tales may have been models of life, but they never were blueprints for life—they never called for action in reality. They served as safety valves: escapist in character in the past, they serve as such also in the present. In feudal times they did not pave the way for rebellion—and Little Red Riding Hood did not wear her cap of liberty in order to incite the Germans to fight the French.

It is in this connection that Marxist-oriented educationists offer their criticism of Grimms' fairy tales, calling them outmoded and escapist.³⁰ They demand that modern tales should lay bare the underlying structure of our own society which, for the understanding of children, could be simplified by an unambiguous stratification: the capitalists, the rich oppressors on top and the poor oppressed labourers at the bottom. They claim that such stories would no longer be escapist but would give the child some understanding of the powers and mechanisms at work in its life and would motivate it for future action.³¹

In East Germany and in East Berlin attempts have been made to meet these demands, and quite a few books of this kind have found their way into West Germany.

However, none of these contemporary authors has so far been able to replace the brothers Grimm, either in East or in West Germany—and certainly not in the world at large.

Notes

¹German Popular Stories. Translated from Kinder und Hausmärchen, collected by MM Grimm from oral tradition. 2 vols. London 1823 and 1826.

²Grimm Household Tales. Translated from the German and edited by Margaret Hunt, with Jacob Grimm's original notes and an introduction by Andrew Lang. London 1884.

This title and that cited in n. 1 are quoted by Katherine M. Briggs in 'The influence of the Brothers Grimm in England', Brüder Grimm Gedenken 1963, essays edited by L. Denecke. Marburg 1963.

³ L. Denecke, Jacob Grimm und sein Bruder Wilhelm. Sammlung Metzler M 100. Stuttgart 1971.

⁴ F. Schnabel; Deutsche Geschichte im neunzehnten Jahrhundert, vols. 3, 4, 5. Herder Bücherei 205, 206, 207. Freiburg 1964, 65.

⁵ 1828

⁶ 1840

⁷ 1838

⁸ 1815

⁹ cf. M. Mojasevic, 'Jacob Grimm und die Jugoslawen', Brüder Grimm Gedenken 63, p. 333.

¹⁰ 1835

¹¹ 1819

¹² 1826

¹³ 1831

¹⁴ 1837

¹⁵ 1811

¹⁶ 1821

¹⁷ 1852

¹⁸ Katherine M. Briggs quotes from an essay on the Household Tales, written by J. Campbell: 'Those days', wrote Wilhelm, 'of the collapse of all hitherto existing establishments will remain forever before my eyes . . . The ardour with which the studies in Old German were pursued helped overcome the spiritual depression. . . . Undoubtedly the world situation and the necessity to withdraw into the peacefulness of scholarship contributed to the re-awakening of the long forgotten literature; but not only did we seek something of consolation in the past, our hope, naturally, was that this course of ours should contribute somewhat to the return of a better day.' Gedenken 1963, p. 511.

¹⁹ Quote d by L. Denecke , op. cit., p. 141 . Translated by the author.

²⁰Volkslieder von Goethe in Elsaß gesammelt, edited by L. Pinck, Saarbrücken 1935.

²¹ W. Schoof, Zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Grimmschen Märchen, p. 17f. Hamburg 1958.

²² 1825

²³ H. W. Jäger, 'Trägt Rotkäppchen eine Jakobiner-Mütze?' Literatur-soziologie. Beiträge zur Praxis, vol. II, edited by J, Bark. Stuttgart 1974.

²⁴ L. Tieck; Leben und Tod des kleinen Rotkäppchens. Eine Tragödie 1800. Tieck Schriften, vol. 2. Berlin 1828.

²⁵Moralité

On voit icy que de jeunse enfans,
Sur tout de jeunes filles,
Belles, bien faites et gentilles,
Font tres-mal d'écouter toute sorte de gens,
Et que ce n'est pas chose étrange
S'il en est tant que le loup mange.
Je dis le loup, car tous les loups
Ne sont pas de la même sorte:
Il en est d'une humeure accorte,
Sans bruit, sans fiel et sans courroux,
Qui, privez, complaisons et doux,
Suivent les jeunes demoiselles
Jusque dans les maisons, jusque dans les ruelles.
Mais, hélas! qui ne scait que ces loups doucereux
De tous les loups sont les plus dangereux!

(Contes de ma mère L'oye, Ch. Perrault, Les Editions la Bruyère, Paris, no date.)

²⁶ I. and P. Opie, The Classical Fairy Tales: 'Little Red Ridinghood', p. 93 f. London 1974. H. W. Jäger, op. cit., p. 159 and p. 176, refers to: H. Husson, La Chaine traditionelle (1874), A. Lang, Perrault's Popular Tales (1888), and F. Linning, Deutsche Mythenmärchen (1883), as well as E. Siecke, Indogermanische Mythologie (1921), and P. Saintyves, Les Contes de Pérrault et les Récits parallèlles (1923).

²⁷ Scene 2: the hunter:

Wenn ich den Monsieur Wolf nur packe,So ists gewiß um ihn geschehn.

²⁸ The most striking example, also quoted by Jäger, op.cit., p. 164, is:

Eine Lustjagd, wie wenn SchützenAuf der Spur dem Wolfe sitzen!Schlagt ihn tot! Das WeltgerichtFragt Euch nach den Gründen nicht!Germania an ihre Kinder (1809)

This quotation, incidentally, also casts some light on the rôle of the hunter.

²⁹ L. Denecke, op. cit., p. 74. D. Richter and J. Merkel; Märchen, Phantasie und soziales Lernen. Basis Theorie 4. Berlin 1974 p. 39 f.

³⁰ Richter/Merkel, op. cit., p. 102.

³¹ Richter/Merkel, op. cit., p. 119 f.