Today’s Wonder of the Day was inspired by Amelia. Amelia Wonders, “Who were the brothers Grimm?” Thanks for WONDERing with us, Amelia!
Have you heard the one about the beautiful young girl who is forced to live with seven miniature miners to avoid the evil plots of her wicked stepmother? Of course, you have! Everyone knows the tale of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
But how is it that we know Snow White's tale, as well as those of other fairy tale characters, such as Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, Cinderella, and Sleeping Beauty? You can thank two brothers from Germany.
The Brothers Grimm, otherwise known as Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, were German librarians who also specialized in philology, which is the study of language in historical texts. During the early 19th century, they became interested in cultural research and began to collect and publish local folklore.
The Brothers Grimm didn't actually write any of the stories their name has become synonymous with. Instead, these stories existed as part of a longstanding oral tradition in Germany and had been passed down from one generation to another for many years.
The Brothers Grimm interviewed friends and relatives, writing down these stories to save them from extinction. Eventually, they published their collection of folklore and fairy tales as Children's and Household Tales in 1812.
In addition to the famous tales mentioned previously, the collection contained many other famous tales, including The Frog Prince, Little Red Riding Hood, and Hansel and Gretel. The collection, which would over time become known as Grimm's Fairy Tales, was republished many times, eventually growing from an initial collection of 86 stories to over 200 stories in the seventh edition.
To date, the fables and fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm have been translated into more than 160 different languages. The stories are so timeless and popular that one language can have many versions. In the United States, for example, you can find more than 120 different editions of Grimm's Fairy Tales.
The enduring popularity of these stories can be seen in the number of the stories that have been made into movies. Even though many people would consider these popular fairy tales to be children's stories, they weren't originally meant for kids.
The earliest editions of Grimm's Fairy Tales did not contain illustrations and were targeted at adults. Many of the stories contained violence and other dark content not meant for children. Over time, many of the stories were modified to resemble to the tales we know today.
Although the Brothers Grimm published many other works, including books about mythology, linguistics, and medieval studies, Grimm's Fairy Tales was their enduring, signature work. It was a bestseller during their lifetimes and has maintained its popularity throughout the ages.
In a magazine illustration based on a painting by Louis Katzenstein, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm sit and listen to the folk tales told by Dorothea Viehmann, an inn-keeper’s daughter who knew a wealth of stories, many of which appeared in the Grimms’ famous collection Children’s and Household Tales. It’s an idealized picture of how an older woman, surrounded by children, shares the folksy stories she remembers from her life with two young scholars in a crowded but cozy home while chickens walk in and out of the open door in the background. It fits the common image of the brothers Grimm as collectors and editors of fairy tales and legends: they gathered the narratives of the simple folk in collections that preserved a shared, popular heritage – they became the record keepers of the people.
As I show in The Brothers Grimm and the Making of German Nationalism, however, we should not think of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm as scholars surrounded by the people, two academics among the German Volk. Throughout their professional lives in the first half of the nineteenth century, the two brothers worked in various capacities under rulers in a succession of German states. They were professionals with legal training who depended on princes for stable, salaried employment. The list of rulers who employed, sponsored or in some way decided over Jacob Grimm is quite long: William I the Elector of Hesse, Jérôme Bonaparte King of Westphalia, the Elector William II, Ernest Augustus I King of Hanover, and finally Frederick William IV of Prussia. Grimm took on a number of tasks over the years. He served as a court librarian and archivist under Bonaparte in Kassel, a delegation secretary, censor, and librarian under the Hessian Electors, a professor in Göttingen, Hanover, and an academy member and lexicographer in Prussian Berlin. Jacob Grimm himself never worked as a private teacher at a court, but Wilhelm Grimm did, trying to tutor the Hessian Elector’s apathetic son in the early 1820s.
Shaped by their professional careers as civil servants, the brothers Grimm did not only want to remind German people of their stories and thereby strengthen national consciousness; they also thought that monarchs should appreciate and honor the cultural and ethnic character of the people. Equipped with detailed knowledge of Germanic grammar, law, myth, and stories, Jacob Grimm especially saw himself as a potential advisor to the rulers of his day. He felt that his expertise allowed him to disentangle peoples from one another, counsel rulers on the proper extent of their authority, and even adjudicate disputes over territories. The philologist could not offer the king any Machiavellian insights into how to acquire and maintain power or clarify the principles of justice in the manner of a philosopher. Yet the princes of the period, Jacob Grimm believed, would benefit greatly from philological input on where the true borders ran between peoples and lands. For him, legitimate government depended on a close cultural and linguistic fit between rulers and ruled, and the philologist was best suited to judge when this fit had been achieved.
We are used to seeing the brothers Grimm as scholars who listened to the people and sought to preserve their heritage, with the intent of strengthening the nation. But this image does not capture the political vision of Jacob Grimm and his brother. Throughout their career as scholars and civil servants, they wanted to remind the Volk of its cultural identity but also reach the ruling elite; awaken the nation but also educate the king.
Image source: //de.wikisource.org/wiki/Die_Br%C3%BCder_Grimm_bei_der_M%C3%A4rchenerz%C3%A4hlerin
"Looking for a sweet, soothing tale to waft you toward dreamland? Look somewhere else. The stories collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the early 1800s serve up life as generations of central Europeans knew it—capricious and often cruel. The two brothers, patriots determined to preserve Germanic folktales, were only accidental entertainers. Once they saw how the tales bewitched young readers, the Grimms, and editors aplenty after them, started "fixing" things. Tales gradually got softer, sweeter, and primly moral. Yet all the polishing never rubbed away the solid heart of the stories, now read and loved in more than 160 languages. " (National Geographic)
"Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were scholars under patronage of various German princes (Jacob was librarian at Kassel and Göttingen), famous for their contributions to Indo-European and Germanic philology/linguistics. Their fairy-tale collection came in part because of this scholarly background; they were seeking data on the German language for their linguistic studies. They also were strongly influenced by feelings of national pride, especially following a period in which the culture of neighboring France had been enormously influential; by collecting examples of German folk literature, and emphasizing the uniquely German characteristics of that literature, the Grimms hoped to make a statement about the importance and value of German culture. The general view of their work is that …the Grimms were the first to collect and appreciate folk literature for its own sake and to record tales as ordinary people told them; they were the first to record the identity of the teller in their field notes (which has allowed some of their reputation to be undermined). The first translation of their work into English, by Edgar Taylor in 1823, almost instantly turned fairy tales into a respectable subject of antiquarian study and children's entertainment.
However, more recent scholarship has called into question the extent to which the Grimms actually carried out what they claimed to do in terms of folklore collecting techniques. Many of their sources were young, literate, middle-class women (one later married Wilhelm) - not the older, illiterate peasant storytellers of tradition. Many had backgrounds that included familiarity with French sources such as
They included a greater standardization of language, the elimination of sexually oriented elements, the addition of Christian elements, a consistent tendency to
the Grimms' tales much more frequently feature genuine peasant heroes or heroines, and often show the royalty as duplicitous in relation to the lower classes, making them much more class-conscious than their predecessors. The Grimms' fairy tales also cover a wider spectrum, including trickster tales and folk tales that include no magic at all (e.g., "Clever Gretel") as well as holy legends. " (Northern.edu)The stories of the Brothers Grimm differed from those of Charles Perrault in the manner described above. Rather than creating tales for the amusement and training of the young ladies of Louis XIV's court, they retold their tales in a manner which emphasized German nationalism. In addition, they "christianized" the stories and often made them more violent and less magical.
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