Selected Tales of the Brothers Grimm

by Jacob Grimm

  From the start, the collection was, in fact, as much a work of fine-tuned fiction as of popular folklore. Pretending to tap peasant lore, the brothers enjoined friends to transcribe narratives from old books and sought their respondents among the neighboring gentry, notably in families of noble origin like the Haxthausens, who, in turn, sounded out their servants. And as for the purported Germanic folk purity of their sources, their favorite informant, the Märchenfrau Dorothea Viehmännin, a popular storyteller touted in the aforementioned foreword as “a peasant woman,” was the wife of a tailor and herself of French Huguenot origin. The provenance of many of her tales proved to lead back across the Rhine to Perrault and other Gallic sources. Nationalism was one of those nineteenth-century fictions whipped up in the frenzy of political self-affirmation, but geographic borders proved infinitely porous, and stories slipped between the cracks.

  The Grimms have been accused of tampering with the narratives entrusted to them. Yet as Maria Tatar makes clear in her balanced accounting, The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, “It is an error to see in the Grimms’ collection printed transcriptions of oral folktales. The tales are simply too far removed from oral source material to deserve the title.” Scholars have shown to what extent the brothers, and Wilhelm, in particular, raked through the material, deleting here, amending there, censoring, moralizing, and bowdlerizing. “But what name do they then merit?” Tatar asks.

  Clearly one cannot call them literary fairy tales, for, notwithstanding Wilhelm Grimm’s unending editorial intervention, they are a far cry from the kind of narratives penned by E. T. A. Hoffmann, Hans Christian Andersen, or Oscar Wilde. The texts in the Nursery and Household Tales seem to lead an uneasy double life as folklore and literature.

  The fact remains that their original source, that of a folk-narrative tradition passed on from generation to generation, still seeps through and speaks out, no matter how tinkered and tampered with the tales may be.

  Their appeal spread rapidly. No doubt exaggerating a bit, the tall-tale teller Baron von Münchhausen declared that “In an old-fashioned German household, Grimms’ fairy tales occupied a position approximately midway between the cookbook and the hymnal.” And across the English Channel, in London, Karl Marx supplemented his little daughter Eleanor’s spoken German with daily doses of Grimm. In an 1819 review in The Quarterly Review, an English journal, Francis Cohen, a.k.a. Sir Francis Palgrave, wrote appreciatively:

  The most important addition to nursery literature has been effected in Germany, by the diligence of John and William Grimm, two antiquarian brethren of the highest reputation. Under the title Kinder- und Hausmärchen, they have published a collection of German popular stories, singular of its kind, both for extent and variety, and from which we have acquired much information.

  The first English-language edition, titled German Popular Stories, edited and translated by Edgar Taylor, with illustrations by George Cruikshank, appeared in 1823 and proved an immediate smashing success. Three more English translations followed. Charles Dickens called Little Red Riding Hood “my first love,” opining that “if I could have married [her] I should have known perfect bliss.” Charles Dodgson (a.k.a. Lewis Carroll) hailed “the love-gift of a fairy-tale” in Through the Looking Glass. A generation later, in the midst of World War II, in his 1944 review of the Margaret Hunt translation, W. H. Auden wrote: “It is hardly too much to say that these tales rank next to the Bible in importance.” He furthermore declared them “among the few indispensable common-property books upon which Western culture can be founded.”

  Meanwhile, back in the German fatherland, National Socialist theorists praised the Grimms’ fairy tales as epitomes and models of the character of Nordic peoples, offering “a rare insight into the soul of peoples of German blood” and clues to the “primary principle of German character.” It is true that the Grimms favored golden-haired princesses and heroes of solid peasant stock, and tapped popular anti-Semitic motifs that make the modern reader wince. In “The Jew in the Thorns,” for instance (a tale not included in this selection), a Jew who tries to trick a fiddler is made to dance himself bloody among the thorn bushes as a prelude to his hanging, presumably to the giggling delight of little readers and listeners. But the questionable role of the Jew as villain in the German imagination was not invented or cultivated by the Grimm brothers, nor are racist tinges any more marked in their work than in that of other nineteenth-century Dichter and Denker, like Kleist and Nietzsche, both likewise posthumously conscripted to the Aryan cause. And while Nazi theorists had a field day interpreting the tales and extracting narrative elements in support of their theories, the scholarship was sometimes more questionable than the source. So a certain Georg Schott saw the protagonist of “The Brave Little Tailor” as “an altogether crafty character” in whom he divined definite Jewish traits. He furthermore viewed the giants in the same tale as “fine specimens of German manhood” who were taken in and victimized by the tailor’s lies. “All this is truly Jewish,” claimed Herr Dr. Schott. “We need only think of the brash publicity: ‘Seven with one blow.’ “

  But according to the postwar German scholar Ruth B. Bottigheimer:

  It was not that the Kinder- und Hausmärchen themselves conspired to produce warlike behavior, but that decades of nationalistically steered propaganda had hallowed their “authors” as quintessentially German or Germanic, and therefore, as worthy standard-bearers for Germany at war. Wartime editions of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen poured off German presses.

  For the British and American occupation forces in the immediate wake of World War II, the Grimms’ fairy tales were considered taboo, practically akin to Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and consequently removed from circulation in libraries and schools. But the German fondness for the fairy tale could not be expunged and the books were soon reissued, with some of the grimmer bits trimmed. Yet while it may not be too far-fetched to perceive an imaginative link between the oven of the cannibalistic witch in “Hansel and Gretel” and the human ovens of Auschwitz and Treblinka, Nazi Party officials and functionaries and the German engineers who helped them realize their murderous schemes can well be credited for the mechanization and assembly-line efficiency of genocide, but the Grimms bear no blame for the blueprint. (Or does the right to bear arms, assured by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, reveal an innate violence in the American psyche that makes us more bellicose than others?) Any attempt to excise the cruelty of these tales, the very element that endears them to so many of their little readers, is to my mind as ill-advised and foolish as the ban on toy guns in a country where the real thing is readily available. For as W. H. Auden reminded: “No fairy tale ever claimed to be a description of the external world and no sane child ever believed that it was.” To make believe is all about playfully working through the aggressive and violent tendencies innate to the human species, rather than unleashing them on one’s playmates.

  The sexuality in these tales is another prickly point of contention. Ever since Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams, psychoanalytic theorists have kept busy finding phallic symbols, oedipal complexes, and penis envy hidden on every page. There is indeed an undeniable erotic subtext to many fairy tales, sometimes readily apparent, sometimes hidden at the metaphoric level. It is not too much of a stretch to recognize that Rapunzel’s door-less tower represents her virginal body, to which her sorceress-chaperone permits no point of access for the prince. Nor need one necessarily be sex-obsessed to surmise a figurative allusion to something else in “Hans My Hedgehog” in the princess’s fear of the prick of the protagonist’s quills on their wedding night. And when the young protagonist in “The Blue Light” first steals the clothes of his invisible bride-to-be and later lays his head in her lap, surely I am not the only reader to respond with a libidinal rise.

  The Grimms’ tales have likewise been lambasted for their alleged sexism, to which the novelist Margaret Atwood offers a ready reply:

  I’m always a little astonishe
d when I hear Grimms’ Fairy Tales denounced as sexist . . . It seems to me that traits were evenly spread. There were wicked wizards as well as wicked witches, stupid women as well as stupid men . . . When people say “sexist fairy tales,” they probably mean the anthologies that concentrate on “The Sleeping Beauty,” “Cinderella,” and “Little Red Riding Hood” and leave out everything else. But in “my” version, there are a good many forgetful or imprisoned princes who have to be rescued by the clever, brave, and resourceful princess . . . And where else could I have gotten the idea, so early in life, that words can change you?

  And as for accusations of these tales being wellsprings of authoritarian attitudes, there is far more revolutionary fervor and outright sympathy for the underdog here than any fondness for authority. In “The Master Thief,” an ingenious burglar of peasant origin repeatedly hoodwinks and outwits a gullible lord and gets away with it. In “The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs,” a good-luck child of humble birth tricks the treacherous and greedy king, who had intended to send him to his death, turning the tables on him and sending the king into eternal servitude as a doomed ferryman on the German tributary of the River Styx. Royalty almost inevitably gets the raw end in the Grimms’ realm, whereas peasants and tailors claim the crown, turning social hierarchy on its head. The tasks the heroes of fairy tales set out to accomplish are humble takes on knightly quests, no search for the Holy Grail and the like, but hacking down and stacking a forest full of logs, fishing a pond dry of fish, and sorting lentils from ashes. But the humble nature of the task makes its accomplishment no less praiseworthy.

  Some have perceived in fairy tales the residue of ancient myth. There is indeed a certain similarity between the trials of Hercules and all the impossible chores of fairy-tale protagonists, and a kindred motif in Danaë’s father’s attempt to keep his daughter childless in a bronze chamber open to the sky and Rapunzel’s imprisonment in a tower with no point of entry. Might the marvelous minstrel in the tale of the same name, who charms wild beasts in the forest with his fiddle, be a distant relation or an heir to Orpheus? And when the servant Faithful Johannes in the tale of the same name is turned to stone on account of his loyalty and his master’s folly, might one read into the prescribed remedy, that the king kill his sons, an echo of Jehovah’s test of Abraham’s faith on Mount Moriah?

  Like Freud a century later, the Grimms were first elevated to near-saintly status and thereafter dragged through the mud, their tales accused of fostering every sin under the sun, before being sanitized and resurrected by Disney. These stories tap the unfiltered fundament of the collective unconscious as few others have before or since, dredging up ugliness along with beauty, bravery with cowardice, kindness with cunning. In uttering the unutterable, fairy tales retain the ring of truth. Which is why they have weathered the whimsies of successive social theories and political ideologies, and the passing fads and fashions of child-rearing, and why they are likely to stand the test of time for years to come.

  As the Grimms’ Märchen remind us, life is full of pitfalls and traps with ogres and witches at every turn. Nature keeps teaching seemingly self-evident truths to those inclined to listen. While the dragon of old may have gone extinct, global warming and drought are two intertwined modern monsters. Honeybees risk extinction if some simpleton doesn’t come along soon to heed their warning. And a bloodthirsty virus is on the loose decimating the vulnerable. But there are hopeful signs. A handful of youths and maidens have been brave or foolhardy enough to take the jinni by the tail and topple seemingly omnipotent oligarchs in the land of A Thousand and One Arabian Nights, and others here at home have dared stand up to the hundred-headed fire-breathing dragon of multinational corporate greed. The rest of us children and addled adults, meanwhile, are forever getting bottled up in the infinite manifestations of our fears and furies. But instead of shying away, if we face them, as the long-suffering protagonists of “All-Kind-of-Hide” and “Hans My Hedgehog” do, redemption is sometimes a matter of shedding our old skin and discovering another. If there is wisdom in these seemingly simple tales, as I believe there is, it is in the promise of metamorphosis (frog to prince, straw to gold, hedgehog to human, tailor to king) and the potential force of metaphor to lift the spell of the mundane and point the way to a magical tomorrow.

  Peter Wortsman

  The Return of Little Red Riding Hood in A Red Convertible A Postscript

  The girl goes driving in a red coupe sedan – no, make it a red convertible – to visit her dear old grandmother. The wolf tries to hitch a ride on the highway where you’re not supposed to stop, and when he gets pushy she runs him right over. But the wolf, being resilient and conniving by nature, eats his way through the body of the car (a cheap import) and into the heart of Little Red Riding Hood. Now the wolf is squirming in the gut of the girl and she can’t get him out and there is no emergency medical service for miles – nor would they know what to do if there were one, never having delivered a young girl of an invasive wolf. But the beast won’t let her be. You’ll learn to live with me, he says. Like hell I will! says the headstrong girl, who always carries a nail file in her purse and proceeds to cut him out, endangered species be damned. And scornful of speed limits, she makes it to Granny’s with plenty of time to spare and whips up a tasty lunch of the leftovers. Granny gets indigestion and dies. Little Red inherits her pin cushion stuffed with precious stones and her automatic rocking chair, drives off distraught at breakneck speed into the sunset, and dies in a car crash. The convertible is junked, later to be recycled in the form of a thousand cans of Portuguese sardines pulled off the shelves following a few reported fatal cases of botulism.

  Peter Wortsman

  We gratefully acknowledge the following artists and institutions for the illustrations in this book:

  Cover image, 10. 20x24 inches mixed media 2008, Pascale Monnin.

  Galerie Monnin 19 Rue Lamarre, Pétionville, Haïti.

  24x24 inches mixed media 2008, Pascale Monnin.

  20x24 inches mixed media 2008, Pascale Monnin.

  Fruits, Jean-Claude Legagneur.

  Le chien de garde, Hector Hyppolite.

  in Galaxie Chaos-Babel, Frankétienne.

  Fantastical Metamorphosis, Gesner Abelard.

  Embarquement pour la Floride, Edouard Duval-Carrié. edouard-duval-carrie.com.

  Pour cueillir la rose géante, Jean-Louis Sénatus.

  24x24 inches mixed media 2006, Pascale Monnin.

  in Galaxie Chaos-Babel, Frankétienne.

  Le lagon bleu, Phillipe Dodard.

  Rétable des neuf esclaves, Edouard Duval-Carrié.

  Baron, Edouard Duval-Carrié.

  Recontre, ou Meeting, Frankétienne.

  Mariton, Marithou Dupoux.

  30x30 acrylic on canvas, Pascale Monnin. Collection Toni Monnin.

  10x10 etching 2003, Pascale Monnin.

  Maître Grandbois, Lionel St. Eloi.

  La départ, Edouard Duval-Carrié.

  Prière du Pêcheur, Lyonel Laurenceau.

  Fillettes, Jeanne Elie-Joseph.

  Sans titre, Gregory Vorbe.

  Femme au miroir, Jean-René Jérôme.

  Jungle of Haiti, A.M. Maurice.

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