Selected Tales of the Brothers Grimm

by Jacob Grimm

  One day her mother said to her, “Come, Little Red Riding Hood, here is a piece of cake and a bottle of wine, take it to your grandmother. She is sick and weak, and it will make her feel better. Get ready before it’s too hot out, and once you’re on your way, watch where you’re going and see that you keep to the path, or else you’ll break the bottle and it won’t do Grandmother a bit of good. And when you get to her place, don’t forget to say, Good Morning, Grandma!, before you go poking your nose into every corner.”

  “I’ll do everything you say,” Little Red Riding Hood promised her mother with a handshake. But her grandmother lived deep in the woods, half an hour from the village. No sooner did Little Red Riding Hood enter the forest than she ran into the wolf. But she had no idea what kind of evil creature it was and was not afraid of it.

  “Hello, how are you, Little Red Riding Hood?” said the wolf.

  “Very well, thank you, Mr. Wolf.”

  “Where are you off to so early, Little Red Riding Hood?”

  “To Grandmother’s house.”

  “What do you have there under your apron?”

  “Cake and wine – yesterday we baked, and I’m taking it to Grandmother, who’s sick and weak, to make her feel better.”

  “Where does your grandmother live, Little Red Riding Hood?”

  “Oh, about a quarter of an hour from here in the woods, under the three oak trees, in the house with walnut hedges out front. I’m sure you know the place,” said Little Red Riding Hood.

  The wolf thought to himself, The tender young thing, there’s a juicy mouthful, she’ll taste much better than the old biddy. Best be sly about it, and you’ll get the two of them. So he went walking for a while next to the girl, then he said, “Look, Little Red Riding Hood, at the lovely flowers growing over there. Why don’t you look around? It seems to me you don’t even hear the little birds singing sweetly in the treetops. You’re walking so stiffly, like you’re headed for school, and you’re missing all the fun in the woods.”

  Little Red Riding Hood opened her eyes wide, and when she saw how the rays of sunlight danced through the trees and how the forest bed was covered with lovely flowers, she thought, If I bring Grandmother a fresh-plucked bouquet of flowers it’ll make her happy. It’s so early, I’ve got plenty of time to get there. And she ran from the path into the woods to pluck flowers. And no sooner had she plucked one than she spotted a prettier one a little farther off and ran to fetch it, and so she wandered ever deeper into the woods.

  But the wolf went straight to Grandmother’s house and knocked at her door.

  “Who’s there?”

  “It’s Little Red Riding Hood, come to bring you cake and wine. Open the door.”

  “Just lift the latch, it isn’t locked,” cried Grandmother. “I’m too weak to get up.”

  The wolf lifted the latch, the door opened, and he entered without a word, went straight to Grandmother’s bed, and gobbled her up. Then he put on her clothes, donned her bonnet, lay himself in her bed, and pulled the bed curtains.

  But Little Red Riding Hood had run around fetching flowers, and once she’d picked so many she couldn’t carry any more, she remembered her grandmother and set out again to her place. She was a bit surprised when she got there to find the door open, and when she went in, she had such a strange feeling that she thought, My goodness, I’m usually glad to visit, but today there’s something wrong!

  She called out, “Good morning, Grandma!,” but there was no reply. Then she went over to the bed and pulled back the curtains – Grandmother lay there with her bonnet pulled down low over her eyes and looked so strange. “Oh, Grandmother, what big ears you have!”

  “The better to hear you with.”

  “Oh, Grandmother, what big eyes you have!”

  “The better to see you with.”

  “Oh, Grandmother, what big hands you have!”

  “The better to hold you with.”

  “But, Grandmother, what an awfully big mouth you have!”

  “The better to eat you.”

  No sooner did the wolf utter these words than he leapt up and devoured poor Little Red Riding Hood.

  Once the wolf had satisfied his desire, he lay himself back down in bed, fell asleep, and started snoring loudly. A hunter just happened to be passing the house at that moment and thought, The old lady’s snoring up a storm. Better go see if she’s all right. So he stepped inside and as soon as he went over to the bed he saw the wolf lying in it. “Here you are, you old sinner,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you a long time.” He was about to empty his musket, but then he thought, the wolf might have eaten up the grandmother and maybe she can still be saved – so he did not shoot but rather took a pair of scissors and started cutting open the sleeping wolf’s stomach. After a few snips he saw the red hood, and a few snips later the girl leapt out and cried, “Oh, how scared I was! It was so dark in the wolf’s belly!” And then the old grandmother came out, still alive but hardly breathing. Little Red Riding Hood rushed to fetch a few big stones to stuff into the wolf’s belly, and when he woke up he wanted to make a run for it, but the stones were so heavy that he keeled over and promptly dropped dead.

  Whereupon all three were happy. The hunter skinned off the wolf’s fur and went home with it, and the grandmother ate the cake and drank the wine that Little Red Riding Hood brought her and got better. Little Red Riding Hood thought, I’ll never ever wander off the straight and narrow path again, if my mother forbids it.

  It has also been told that another time, when Little Red Riding Hood again went to bring her old grandmother a piece of cake, another wolf spoke to her and tried to lure her off the path. But Little Red Riding Hood was on her guard and kept to the path and when she got to her grandmother’s house, she told her that she’d met the wolf, that he’d wished her a good day, but he had such an evil look in his eyes: “If I hadn’t been on the open road, he’d have devoured me for sure.”

  “Come,” said the grandmother, “we want to lock the door, so that he can’t get in.”

  Shortly thereafter the wolf knocked and cried, “Open up, Grandmother, I’m Little Red Riding Hood, and I brought you cake.”

  But they kept silent and did not open the door, so the sly gray creature crept several times around the house and finally jumped on the roof, where he planned to wait until sundown for Little Red Riding Hood to go home again. He intended to creep after her and devour her in the dark. But Grandmother realized what he had in mind. Just outside the house there was a big stone trough. So she said to the child, “Take this bucket, Little Red Riding Hood. Yesterday I cooked sausages in it, here – carry the water I cooked them in and dump it into the trough.” Red Riding Hood kept carrying water until the big trough was full to the edge. The sausage smell rose up to the wolf’s nose. He sniffed and peered down, and finally he stretched his neck so far out that he lost his balance and starting to slip. Then he fell from the roof directly into the great trough and drowned. Then Little Red Riding Hood went happily home again and nobody did her any harm.

  SCHLARAFFENLAND

  To Schlaraffenland I went, and there I saw Rome and the Lateran Basilica hanging by a silken thread and a man with no feet outrunning a swift horse and a razor-sharp sword that split a bridge. There I saw a young donkey with a silver nose chasing after two fleet-footed hares and a broad-limbed linden tree that bore hotcakes as fruit. There I saw a shriveled old she-goat carrying a hundred cartloads of lard and sixty cartloads of salt. Shall I pull your leg some more? There I saw a plow without horse or oxen plowing a field, a one-year-old child who flung four millstones from Regensburg to Trier and from Trier to Strasbourg, and a hawk swam across the Rhine and none would deny its right to do so. There I heard fishes making a racket that echoed all the way to heaven and sweet honey flowing like water from a deep valley in the cleft of a high mountain. All this, I tell you, was a sight for sore eyes. There were two crows mowing a lawn and two midges building a bridge and two pigeons tearing a wolf to shred
s, two tiny tykes heaving two goat kids and two frogs threshing a bushel of grain. There I saw two mice anointing a bishop and two cats scratching out a bear’s tongue. A snail came racing along and slew two wild lions. There stood a barber shaving off a woman’s beard and two nursing infants telling their mother to keep still. There I saw two greyhounds dragging a mill out of the water and an old nag standing by, nodding her approval. And in the yard stood four steeds threshing grain with all their might, and two goats heating the oven, and then a red cow loaded loaves of bread into the oven. And there was a rooster crowing: “Cock-a-doodle-do, this tale is through, cock-a-doodle-do.”

  An Afterword Facing Fears and Furies: The Unexpurgfated Brothers Grimm

  A six-hundred-kilometer stretch from Hanau, the birthplace of the Grimm brothers, in the German state of Hessen, to Bremen, the destination of the fabled musicians, in the state of Bremen, has been designated as the Deutsche Märchenstrasse (German Fairy Tale Road). The road runs past Sababurg, supposed somniferous nook of Sleeping Beauty; the tower of Trendelburg, Rapunzel’s alleged lockup; and Hameln, where the fabled Rat Catcher plied his trade. The Grimms have posthumously provided for a veritable industry, nearly as global in its distribution network as Coca-Cola. Countless selections of their tales keep pouring off the presses, nourishing imaginations in every language under the sun. But most delete the less savory details and leave out the darkest of the lot, candy-coating the content and tone. Disney’s 1937 animated hit Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs set the modern standard of narrative nicety, turning the film’s theme song, “Whistle While You Work,” into an anthem to the Protestant work ethic, while judiciously deleting the evil queen’s curious craving for the little girl’s lungs and liver.

  Why then issue yet another selection and translation of these tales? Because it is this translator-editor’s hope to hereby salvage these enigmatic narratives from the insipid pabulum to which they have been reduced and restore the sting and the bite of the original.

  For English-language readers, as for their German counterparts, the term Märchen, or fairy tale, is practically synonymous with the name Grimm, as though the genre itself spilled fully formed from the lips of the celebrated brethren, the pair attached in the popular consciousness like talkative Siamese twins. Inevitably, given the dark and cruel character of many of their tales, notwithstanding repeated attempts at expurgation – a process in which Brother Wilhelm himself already had a heavy hand – we likewise tend to conflate the name Grimm with its homonym grim, as in Grim Reaper. For the tales do indeed reveal monstrous intentions and recount cruel acts, like child abuse (“Cinderella”), child abandonment (“Hansel and Gretel”), mutilation (“The Girl with No Hands”), fratricide (“The Singing Bone”), incest (All-Kind-of-Hide”), and cannibalism (“The Tale of the Juniper Tree”). They readily acknowledge fear (“The Fairy Tale About a Boy Who Set Out to Learn Fear”), greed (“The Golden Goose”), and desire (“Rapunzel”). They titillate like horror films and terrify like nightmares. But it is a playful – and therefore paradoxically comforting – terror, since as with scary movies and dark dreams, we know all along that it’s only the stuff of fantasy and relish it all the more the grimmer it gets.

  These tales captivate because, in imaginative terms, they tell it like it is, sublimating nothing, mining the tenuous realm of make-believe. Their enduring appeal, as Bruno Bettelheim reminds in his classic defense of the grim stuff in Grimm, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, lies precisely in their bluntness:

  “Safe” stories mention neither death nor aging, the limits to our existence, nor the wish for eternal life. The fairy tale, by contrast, confronts the child squarely with the basic human predicaments.

  Bettelheim then elaborates:

  The deep inner conflicts originating in our primitive drives and our violent emotions are all denied in much of modern children’s literature, and so the child is not helped in coping with them . . . The fairy tale, by contrast, takes these existential anxieties and dilemmas very seriously and addresses itself directly to them: the need to be loved and the fear that one is thought worthless, the love of life, and the fear of death.

  Let us acknowledge here and now, notwithstanding our best attempts to sugarcoat and coddle the reality, that childhood is a fearful state. Virtual victims dwarfed by powerful giants, children spend much of their time petrified of an infinite number of imagined and actual threats, and are themselves hardly innocent of violent intent. Biting, kicking, and scratching come before walking and talking. Even babes born with a silver spoon (or a stainless steel one, as the case may be) suffer and/or inflict oodles of actual or fantasized grief, and plow back the terror as imaginative mulch to mull over again at night. What children want in the stories they like and ask to be read or told again and again – what I remember wanting, and still crave now in the literature that matters – is a narrative drawn in broad elemental strokes, which acknowledges the mystery, the cruelty, and the terror, encompassing all the dark contradictions of life, and in so doing, defangs the threat, vaccinating the ever-vulnerable psyche with denatured venom.

  A word about the brothers and their background. Two of a family of nine children, six of whom survived, Jakob Ludwig Karl (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Karl (1786–1859) were born to Philipp Wilhelm Grimm, a privy councillor at court, and his wife, Dorothea (née Zimmer), the daughter of an apothecary, in a comfortable household in Hanau, in the principality of Hessen, at a time when Germany was a patchwork quilt of principalities loosely linked by a common tongue. Three occurrences – two domestic, one external – shattered the protected idyll of the brothers’ childhood: the death of their father in 1796, and of their grandfather two years later, leading to the family’s financial ruin; and in 1806, Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion and occupation of the Rhineland and the formation of the Confederation of the Rhine, an amalgamation of German city-states, electorates, kingdoms, and duchies under French dominion.

  With a determination worthy of one of their fairy-tale protagonists, albeit with the aid of an affluent relative, Jakob and Wilhelm, both of bookish bent, studied law and gravitated to philology. Jakob worked for a time as a court librarian to the King of Westphalia, later joining his brother as a court librarian in Kassel. Both subsequently secured appointments – Jacob as a professor and librarian, Wilhelm as a professor – to the University of Göttingen, in the state of Hanover, where they lived under the same roof. Wilhelm married, while Jakob remained single. Both were dismissed, along with five other colleagues on the faculty, for protesting the revocation of the constitution by Hanover’s autocratic King Ernst Augustus I, and were thereafter invited by King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia to join the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, where they studied happily ever after. Their adjoining graves in the St. Matthäus Kirchhof Cemetery in Schöneberg, Berlin, are still a place of pilgrimage.

  While engaged in various scholarly projects over the years – Jakob wrote extensively on the history and structure of Germanic languages, publishing a four-volume German grammar and later authoring a three-volume German mythology; together they worked on a German dictionary, reaching the letter F, and a two-volume book of German legends – the brothers are best known for their collection of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Fairy Tales), a project they began as young students and continued to tinker with well into old age. Notwithstanding sluggish sales of the first and second editions, the work was reissued in seven large editions and ten small editions during the brothers’ lifetimes, bringing them a modicum of celebrity, if not material comfort. But it was only in the late nineteenth and the twentieth century that the book, commonly known as Grimms Märchen, flooded the market in countless editions and came to achieve a popularity in Germany and abroad second only to the Bible.

  Solicited by their friends, the writers Ludwig Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, who compiled a German folk-song collection, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boys’ Magic Horn), Jakob and Wilhelm began gatheri
ng folk fairy tales for a planned sequel. The sequel never materialized, but the Grimms took the task to heart and ran with it. Culture and politics mingled in their motivation; sharing the burgeoning German nationalism of the moment stirred in response to the French occupation, the brothers found a scholarly outlet for their patriotic zeal. They set out to collect, and thereby preserve, what they believed to be an endangered store of popular German lore. As they put it in the foreword to the second edition:

  This is how it seemed to us, when we saw that of all that blossomed in former times nothing survived – even the memory thereof was almost erased – nothing, that is, but a few folk songs, a handful of books, some legends, and these innocent household tales . . . It was perhaps high time to collect these fairy tales, for those who ought to safeguard them are fewer and fewer in number.

  Or as Jakob would reflect, in retrospect, in 1841, they sought “in the history of German literature and language, consolation and refreshment . . . from the enemy’s high spirits.” By collecting and publishing these texts, they felt that they were “fostering national self-reflection.” The first volume of what would become the first edition, published in 1812, was, in fact, intended strictly for scholars. It was only later that Wilhelm, the worldlier and somewhat sawier of the two, fathomed the work’s appeal for a younger readership and modified its tone and content accordingly, elaborating on the spare folk descriptions and adding moral lessons to please and appease parents and educators. Still, scholars continued to take note. The second edition was line-edited by the philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher.