Familiar folk stories and fairy tales such as “Snow White,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and “Little Red Riding Hood” are the legacy of the Brothers Grimm—Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1768–1859)—two university-trained linguists who traveled through rural Germany recording folktales in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Determined to preserve what Wilhelm called “a world of magic” from the forces of urbanization, industrialization, and war, their investigations uncovered a popular oral culture that combined mythic, pagan, and Christian themes with folktales and legends about the trials and joys of everyday life. In 1812, the brothers published the first volume of Children’s Stories and Household Tales. The second volume that followed in 1815 was only the start of a collaborative scholarly career that produced a series of prestigious publications on linguistics, German myth and history, and ancient German law.

The Brothers Grimm are representative of a broader cultural-political movement that brought together the romantic idealization of simple rural virtues and the growing appreciation of national character and difference. Collecting German folktales at the height of the Napoleonic Wars and the French occupation of German territories helped popularize a specifically nationalist tradition, which set the Germans apart from the French and offered at least passive resistance to the foreign invaders. In the passages below, excerpted from the prefaces to their first major works, Wilhelm eloquently describes the pleasure and importance of uncovering lost tales even as he emphasizes the unique “riches of German poetry” and folk stories.

From Children’s Stories and Household Tales vol. I (1812)

When a storm of some other calamity from the heavens destroys an entire crop, it is reassuring to find that a small spot on a path lined by hedges or bushes has been spared and that a few stalks, at least, remain standing. If the sun favors them with light, they continue to grow, alone and unobserved, and no scythe comes along to cut them down prematurely for vast storage bins. But near the end of the summer, once they have ripened and become full, poor devout hands seek them out; ear upon ear, carefully bound and esteemed more highly than entire sheaves, they are brought home, and for the entire winter they provide nourishment, perhaps the only seed for the future. That is how it all seems to us when we review the riches of German poetry from earlier times and discover that nothing of it has been kept alive. Even the memory of it is lost — folk songs and these innocent household tales are all that remain. The places by the stove, the hearth in the kitchen, attic stairs, holidays still celebrated, meadows and forests in their solitude, and above all the untrammeled imagination have functioned as hedges preserving them and passing them from one generation to the next….

We know them and we love them just because we happen to have heard them in a certain way, and we like them without reflecting on why….[O]ne quickly discovers that the custom [of telling these tales] persists only in places where there is a warm openness to poetry or where there are imaginations not yet deformed by the perversities of modern life….

We have tried to collect these tales in as pure a form as possible. In many, the narrative flow is interrupted by rhymes and lines of verse, which sometimes clearly alliterate but are never sung during the telling of a tale. Precisely these are the oldest and best tales. No details have been added or embellished or changes, for we would have been reluctant to expand stories already so rich by adding analogies and allusions. They cannot be invented. A collection of this kind has never existed in Germany.

From Children’s Stories and Household Tales vol. II (1815)

The true value of these tales must really be set quite high: they put our ancient heroic poetry in a new light that could not have been produced in any other way. Briar Rose [or Sleeping Beauty], who is put to sleep after being pricked by a spindle, is really Brunhilde, put to sleep after being pricked by a thorn….Snow White sleeps peacefully with the same glowing red colors of life on her cheeks as Snaefrid, the most beautiful woman of all, at whose coffin sits Harald the Fair-Haired [Brunhilde, Snaefrid, and Harald are characters from ancient Germanic myths]….These folktales have kept intact German myths that were thought to be lost, and we are firmly convinced that if a search were conducted in all the hallowed regions of our fatherland, long neglected treasures would transform themselves into fabulous treasures and help to found the study of the origins of our poetry. It works the same way with the many dialects of our language. In them a large part of the words and peculiarities that we had long held to be defunct live on undetected.

The aim of our collection was not just to serve the cause of the history of poetry. It was also our intention that the poetry living in it be effective, bringing pleasure when it could, and that it therefore become a manual of manners….

We have published variant forms, along with relevant notes, in the appendix. Those who feel indifferent to such things will find it easier to skip over them that we would have found to omit them. They belong to the book, since it is a contribution to the history of German folk poetry. These different versions seem more noteworthy to us than they do to those who see in them nothing more than variants or corrupt forms of a once extant archetypal form. For us, they are more likely to be attempts to capture, through numerous approaches, an inexhaustibly rich ideal type.

Source: Maria Tatar, ed., The Annotated Brothers Grimm: The Bicentennial Edition (New York: Norton, 2004, 2012), pp. 435–36; 440; 443–445.

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