[In the following essay, the Davids advocate approaching the tales as imaginative literature rather than as folklore. Examining the Grimms' approach to nature and art, the critics consider the tales in the context of the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century.]

Upon the hundredth anniversary of the death of Jacob Grimm, folklorists the world over have united to pay tribute to the memory of the Brothers Grimm. The Institute for Central European Folklife Research at Marburg has brought out a memorial volume of essays entitled Brüder Grimm Gedenken 1963¹—a reminder not simply of the closeness of the brothers but of the ideals of brotherhood that their lives represent and that their works have done much to promote. The astonishing thing about Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm is the sweep of their learning in many related fields. Although they made enormous contributions to the study of folklore, philology, and literary history, they transcend the boundaries of academic disciplines. "To see European literature as a whole," wrote Ernst Curtius, another great German scholar on the model of the Grimms, "is possible only after one has acquired citizenship in every period from Homer to Goethe."² The brothers achieved this difficult citizenship and a view of European literature as a whole that has left its mark on all of their achievements. It is fitting, then, to approach the most universal of their works—the Kinder- und Hausmärchen—as a great monument of European literature.

When the Grimms entitled their collection of folktales Kinder- und Hausmärchen, they did not mean to imply that they had compiled a volume of stories for the nursery. It was in part their purpose that, as has actually happened, generations of children should read their book and that it should become a household work. But the title implies primarily an idea of the fairy tale, not an audience for which fairy tales are destined. For the Grimms it meant that the stories preserved the simplicity and innocence that their generation—the first generation of romantic writers—associated with childhood and the family hearth. In the foreword to the first volume Wilhelm Grimm wrote: "These stories are pervaded by the same purity that makes children appear so marvelous and blessed to us."³ In other words, it is not that the stories are primarily for children (though most children enjoy them), but the stories are like children, have lived among children, and have been treasured and preserved within the family.

This childlike sense of wonder and the moral simplicity that the Grimms saw in fairy tales were also qualities that they attributed to the earlier literature of the Germanic peoples, and it was primarily for what remained in them of the spiritual heritage of the past that the Grimms collected folktales. In the study and preservation of the literature of the past the Grimms had a cultural and moral aim: they were striving to make their own generation and future generations conscious of the national soul that, so they believed, had lived on subconsciously in the traditional stories of the folk.

The Grimms came to folklore through literature, specifically through the literature of the Middle Ages. Before they had published their first volume of fairy tales in 1812, the brothers had already brought out, individually or together, Über den altdeutschen Meistergesang (1811), Altdänische Heldenlieder, Balladen und Märchen (1811), and an edition of the Old High German Hildebrandtslied (1812). Their interest was drawn to folk literature by the poets Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano with whom they collaborated on the third volume of Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1808). In the course of this collaboration and in their subsequent correspondence with von Arnim⁴ they began to develop their own ideas about folk literature, which differed essentially from those of Brentano and von Arnim, who looked upon folk songs and ballads chiefly as raw material for original poetry.

The Grimms' interest in fairy tales was, therefore, literary and historical and was just one aspect of their broader interest in ancient Germanic languages and literature. In order to understand why they began collecting folktales and how they went about recording and, in many instances, reworking the stories they had collected, it is necessary to see the märchen as part of their life work—the restoration of the German literary past.

Although the Grimms were the first to collect folktales at all systematically and to make some effort to preserve the stories in their oral form, they also reworked their material considerably. The final result is a subtle blending of folklore and literary craftsmanship, and it is of interest both to the folklorist and to the student of literary history to obtain some insight into the growth and development of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen into their present form.⁵

The Grimms published seven major editions in their lifetime. The first edition consists of two volumes (1812 and 1815), each with a short foreword by Wilhelm Grimm. These were revised and combined as the foreword to the second edition (1819), which also contains two longer essays, Über das Wesen der Märchen" and "Kinderwesen und Kindersitten." All but the last of these contain important statements about the Grimms' concept of the folktale and all, with the exception of the revised 1819 foreword, are reprinted in Wilhelm Grimm's Kleinere Schriften. The 1819 foreword is available in most modern editions of the so-called Grosse Ausgabe;,⁶ and it is from this that Margaret Hunt translated several excerpts in the preface to her translation of 1884.⁷ Unfortunately these excerpts, unless they are read very carefully, are apt to give a misleading impression of the Grimms' method of collecting. They would seem to have misled Mrs. Hunt, for she comments:

They wrote down every story exactly as they heard it, and if some of its details chanced to be somewhat worse, or if sacred persons were occasionally introduced with a daring familiarity, which to us seems almost to amount to profanity, they did not soften or omit these passages, for with them fidelity to tradition was a duty which admitted no compromise—they were not providing amusement for children, but storing up material for students of folklore.⁸

This statement contains a half-truth and does not really represent what the Grimms themselves said they were doing. It is perfectly evident that in fact the Grimms changed and added a great deal—how much one comes to realize only after comparing the various editions and the few manuscripts that have survived.

Margaret Hunt certainly did not mean to misrepresent the Grimms. She seems to have sincerely believed that, wherever possible, they had taken down their stories almost word for word. The misunderstanding is possible because the true picture is very much confused for a number of reasons. For one thing, the Grimms' attitude toward the tales and their methods of recording them developed gradually over a period of years, and they have left behind a number of statements, written at different times and on different occasions, that do not always seem consistent. The brothers themselves differed about method, at times even heatedly; Jacob, as one would expect, was the more scholarly and more insistent upon faithfulness to oral tradition. Finally, there is the prose style of Wilhelm's prefaces. They are written in a lyrical and highly metaphorical language, as obscure and as intricate as only German romantic prose can be. All the same, a more or less coherent theory does emerge from the various forewords and statements, which goes far to explain the Grimms' method of collecting and the changes they made in their material. The theory is not argued with scientific consistency, but it can be extracted, much in the same way that Coleridge's critical doctrines may be extracted from his scattered writings.

All the labors of the Grimms, whether in philology or in folklore, stem from a basic premise that they share with most of the major figures of the romantic movement: there is a spiritual force in nature that finds expression in literature. Nature means not only external nature—mountains, forests, lakes—but human nature which responds to these things. One may call this force God, or the Immanent Will, or the Over-Soul. Wordsworth captures the essence of the faith when he writes in "Tintern Abbey" of

A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;

A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

The ancient poets, the Grimms and their fellow romantics felt, had lived closer to nature, and their works were therefore imbued with fundamental truths and values. These truths and values had been given their noblest embodiment in the ancient epic poetry, much of it lost, but they still survived in the humbler form of the folktale. Wilhelm Grimm compares the old poetry to a field of grain that has been beaten down by a storm; in a few sheltered places, by shrubs and hedges, isolated ears have remained standing; these continue to grow, solitary and unnoticed; and at harvest time they are gathered by the pious hands of poor gleaners to provide nourishment for the winter and seed for the future harvest.⁹ (The image itself is characteristically romantic.) The folktales are of course the solitary ears of grain; the pious hands are those of collectors like the Brothers Grimm; the future harvest is no doubt the future greatness of German literature that they foresaw springing from the native soil. Ideas such as these are recurrent themes in the forewords. In justifying the time and labor they bestowed on these simple stories, Wilhelm Grimm wrote in the foreword to the 1812 volume:

… their very existence is sufficient to defend them. Something that has pleased, moved, and instructed in such variety and with perpetual freshness contains within itself the necessity for its being and surely comes from that eternal fountain that quickens all living things with its dew, even if it be but a single drop, clinging to a small tightly-folded leaf, sparkling, nevertheless, in the first light of the dawn.¹⁰

Translation cannot render the double sense of "first" in this sentence. The drop of dew not only sparkles in the early light of the dawn, but it still reflects the glory of the first dawn, that primal creative dawn in which the older literature had flourished.

The "eternal fountain" was for the Grimms the mystical power of nature, the source of all good. Anything partaking of nature must be good, and so the Grimms saw a natural morality in stories that told of "faithful servants and honest craftsmen, … fishermen, millers, charcoal burners, and shepherds who live close to nature."¹¹ One is again reminded of Wordsworth who in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads declared that he had chosen "incidents and situations from common life" because "in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature."

In fairy tales the cycle of human life is intimately related to the cycle of nature, as in the beautiful passage at the beginning of "The Juniper Tree" where the mother's pregnancy is described in terms of the fruitfulness of nature, specifically of the juniper itself:

In front of the house was a yard in which there stood a juniper tree. Once in wintertime the woman was standing under it peeling an apple, and as she was peeling the apple, she cut her finger, and the blood fell upon the snow. "Oh," said the woman, sighing from the bottom of her heart, and she looked at the blood in front of her and was very sad. "If only I had a child as red as blood and as white as snow." And as she said this, she felt quite cheerful; she had a feeling that something would come of it.

She went back into the house, and a month passed and the snow melted; and two months, and things were green; and three months, and the flowers came out of the ground; and four months, and all the trees in the wood put out leaves and their green branches became entangled with each other—there the little birds sang so that the whole wood echoed and the blossoms fell from the trees. Then the fifth month was gone, and she stood under the juniper tree, which smelled so sweet, and her heart leaped and she fell on her knees and was carried away by joy. And when the sixth month had passed, the fruit got thick and heavy, and she became completely calm. And the seventh month, and she snatched at the juniper berries and ate them very greedily, and she became sad and sick. Then the eighth month passed, and she called her husband and wept and said, "If I should die, bury me under the juniper tree." Then she was consoled and "was glad until the ninth month had passed; then she bore a child as white as snow and as red as blood; and when she saw it she was so happy that she died.¹²

In both "The Juniper Tree" and "Cinderella" the guardian spirit of the dead mother passes into a tree that magically protects her children. In "Briar Rose" the briar hedge is the symbol of nature guarding her rose: the princess who sleeps inside the castle. When the right prince comes along, the briars turn into flowers that separate of their own accord to let him pass. On the other hand, nature punishes whatever is unnatural and evil. The doves who help Cinderella, peck out the eyes of her wicked sisters, and the two older brothers in "The Water of Life" are imprisoned by the mountains, as hard and unyielding as their own pride.

In the many parallels between the fairy tales and Germanic mythology and legend the Grimms thought that they detected the traces of a primitive natural religion. The sleeping Briar Rose surrounded by the hedge of thorns is like the sleeping Brunhild surrounded by the ring of flames; the three spinners are the Norns; the boy who goes to Hell to bring back the Devil's three golden hairs is like all the legendary heroes who travel to the Underworld. Even ostensibly Christian figures like God and Saint Peter wander over the earth as Odin did. Such parallels suggested to the Grimms that the fairy tales were not merely delightful stories but had a deeper religious significance:

They preserve thoughts about the divine and spiritual in life: ancient beliefs and doctrine are submerged and given living substance in the epic element, which develops along with the history of a people.¹³

Thus the Grimms applied romantic theories of nature and art to the folktale. Wilhelm's prefaces reflect a strain of romantic primitivism that has been attributed to Rousseau. Although the Grimms themselves did not point this out, the folktales are a perfect example of "naive" poetry, in the sense of Schiller's essay On Naive and Sentimental Poetry; they are the unreflecting art of men moved directly by nature itself instead of self-conscious contemplation of nature. The folktale might well be added to the list of things in nature that Schiller, at the beginning of the essay, says have a power to move us in a particular way:

There are moments in our lives when we respond to nature—in plants, minerals, animals, and landscapes, as well as in human nature, in children and in the customs of country folk and primitive peoples—with a kind of love and affectionate regard, not because it pleases our senses, nor because it satisfies our reason or our taste … but simply because it is nature.

In such a view, folklore, the literature of "common folk" and "primitive peoples," appeared as something that had been produced, as it were, by nature itself working through human instruments, and romantic writers everywhere turned eagerly to folk literature for inspiration. Moreover, the emergent sense of nationalism gave men a further reason to cherish not only what grew from the soil but especially what grew from the soil of their native land. Thus Sir Walter Scott collected the ballads of the Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, and in America Washington Irving attempted to celebrate the legendary past of a country that had barely had time to acquire one.

The Grimms, then, shared a widespread interest in the preservation and use of native culture. The originality of their contribution lay in the care with which they collected folk materials and in their respect for oral tradition. Collections of folktales had been made before, but the earlier collectors had relied primarily on literary sources and had not scrupled to change the stories in whatever manner suited their fancy. The Grimms, too, occasionally went back to literary versions, but it was their aim to preserve the märchen, as far as possible, in the form in which they were still being told in the German provinces.

But exactly what does this mean in 1812 when it comes to the actual matter of preparing stories received from oral tradition for publication? It may be demonstrated that the Grimms' genuine desire to preserve oral tradition was consistent, at least in their eyes, with a considerable amount of changing and adding. It certainly did not mean that they felt obliged to transmit every story word for word. The fact that, as a rule, they did not take the stories down from dictation is evident in the well-known passage describing the exceptional instance when they did. This is the description of their most interesting contributor, Frau Katherina Viehman, the famous Märchenfrau of Niederzwehren. The Grimms had already published their first volume when they discovered Frau Katherina. Wilhelm wrote of her in the foreword to the 1815 volume:

This woman is still vigorous and not much over fifty … she has firm, pleasant features and a clear, sharp expression in her eyes; in her youth she must have been beautiful. She retains these old legends firmly in her memory—a gift that she says is not granted to everyone, for some people cannot remember anything. She tells a story with care, assurance, and extraordinary vividness and with a personal satisfaction—at first with complete spontaneity, but then, if one requests it, a second time, slowly, so that with a little practice one can take down her words.¹⁴

There is no evidence here that the stories in the 1812 volume, or for that matter the stories of the other contributors to the 1815 volume, were ever recorded in this way; in fact, the implication is strong that they were not.

Unfortunately all but a handful of the manuscripts from which the Grimms worked were lost. But through a lucky accident of literary history we do have a considerable number of the stories that went into the first volume in an Urfassung that makes it possible to get some notion of what sort of material the Grimms started with. In 1809 their good friend Clemens Brentano asked the brothers for copies of tales in their collection for use in a volume of fairy tales that Brentano himself was contemplating. They generously made a copy for him of practically everything in their possession at the time. Nothing ever came of Brentano's own project, but the manuscripts sent to him by the Grimms have survived among his literary remains. They are preserved today in a Trappist monastery in Alsace and were brought out in 1927 in a handsome edition by Professor Joseph Lefftz.¹⁵

The tales in this interesting volume are often little more than plot summaries. Numerous motifs, later to be added, are not yet present. Some of the stories have alternate beginnings and endings. There is no question that any of these stories was a direct transcript from oral delivery. They seem to have been sketched out from memory with the aid of notes. They are clearly meant to be reworked, and this is exactly what Wilhelm Grimm tells us in one of the passages translated by Margaret Hunt, referred to above: "As for our method of collecting, our primary concern has been for accuracy and truth. We have added nothing of our own, nor have we embellished any incident or feature of the tale, but we have rendered the content just as we received it."¹⁶ The key word here is content. Wilhelm is careful to distinguish this aspect of the collection from the question of style, and continues:

That the mode of expression and execution of particular details is in large measure our own is self-evident; nevertheless, we have tried to preserve every characteristic turn that came to our attention, so that in this respect, too, we might let the collection retain the diversified forms of nature. Moreover, anyone who has engaged in similar work will realize that this cannot be regarded as a careless and mechanical sort of collecting; on the contrary, care and discrimination, which can be acquired only with time, are necessary in order to distinguish whatever is simpler, purer, and yet more perfect in itself from that which has been distorted. We have combined different versions as one, wherever they completed each other and where their joining together left no contradictory parts to be cut out; but when they differed from each other and each preserved individual features, we have given preference to the best and have retained the other for the notes.

From this description of their method it can be seen that the Grimms did not make free use of their materials as had been the practice of Brentano and von Arnim in Des Knaben Wunderhorn. The Grimms felt that such reworking would destroy not only the historical value of their collection but the inner "truth" of the stories. However, this did not mean that they felt obliged to retell the stories exactly as they had heard them or that they might not combine different versions of a story (or to introduce motifs from other stories) in an attempt to arrive at the "best" form. They consciously strove in their retellings to retain the flavor of oral narrative and, indeed, felt that it was their duty to purify the stories of any corruptions or artificialities that might have crept in in the process of oral transmission. They were thus not inventing details but simply drawing, like the original storytellers, on the vast stockpile of traditional material in an effort to approach the ideal form of a story, a form that might never have existed in fact but that was nonetheless "present and inexhaustible in the soul."¹⁷ This is to say that they had no hope of getting back to some ultimate, uncorrupted Urform of a story. Instead they aimed at a version such as might have been told by some gifted storyteller like Frau Katherina, some Homer of the fairy tale. In selecting the best among several variants or in combining details from different sources, the basis of their choice was stylistic. It becomes important, therefore, to establish what they took to be the genuine "folk style"—for the changes they made in the stories are to some extent influenced by their romantic concept of the folk. Their ideas about nature and history turn out to have a direct influence on the literary style of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen.

Wilhelm Grimm had stated that the ability to distinguish the true folk material from the false was a gradually acquired skill, and it was natural that as he heard and recorded more and more stories, especially those told by Frau Katherina, he should have become conscious of a definite fairy-tale style and attempted to imitate it. This style became, especially for Wilhelm, an intrinsic part of the value of the märchen and an objective test for what in a story was "true" or "false." This gradually developing sense of style was applied not only to new stories, but many of the older ones, already printed in the first volume, were revised in the light of it. The history of the seven editions of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen is a constant polishing and refinement of the style.¹⁸ Some of the favorite stories like "Snow White," "The Wolf and the Seven Kids," and "The Brave Little Tailor," were revised in almost every edition. The difference may be seen by comparing any of these tales with a story like "Jorinda and Joringel," which has hardly undergone any change since the 1812 volume and seems mysterious, choppy, incomplete, and yet strangely powerful.

In the first volume the tales had already been polished considerably, but not enough to suit the Grimms' friends von Arnim and Brentano. "If one wants to exhibit a child's garment," Brentano wrote to von Arnim, "it can be done in all honesty without displaying one that has all the buttons missing, that is covered with mud, and that has the shirt sticking out of the breeches."¹⁹ The brothers were deeply concerned about the genuineness of their stories, and Jacob defended their method vigorously in a series of letters to von Arnim.²⁰ He admitted that some changes were inevitable in printing the tales. However, he drew an analogy between collecting folktales and breaking open an egg. Even if it is done very carefully, some of the white of the egg will run out, but the yolk remains intact; the yolk of the stories, he staunchly maintained, they had preserved.²¹ Yet who was to say what in a fairy tale con stituted the white and what the yolk? Jacob and Wilhelm themselves differed on this score, and on one occasion Jacob took his brother severely to task for what he regarded as unwarranted changes. Eventually, perhaps realizing more and more the subjective element in their procedure, he abandoned the märchen to Wilhelm and concentrated on his philological studies. Von Arnim was much better pleased with the second volume of tales, and he wrote Wilhelm: "You have been fortunate in your collecting, and occasionally you have been quite fortunate in lending a helping hand—naturally you do not tell Jacob about this. You should have done this oftener and many of the endings of the fairy tales would have been more satisfactory."²² Wilhelm did, in fact, do this oftener. It is obvious today that the style of the Grimm fairy tales is in large measure the creation of Wilhelm Grimm. Even in the Urfassung, the stories in his handwriting are more finished and literary. If perhaps he has received more than his due as a folklorist, he has never received sufficient recognition as an artist—except for the tribute of being universally read.

For the most part the changes and additions are those that might be made by any good storyteller to make his narrative more coherent, more dramatic, and more vivid. This particular aspect of the märchen has been thoroughly treated by Ernest Tonnelat.²³ Tonnelat expressed his admiration for the trouble the Grimms took to polish the style of their narrative, a practice that he noted was not common among their compatriots. He lists some twenty kinds of stylistic changes made in the märchen, only a few of which need be mentioned here.

The Grimms supplied motivation where it was lacking. For example, in the first edition of "Rumpelstiltskin" the miller simply tells the king that he has a daughter who can spin straw into gold. In the sixth edition we are told that he said it "to give himself an air of importance." In the first edition the king merely summons the girl. In the second we are informed that he loved gold. In the first edition he tells the miller's daughter that he will marry her if she succeeds in spinning the straw into gold. In the second edition he thinks to himself, "I won't find a richer woman in the world." In the final edition he thinks, "Even if she is only a miller's daughter, I won't find a richer woman in the world." As one can see, the king's character is steadily developed.²⁴

As in the examples just cited, indirect discourse and statements about what the characters thought and did are replaced by dialogue, and thus the stories acquire a dramatic quality. The character of the wicked queen in "Snow White" is made blacker through her reactions when she thinks that she has succeeded in poisoning the heroine. In the Urfassung her reactions are not even mentioned. In the first edition we are told that she "was satisfied," that "her heart felt light," and that "she was glad." In the final version she gloats, "Now you were the most beautiful," "You paragon of beauty … now it's all over with you," and the third time, "White as snow, red as blood, black as ebony! This time the dwarfs can't revive you again."²⁵ Details are made more concrete and vivid, often through the use of simile. "Snow White" originally began, "The snow was falling from the sky"; this becomes, "The snowflakes were falling like feathers from the sky." Many phrases and expressions are added to give the stories a homely, colloquial flavor. When the seven kids are cut out of the wolf's belly, they hop around their mother "like a tailor at his wedding." Rumpelstiltskin's little house stands "where the fox and the hare say goodnight to each other." The father of Hansel and Gretel is forced to abandon his children a second time because "Whoever says 'A;' has to say 'B'." Animals are given humorous nicknames; for example, the princess calls the frog king "alter Wasserpatscher."

In the case of these last-mentioned additions, the aim is evidently not just to make a better story but to create the atmosphere of a particular kind of story. Many of the homely touches that charm the reader with the naiveté of these tales were added in a very sophisticated way to have precisely this naive effect. They were put in to suggest the folk origin of the stories. Indeed, some of the characteristics that one would surely expect to have come from oral tradition are often the result of skilful retouching. Asides to the audience, closing formulas, and many of the verses have been inserted. Everyone knows that in fairy tales things happen in threes. So did the Grimms, and if their sources were content with only one or two occurrences from an obvious sequence, they occasionally made up the deficiency.

Thus many of the changes they introduced were meant to make the stories conform more closely to their notion of what a folktale should ideally be like. Their ideas on this subject, as has been said, were influenced by their romantic theories of nature and literature. Tonnelat also calls attention to the place of the Grimms in the Romantic Movement,²⁶ but he does not show how profoundly romantic theory affected the style of the märchen.

The most interesting changes are those in which the Grimms, no doubt quite unconsciously, modified the stories to conform with their idea of nature. Snow White's wicked stepmother was originally her own mother. The Grimms would have felt justified in such a change because of the wicked stepmothers in other stories; in any case, a mother's jealousy of her daughter would have clashed with their romantic belief in the purity of the love that mothers in folk literature ought to show for their own children. (Even the stepmothers love their own daughters!) Similar revisions in other stories have resulted in occasional inconsistencies so that the same character may be called "the mother" on one page and "the stepmother" on another.²⁷

Some of the most characteristic changes emphasize the role of nature in the tales. Snow White's coffin was at one time kept in the dwarfs' cottage and lit by candles; later it was transferred to the mountainside where Snow White is mourned by the owl, the raven, and the dove. The Grimms had a lot of trouble finding a satisfactory ending for "Snow White." In the first edition one of the prince's servants, who gets tired of having to carry the coffin around from place to place for the prince, thumps Snow White on the back like a petulant child punishing a doll, and thus the piece of poisoned apple is ejected. The ending is actually comic. In the final version the servants carrying the coffin trip over a bush, almost as if nature itself were taking a hand in restoring Snow White to life and marrying her to the prince. In the manuscript version of "Briar Rose" when the princess pricks her finger, we are told that everything went to sleep "down to the flies on the wall." In the first edition the horses go to sleep in the stable, the doves on the roof, the dogs in the courtyard, and even the fire on the hearth. The fourth edition adds the final magic touch: "The wind dropped, and not a leaf stirred on the trees in front of the castle." Thus all of nature is made to fall asleep in sympathy with the sleeping princess.

Family relationships are emphasized everywhere. The opening of "The Wolf and the Seven Kids" is an excellent example. In the Urfassung the tale begins: "Once upon a time there was a goat who had seven kids." The first edition adds: "whom she loved dearly." The second edition makes it: "whom she loved like a mother." In the fifth it reads: "Once upon a time there was an old goat who had seven young kids, and she loved them the way a mother loves her children." One should note, incidentally, the artistic contrast in this last version between the old goat and her young kids.

The Grimms believed that the stories contained a natural morality, but they often pointed the moral for the reader. Thus when the queen at last feels at peace after she has poisoned Snow White with the apple, they later added, "so far as a jealous heart can ever be at peace." Because they found deeper spiritual meaning expressed with childlike purity in the fairy tales, they believed that their collection could serve "as a book of education,"²⁸ a book that would develop the moral character of children. Consequently they were sensitive to objections raised by von Arnim and others against the first volume that certain details and stories were unsuitable for children. To these criticisms Wilhelm replied in the foreword to the second volume with the argument that what was natural could not be harmful. He compared the stories to flowers that might, for exceptional reasons, give offense to a few: such a one "who cannot enjoy their benefit, may pass them by, but he cannot ask that they be given a different color or shape."²⁹

Yet the Grimms themselves must have felt a few colors were too strong to be natural. The first volume had contained two stories in which children play "butcher" and one child slaughters another. These tales were suppressed in the second edition. In the original version of "The Twelve Brothers," the brothers actually carry out their vow to kill every girl that they meet, and when their sister comes to the house in the forest, her youngest brother orders her to kneel: "Your red blood must be shed this instant!" It is not that the Grimms objected to the horror of such scenes—there is nothing here to match the horror in "The Juniper Tree." But the action of the twelve brothers, who are intimately associated with nature in their forest retreat, would tend to contradict the Grimms' idea of nature whereas "The Juniper Tree" perfectly confirms it. The tree is the symbol of nature, and through it the murdered boy is brought back to life and his unnatural stepmother is destroyed. More than any other story, this mysterious and primitive tale reveals the connection that the Grimms perceived between fairy tales and ancient mythology and religion.

Fundamentally the Grimms were right—fairy tales derive from nature, although to a post-Darwinian and post-Freudian generation nature may not always appear as the pure moral force the Grimms thought it to be. The children's "butcher" game may seem more like nature to readers of The Lord of the Flies than the affection of Hansel and Gretel for each other did to the Brothers Grimm. We may, if we like, see all of the stepmother figures as symbolic substitutions for the mother figure, as was really the case in "Snow White." No doubt there is a symbolic significance that the Grimms failed to recognize in the many situations where a princess is locked in a tower or where the hero must perform impossible tasks to win her from a jealous father or mother. Their own intimacy gave them no reason to suspect that the hatred of older for younger brothers is by no means abnormal.

This is not to say that they were wrong. The truth that they saw in fairy tales is also valid. The mother and stepmother, the good and the wicked brothers in fairy tales are, after all, dual aspects of complex human relationships that are made pure and simple in fairy tales where good and evil are given separate identities instead of remaining closely knit parts of a single psyche. What matters is that these stories present recognizable patterns of human behavior. The Grimms' achievement was to present them in such a way that their humanity could be recognized by everyone—by children, by adults, and especially by later writers for whom, as the Grimms had hoped, the märchen served as inspiration.

Although with their collection the Grimms made an invaluable contribution to the study of folklore, still their final achievement was in literature. The literary influence of the märchen began to be felt almost at once, not only in Germany in writers like E. T. A. Hoffmann, but in other European countries where translations soon began to appear. Andersen is the most brilliant example. In England Dickens, Thackeray, and Ruskin all tried their hands at writing fairy tales that in their self-consciousness are a far cry from the simplicity and artlessness the Grimms were striving for.

But the influence of the Grimms is perhaps not limited to literary imitations of the märchen form. Many nineteenth-century novelists have what may be called a fairy-tale imagination. Objects in the novels of Dickens, like Mrs. Gamp's umbrella, have a life of their own as they do in fairy tales. Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Great Expectations all have typical fairy-tale plots in which an abused child must overcome obstacles in a quest for security. Aunt Betsy Trotwood performs the function of a wise woman who gives good gifts; Abel Magwitch is like the wild Iron Hans, both in his savage nature and in the magical way in which he repays and tests the young hero who has been kind to him. Jane Eyre is both a Cinderella figure and the girl whose love releases a beast-bridegroom from his spell. In the twentieth century the tradition remains vital. James Thurber has written excellent literary fairy tales. F. Scott Fitzgerald created a fairy-tale world in which the kings and princesses are all beautiful but damned.

All this is a way of saying that fairy tales today still speak to us and tell us about ourselves—about our hopes and dreams as well as about our fears and anxieties. They are inspired by nature, then, as the Grimms would have us believe, and they have not lost their power to please, move, and instruct. What Wilhelm Grimm said of them in 1812 can still be said today: their very existence justifies them.

Notes

¹Brüder Grimm Gedenken 1963: Gedenkschrift zur hundertsten Wiederkehr des Todestags von Jacob Grimm (= Hessische Blätter für Volkskunde, LIV), ed. Gerhard Heilfurth, Ludwig Denecke, and Ina-Maria Greverus.

²European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. Willard Trask (New York, 1953), p. 12.

³Kleinere Schriften, ed. Gustav Hinrichs (Berlin, 1881), I, 322. Translations of all quotations from German texts are our own unless otherwise indicated.

⁴ See Reinhold Steig, Achim von Arnim und Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm (Stuttgart and Berlin, 1904), pp. 213-273, passim.

⁵ The story of the circumstances surrounding the publication of the numerous editions of the märchen is told in a series of very informative articles by T. F. Crane, "The External History of the Grimm Fairy Tales," Modern Philology, XIV (1917), 577-610, XV (1917), 65-77, 355-383.

⁶ See Crane, XIV, 601 and XV, 75. An attractive edition published by Winkler-Verlag (Munich, 1955) contains the 1819 foreword, a memoir by Herman Grimm, drawings by Ludwig Grimm, and an afterword by Herta Klepl.

⁷Grimm's Household Tales, tr. and ed. by Margaret Hunt with an introduction by Andrew Lang (London, 1884).

⁸Ibid., I, p. v.

⁹Kleinere Schriften, I, 320.

¹⁰Ibid., pp. 321-322.

¹¹Ibid., pp. 322-323.

¹² The translation of this and other passages from the märchen is from The Frog King and Other Tales of the Brothers Grimm.

¹³Kleinere Schriften, I, 338.

¹⁴Ibid., p. 329.

¹⁵Märchen der Brüder Grimm: Urfassung nach der Original-handschrift der Abtei Ölenberg im Elsass (Heidelberg, 1927).

¹⁶ The translation of this and the passage immediately following is our own, not Mrs. Hunt's. Taken from "Vorrede der Brüder Grimm," Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Munich, Winkler-Verlag, 1955), pp. 34-35.

¹⁷Kleinere Schriften, I, 332.

¹⁸ See Kurt Schmidt, Die Entwicklung der Grimmschen Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Halle, 1932). Schmidt prints the text of the Urfassung, after Lefftz, with all subsequent variants and additions, line by line on top of one another, so that one can follow the process of revision in minute detail over a period of almost fifty years.

¹⁹ Reinhold Steig, Achim von Arnim und Clemens Brentano (Stuttgart, 1894), p. 309.

²⁰ Steig, Achim von Arnim und Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm, pp. 213-273, passim.

²¹Ibid., p. 255.

²²Ibid., p. 319.

²³Les contes des frères Grimm (Paris, 1912).

²⁴ Variants are taken and translated from Schmidt.

²⁵ Translations of the Urfassung and the first edition version of "Snow White" are given in an appendix to The Frog King.

²⁶Les frères Grimm, leur œuvre de jeunesse (Paris, 1912), especially Chapters I, II, and V.

²⁷ E.g. in "Hansel and Gretel." In "The Twelve Brothers" a wicked mother-in-law turns into a "stepmother."

²⁸Kleinere Schriften, I, 331.

²⁹Ibid.