mckaywest11e

Quiz for Primary Source 21.3: The Brothers Grimm, Children’s Stories and Household Tales (1812; 1815)

1. With which of these statements would Wilhelm Grimm have agreed?

By the early nineteenth century, early German poetry had been neglected and all but forgotten.

Early German poetry was celebrated by most German scholars and writers of Grimm’s day.

Folk songs and household tales were poor imitations of more sophisticated literary works.

Poetry should be about the future, not the past.

2. Which of these assumptions was central to the Grimms’s project?

Folk tales can, and should, be improved upon by modern writers.

Folk tales are reflections of social conflict and tension.

Folk tales are extremely old.

All European societies produced versions of the same folk tales.

3. To which of these purposes did the Grimms’s hope to put the folk tales they collected?

They wanted to use them to help trace the development of ethnic divisions in Germany.

They wanted to use them as the foundation for the study of the origins of German poetry.

They wanted to use them to demonstrate the superiority of German culture to all other cultures.

They wanted to use them as evidence of the degeneracy of the German lower classes.