The Wild Girl

by Kate Forsyth

  From ‘Sweetheart Roland’, a tale told by Dortchen Wild to Wilhelm Grimm on 19th January 1812

  ‘It is ten years today since my father died,’ Dortchen said, basting the goose on the roasting spit.

  It was Christmas Day, and she was standing in the kitchen of the Grimm brothers’ apartment on the Bellevuestrasse, an apron tied over her red striped dress. Wilhelm was in his shirtsleeves, mixing wine and brandy and spices together for mulled wine. It was a lovely room, with a high, arched ceiling and windows that looked out over the low blue hills in the far distance.

  ‘It seems impossible to believe,’ he said, taking a quick sip, then adding more cinnamon and honey. He lifted the spoon for Dortchen to taste, then kissed the flavour from her lips.

  ‘So many wasted years.’ She could not help feeling a little melancholy.

  ‘Not wasted.’ He put his arms about her, pressing his lips to the back of her neck. ‘You looked after Gretchen’s children for her, and fulfilled your promise to her. And I wrote some beautiful books. Perhaps I wouldn’t have spent so much time working and writing if you had married me when I wanted you to.’

  She sighed. It had been six months since they had found their way back to each other, and in that time both had been gentle and wary, afraid of hurting and being hurt again.

  ‘I have a gift for you.’ He led her out of the kitchen and into the drawing room, where the resinous scent of a small Christmas tree filled the air.

  ‘But it’s not time for gift-giving yet.’

  ‘I want to give it to you before the hordes arrive.’ He bent and retrieved a small paper-wrapped present from under the tree and pressed it into her hands.

  Dortchen sat and looked up at him in curious anticipation, then laughed and ripped open the paper. Inside was a small leather-bound book. She lifted the cover and read the title page: ‘Kindermärchen’. Tales for children. Eagerly, she looked through it. There were all her favourite tales, beautifully illustrated by Ludwig.

  ‘Oh, it’s a treasure,’ she cried, jumping up to embrace Wilhelm. He hugged her close.

  ‘They have done a print run of one thousand five hundred copies, almost twice as many as the first edition,’ he said, ‘and our publisher has already received so many orders he thinks we’ll need to reprint soon.’

  ‘That is such wonderful news! At last.’ She flung her arms about his neck and he kissed her passionately. Then they heard the key in the lock. Wilhelm and Dortchen broke apart guiltily as Jakob and Ludwig came in, each carrying a heavy load of firewood. They dumped them down by the fire, then shook the snow off their hats and unwound their scarves. She went and put the book in her basket, while the brothers greeted each other cheerfully.

  Wilhelm came and caught her hand, saying in a low voice, ‘Dortchen, can you leave the goose for a while? I want to walk in the woods with you, before everyone gets here. It’s a beautiful evening.’

  ‘It’ll be another few hours before the goose will be ready,’ she answered. ‘I’d love to.’

  Both wrapped up warmly, for the snow was thick on the ground outside and twilight was closing in. Outside, the sky was the colour of pale-blue glass, with one star hanging over the distant hills. Dortchen turned to the left, thinking they would walk in Karlsaue Park, but Wilhelm seized her hand and pulled her to the right.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

  ‘I thought we’d go to the Schlosspark,’ he said. He hailed a carriage and lifted her into it, then climbed in himself, smiling at her surprised face. As the carriage jerked forward, she lurched into his arms. He drew her even closer and lowered his mouth to hers. By the time they reached the Schlosspark, Dortchen’s hair was half unpinned and she had to button up her bodice again.

  ‘I wish that drive was twice as long,’ Wilhelm said, straightening his cravat.

  Hand in hand, they ran along the frozen lake. The palace glowed with light on the hill above them. Dortchen could hear violin music and distant laughter. She knew where they were going. Laughing, she led the way past the briar hedge and into the linden grove. She spun and held out her hands. Wilhelm bowed, then took her in his arms. They waltzed about, knocking snow from the branches in a freezing shower. Their dance slowed as he drew her closer, lifting her face so he could kiss her.

  ‘Dortchen Wild, will you marry me?’ he asked.

  Her pulse leapt, and her breath shortened. ‘Wilhelm Grimm, I shall,’ she answered. ‘With all my heart.’

  Their kiss was full of sweetness.

  ‘We must marry as soon as we can,’ he said, when at last he lifted his mouth away from hers. ‘I don’t want to wait any longer. It’s been far too long already.’

  ‘Tomorrow?’ she laughed.

  ‘I will need to ask the Kurfürst for permission,’ he said. ‘But I’m sure there’ll be no difficulty.’

  ‘Perhaps in the spring, so we can marry in the garden,’ she said. ‘Wilhelm, my brother has told me that he will give me a dowry. His shop is doing so well now, and Herr Schmerfeld has given him such good investment advice that Rudolf feels he can afford to look after me.’

  ‘That is good news!’ He hesitated. ‘Dortchen, once you said that you would not mind if we still lived with Jakob once we were married. Do you still feel that way?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said firmly. ‘Ludwig too, if he wants. I’ll keep house for you all.’

  He kissed her fervently. His nose was cold but his lips were warm and flavoured with honey and cinnamon. ‘We’ll have babies of our own,’ he said. ‘I know how much you love babies.’

  ‘A little boy that looks just like you.’

  ‘A little girl with your beautiful blue eyes.’

  ‘We’ll love them and look after them, and never, ever hurt them.’

  ‘Never,’ he promised her.

  ‘I was afraid this day would never come,’ she whispered.

  He cupped her face in his hands. ‘I told you love works magic.’

  AFTERWORD

  I first read about Dortchen Wild in Valerie Paradiž’s wonderful book Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales. Until I read this book, I had always thought, like most people, that the Grimm brothers travelled about Germany collecting their tales from old peasants. It was a revelation to know that more than half of the tales were actually contributed by educated, middle-class young ladies of their acquaintance. I was also enchanted to know that Wilhelm had married one of the key storytellers, the girl who had grown up next door to him.

  Millions of words have been written by, or about, the Grimm brothers. Thanks to their own letters and diaries, and the writings of people who knew them, we know what they wore, ate, read and thought on nearly every day of their lives.

  Dortchen Wild, however, was virtually silent. Few of her writings remain: a childhood memoir she dictated to her daughter when she was an old lady, and a few letters, including one she wrote to Lotte when she was twelve confessing her crush on Lotte’s handsome elder brother Wilhelm. Otherwise, all I had to help me imagine her life were her stories.

  This one young woman told the Grimm brothers almost a quarter of all the tales in their first collection of fairy stories, when she was just nineteen years old. Stories told to Wilhelm by Dortchen include ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, ‘Hänsel and Gretel’, ‘The Frog-King’, ‘Six Swans’, ‘The Elves and the Shoemaker’, ‘Sweetheart Roland’ (about a girl whose betrothed forgets her) and ‘The Singing Bone’ (about a murdered boy whose bones are used to make a mouthpiece for a flute that then sings to accuse his murderers). She also told a very gruesome version of ‘Bluebeard’ called ‘Fitcher’s Bird’, the primary difference being that the heroine saves herself and her sisters, and a very beautiful version of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ called ‘The Singing, Springing Lark’. A key tale of hers was ‘All-Kinds-of-Fur’, about a princess whose father wants to marry her.

  While researching Dortchen’s stories, I read a study by a psychologist about the therapeutic use of fairy tales to help victims
of abuse. The psychologist had noticed the key differences between the first version of ‘All-Kinds-of-Fur’, which was written down by Wilhelm Grimm and rushed to the printers in October 1812, and the later, edited version of the story, published in the 1819 edition. Victims of abuse who read the 1812 version always identified strongly with the girl in that tale, and thought that the king she married in the end was in fact her father. The later version very carefully made it clear that the father-king and the bridegroom-king were different men. The first story was identified as a tale of incest fulfilled. The second was a tale of incest diverted.

  Later, I read a book by the eminent fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes in which he speculated that the reason Wilhelm Grimm changed that particular story, and other incest tales in the collection such as ‘The Maiden With No Hands’, was that he himself had been abused as a child. But why, then, would he have included them in the first place, I wondered. It occurred to me that perhaps it was Dortchen, his future wife, who had been abused, and that Wilhelm, once he realised this, had changed the story as a kind of gift to her. He certainly included a veiled reference to her as a ‘Wild deer’ in the final version of ‘All-Kinds-of-Fur’.

  Speculating about the possibility of this hidden aspect of Dortchen’s life helped me find a potential solution to a few other problems that had been puzzling me – primarily the long gap between the beginning of her romance with Wilhelm, in 1812, and their eventual marriage, in May 1825. By then, he was thirty-nine and she was almost thirty-two. It’s known that Herr Wild did not like the Grimm brothers, and had declared that Dortchen would be the one to stay home and care for him and his wife till their deaths. However, he died in 1815, and Wilhelm and Dortchen were not married for another ten years.

  Of course, Wilhelm, Dortchen and their families had to struggle against their poverty and the hardships caused by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, which were followed by famine and widespread political turmoil. Dortchen was also busy caring for her nieces and nephews after her sister Gretchen’s death, at a time when such family duty was widely expected. However, many other impoverished lovers managed to marry and be happy, despite the times, including Dortchen’s own sisters.

  Many scholars think that Wilhelm was a confirmed bachelor, happy in his quiet life of scholarship with Jakob. Wilhelm’s diaries are filled with yearning, however. In September 1819, for example, he wrote: ‘I read aloud to Auguste Canitz [Herr Schmerfeld’s sister]. While I was reading Dortchen came and put a flower that she had been wearing on her bosom on the book. Perhaps that was by mistake.’

  I wondered what else might have kept them apart, and speculated that if Dortchen had indeed suffered abuse at the hands of her father, she may have had difficulty in trusting again. And so I built this novel by listening to the story within the stories that Dortchen told.

  In his autobiography, Wilhelm later wrote: ‘I have never ceased to thank God for the blessing and happiness of this marriage. I had known my wife ever since she was a child, and my mother loved her like one of her own, without ever guessing that one day she would be.’

  SOURCES OF THE GRIMMS’ STORIES

  The Grimm brothers never formally acknowledged the tellers of the fairy tales they collected for their first volume of Kinder-und-Hausmärchen, generally saying only ‘a story from Hesse’ or ‘a tale from the Main River’, and so on.

  However, Wilhelm did scribble notes in the margins of his copy of the first edition of the tales. Sometimes, it was simply a name: Dortchen; Gretchen; Marie; Frederike. More rarely, it included a date and the place in which he had heard the tale. For example, this is how we know that Dortchen Wild told him three extraordinary tales – ‘The Singing Bone’, ‘Six Swans’ and ‘Sweetheart Roland’ – on 19th January 1812, in her sister Hanne’s summer house in Nentershausen (which was fifty-four kilometres from Cassel, and would have been a day’s journey for Wilhelm in a hired carriage, along terrible roads).

  For many years, it was believed that the ‘Marie’ who told Wilhelm some of the most famous and beautiful of the tales was the Wild family’s housekeeper, Marie Müller, or ‘Old Marie’. Marie lived with the Wilds up until 1812, the year of the publication of the first volume.

  It was Herman Grimm, Wilhelm and Dortchen’s son, who had helped identify Old Marie as a key source of stories. He wrote in 1895:

  Dortchen also got her trove from another source. Above the Wilds’ nursery in the apothecary building, with its many hallways, stairways, floors and rear additions, through all of which I poked through myself as a child, was the realm of ‘Old Marie’ … One feels immediately that Dortchen and Gretchen only recounted what had been impressed upon them by Old Marie.

  Most early biographies of the Grimm brothers do not hesitate to credit Old Marie with telling such tales as ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘The Maiden With No Hands’ and ‘The Robber Bridegroom’.

  However, in 1980, a German scholar called Heinz Rölleke reissued the 1857 edition of the Kinder-und-Hausmärchen – the final and definitive version – with a new appendix in which he listed all the contributors and their tales. He removed Marie Müller’s name and replaced it with Marie Hassenpflug, Lotte Grimm’s sister-in-law. Rölleke had examined the Grimm brothers’ diaries and realised that, on many occasions, the brothers had been visiting the Hassenpflug household on the date on which those tales had been transcribed. Since the Hassenpflugs were of French descent, this also explained why so many of the stories told by the mysterious ‘Marie’ were versions of Charles Perrault’s well-known French tales.

  Most Grimm scholars now agree with Rölleke’s conclusions, and Old Marie is no longer credited as a key storyteller. Indeed, some go so far as to say that she never existed at all, and was invented to allow the Grimms to pretend that they had collected stories from old peasant women instead of young, well-educated, middle-class ladies.

  However, I am inclined to believe some, if not all, of Herman Grimm’s recollections of what his mother had told him. Someone told Dortchen a great many stories, and it seems unlikely to have been her mother, who only contributed two tales to the collection, both of them short and rather silly.

  So I have allowed Old Marie a place in this story, both as a warm and loving servant and as a teller of stories, spells and old superstitions. She tells Wilhelm two stories. The first, ‘Little Snow-White’, is now usually credited to Marie Hassenpflug. However, it is known that Jakob first sent a version of this tale to Karl von Savigny in 1808, a year before the Grimms met the Hassenpflugs. It is entirely possible, then, that it was Old Marie who told the tale.

  The second, ‘The Maiden With No Hands’, is thought to have been told by Marie Hassenpflug on 10th March 1811. However, I have given this terrible, heartbreaking story to Old Marie to tell, primarily for dramatic reasons, but also because it does not have a French source and is unlike any other stories told by the young, elegant and well-brought-up Marie Hassenpflug. Rölleke himself has admitted that Old Marie may have been the source of some of the stories.

  Another small liberty I have taken with known historical fact is allowing Dortchen to visit the Marburg storyteller in the poorhouse and transcribe two tales from her: ‘Aschenputtel’ and ‘The Golden Bird’. It is not known who transcribed these tales, although it was said to have been done with the help of the warden’s wife.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Writing The Wild Girl was intense, challenging and, at times, very difficult. The story worked its way into my dreams and gave me terrible nightmares. The opening scene with Dortchen dancing by herself in a snowy, twilit forest, with ravens flying over, was inspired by one of these dreams. Some of the darker scenes later in the book also came to me in my sleeping moments, and I had to force myself to write them as a form of exorcism, to rid myself of Dortchen’s terrors.

  Luckily for me, I have a very loving and supportive family, and they allowed me the space and time I needed to brood over this story and find its shape and rhythm. Particular thanks need
to be said to my long-suffering husband, Greg, and my children, Ben, Tim and Ella, for letting me go to Germany on my own to research this book, and for many burnt offerings in the place of dinner. I also need to thank my sister, Belinda, who gave me many books on German history, helped me with my shaky attempts at translation and let me talk about the book at any given opportunity.

  To my wonderful, tirelessly working agents – Tara Wynne at Curtis Brown Australia and Robert Kirby at United Agents in the UK – and to the fabulous team at Allison & Busby – Susie Dunlop, Lesley Crooks, Sara Magness, Chiara Priorelli and Sophie Robinson – I cannot thank you enough. Thank you also to Christina Griffiths, for designing the gorgeous cover.

  Most of the excerpts from the tales told by Dortchen Wild to Wilhelm Grimm were translated from the German by me, so any mistakes are all mine. At all times, I tried to draw upon the earliest known versions of the tales – those recorded in the 1808, 1810 and 1812 manuscripts – since these were closest to the original oral source. I am also grateful to the excellent fairy tale website at the University of Pittsburgh, found at www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm.html and run by the American folklorist and writer D.L. Ashliman, which contains many variants of the tales, including links to the German originals.

  I also need to thank Dr Cay Dollerup, the Danish fairy tale scholar, who wrote the definitive research on ‘Allerleirauh’ or ‘All-Kinds-of-Fur’ in A Case Study of Editorial Filters in Folktales: A Discussion of the ‘Allerleirauh’ Tales in Grimm, which examined in great depth the first version of the tale, told by Dortchen Wild to Wilhelm Grimm on 19th October 1812, only a few days before the typesetting of the first volume of Kinder-und-Hausmärchen. He was also kind enough to answer numerous questions via email, as did Professor Jack Zipes and Professor Ruth B. Bottigheimer.