The Grimm Reader

by Maria Tatar

  I am not sure how much good is done by moralizing about fairy tales. This can be unsubtle—telling children that virtue will be rewarded, when in fact it is mostly simply the fact of being the central character that ensures a favorable outcome. Fairy tales are not—on the whole—parables. The king’s three sons in “The Three Feathers” have nothing in common with Christ’s succinct parable of the talents, where both psychology and morals are precise about what the three servants do with what they are given.

  Psychoanalysts have revealed some of the ways in which the tales represent our secret fears and preoccupations—from being devoured to having a mother or stepmother who either starves you or stuffs you with food in order to eat you up. But all too easily psychoanalytic criticism can become overdetermined, constraining, and limiting. Bruno Bettelheim turns the tales into dream-imagery and paradigms of what he sees as essential sexual development. I remember being very excited by the idea that Sleeping Beauty represents the teenage laziness of the latency period, as also by the idea that the pricked finger represents either menstrual bleeding or a symbolic defloration. It is possible for a good modern writer to use those images in those contexts. But it somehow diminishes the compact, satisfactory nature of the tale itself to gloss it in this way. It takes away, not deepens, its mystery. In the same way many modern feminist defenses of the witch against the docile daughter (Snow White, for instance) take apart the form of the tale and leave us with not very much. It is interesting, as Maria Tatar suggests, how little attention has been paid to resourceful heroines, or suffering heroes, in revisionist criticism. We are overinfluenced by Disney—the great witch in Snow White, the saccharine heroine-doll. And I at least feel manipulated when modern films too obviously try to make contrary energetic heroines. Keats deprecated poetry that had a design on you. One of the true qualities of the real fairy tale is that it does not.

  Writers have always used the forms of the fairy tale—if my idea that they form, or until recently formed, the narrative grammar of our minds is correct, writers must have done. The happy endings of fairy tales underpin the comedies of Shakespeare—we have the comfortable sense that tribulations will result in safety and reconciliation. The absence of those things is an intensifying part of the horror of King Lear, which could have ended differently. There is a layer of most nineteenth-century novels that is pulling with, or against, the fairy-tale paradigm. Mansfield Park is “Cinderella.” Middlemarch contrasts the diligent and lazy daughters, the white and red of warmth and cold, and pulls against the paradigm with gritty moral realism. Witches and dwarves, ogres and wolves, lurk in Dickens and Hawthorne. Elizabeth Gaskell reunited the fairy-tale characters in a fantasy French chateau, in a tale of her own, and also played realist narrative games with stepmother and daughters in Wives and Daughters. Both Günter Grass and Virginia Woolf use the tale of “The Fisherman and His Wife.” In Woolf’s case, particularly, one of the novelist’s purposes is to show that there is more than one way of telling the world, of imagining ambition and danger and safety.

  In recent times Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie both claimed that there was more energy in the old tales than in the recent social realism. Carter made a glittering fantasy world of her own in which wolves and woodcutters, beauties and beasts, Bluebeard and his butchered wives, made new-old patterns. When she came to edit The Virago Book of Fairy Tales she had become suspicious of the popular culture and the social forms that underlay the old stories. She said that even in Perrault’s day there was a sense that popular culture belonged to the past, “even perhaps, that it ought to belong to the past, where it posed no threat, and I am saddened to discover that I subscribe to this feeling too; but this time it might just be true.”

  Terry Pratchett too—a fantasist who both invents otherworlds and observes their limitations from outside them—writes the old stories into his plots in order to criticize their unthinking narrative constrictions. Godmothers and witches and princesses and frogs and woodcutters can and should be free to behave differently. We should beware of what stories can do to the way we put the world together. We live in a world very far from woods, castles, and gibbets. We live in a world of urban myths—alligators in sewers, grandmothers on car roofs, and as Diane Purkiss has suggested, a burgeoning virtual world of gossip and storytelling, real and fantastic, on the Web.

  But we continue to love and need the Grimms’ tales, and to be curious about where they came from, what they mean. Maria Tatar is the most exciting scholar I have read on this subject. Her Norton Critical Edition of The Classic Fairy Tales—variants old and new, authored and traditional, of six great tales—is full of wit, information, and unexpected revelations. Her book The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales is a profound and gripping exploration of the darker aspects of the Grimms’ tales—sex and violence, eating and being eaten, ogres and monsters, victims and cruel stepmothers, husbands and enchanters. Her attitude to our taste for these things—as children and as adults—is wise and complex. She is a true scholar, who writes beautifully, not a theorist making use of the material for her own ends. Her new translation of the Grimms is clear, full of life, and enticing. This collection contains the essential favorites, from “Rapunzel” and “Hansel and Gretel” to “Snow White” and “Rumpelstiltskin” by way of “Cinderella” and “The Frog King.” It also contains slightly less well-known stories which I found even more magical as a child because I hadn’t been told them—“Mother Holle,” “The Worn-Out Dancing Shoes,” “Snow White and Rose Red.” And tales many people may not know before they venture into the world of this book—“The Golden Key” and the unforgettable “A Fairy Tale about a Boy Who Left Home to Learn about Fear.” Maria Tatar has a rare combination of steady good sense and an infinite taste for the uncanny and the marvelous. This book is a delight for the story-hungry and the curious and intelligent together.

  READING THE BROTHERS GRIMM

  onders and marvels tumble thick and fast through the fairy-tale worlds of the Brothers Grimm. There you will find shoreless seas, mountains of glass, and stars that fall down to earth as silver coins. In the glittering, luminous landscapes of the fairy-tale world, there may be a brighter and more colorful Elsewhere, but monsters, ogres, and witches dart about too, contemplating their next meal. Danger lurks in the dark woods and also at home. Cruel stepmothers chop up children and serve them in a stew. Homicidal husbands hang their dead wives on the walls of dark chambers. Crazed widowers propose marriage to their own daughters.

  I first encountered the Brothers Grimm as a child, through an illustrated volume that was completely impenetrable because it was in German—in an exotic, otherworldly Gothic print. But the images in the book spoke volumes, and their alternating racing energy and narcotic beauty kept them alive for me for several decades. I returned to the Grimms long after that volume was nothing more than a dim childhood memory, trying to make sense of the stories as a parent and as a scholar in the field of German studies. In The Annotated Brothers Grimm, I translated the tales, studied their origins and cultural surround, and provided commentary for those new to the collection. Some readers, I discovered, preferred the tales unencumbered by introductions and annotations—raw rather than cooked at the fires of the academic hearth. Encouraged by my editor Bob Weil at W. W. Norton, I have collected these stories in a smaller format, adorned by nothing more than the delicately executed drawings that Walter Crane created for his sister Lucy’s translation of the Grimms’ Household Tales. Readers will find here a hotline to stories that hiss and crackle with narrative energy, to narratives that have migrated from nineteenth-century Germany to other times and places.

  The Grimms’ fairy tales have never lost their native magic, even when they have been transculturated as well as translated. Magic happens in nearly every one of these tales, but the real wonder is that no one ever feels the slightest shock. A girl meets a wolf in the woods and is not at all astonished when he engages in a conversation about her grandmother. A d
onkey spits gold pieces, and witnesses are delighted but not at all dumbfounded. A queen breaks the spell that turned her brothers into ravens by sewing a magic spell into shirts she has woven for them, and they all rejoice when reunited without any sense that the numinous has entered their lives.

  “Fairy tales can come true.” The old saw reminds us that these stories turn not only on magic but also on wish fulfillment, on the “happily ever after” that is the signature of the genre. The ambitions of Cinderella, Jack, Hans, Rapunzel, or Snow White are at times modest, at times outlandish. The characters may aspire to a princess or a prince and half a kingdom, but at least one, like the boy who leaves home to learn about fear, is happiest when he finally learns how to get the creeps. Wish fulfillment in fairy tales, as the French historian Robert Darnton points out, often turns into a “program for survival, not a fantasy for escape.” Sometimes a square meal or a large hunk of gingerbread is all you need to save the day. For others, like the woman in “The Fisherman and His Wife,” the satisfaction of desires produces only displeasure and new desires, and the happy ending comes in the form of being content with your lot in life.

  The rainbow promise of “happily ever after” remains at the heart of fairy tales, and it goes beyond the standard run of kingdoms and castles. Wealth, power, and romance are made real in the tangible form of metals and precious stones, in the shape of crowns, scepters, and thrones, and in the person of princesses wearing glittering gowns or princes with golden hair. “Shake your branches, little tree / Toss gold and silver down on me,” Cinderella chants in the Grimms’ version of the tale, and a bird tosses down a dress that allows her to “dazzle” everyone. In “The Worn-out Dancing Shoes,” there is one avenue of trees with leaves of gold, another with leaves of silver, and a third with leaves of diamonds. Furrypelts wins the heart of a king with a golden ring, a golden spinning wheel, and a golden bobbin cooked in a bread soup while exiled in the kitchen.

  We are in the realm of radiant illumination—light effects that enable us to feel the shock effect of beauty and that kindle our imagination, allowing us to enter into the utopian delights of fairy-tale worlds. But without darkness there is no light, and the abstract glow of fairy-tale beauty is always set against the high-wattage intensity of horror. The Grimms’ fairy tales are astonishingly graphic when it comes to horror, picturing it with a degree of specificity absent from descriptions of beauty. Instead of darkness and the absence of light, we get morbid anatomical detail. We do not need many cues to imagine beauty and its spiritual uplift, but our minds seem to hanker for clear instructions when it comes to imagining the materiality of violence and horror.

  The Grimms’ collection does not fail to deliver on the promise of horror and its attendant direct visceral hits. The bandits in “The Robber Bridegroom” drag a girl into their underground lair and force her to drink wine until her heart bursts. That scene is a prelude to even more hair-raising behavior: “The robbers tore off her fine clothes, put her on the table, chopped her beautiful body into pieces, and sprinkled them with salt.” A false bride from another tale pronounces a punishment that is carried out on her own body: “She deserves to be stripped naked and put into a barrel studded on the inside with sharp nails. Then two white horses should be harnessed up to the barrel and made to drag it through the streets until she is dead.” The boy in “The Juniper Tree” fares no better. He bends down to get an apple from a chest, and his stepmother slams the lid down so hard “that the boy’s head flew off and fell into the chest with the apples.” The woman then takes the boy, chops him up, puts the pieces into a pot, and cooks them in a stew. Salt comes from the tears of his sister, who was duped into thinking that she had decapitated her brother.

  The unsparing savagery of stories like “The Robber Bridegroom” is a sharp reminder that fairy tales belong to the childhood of culture as much as to the culture of childhood. These stories had their origins in preliterate times, serving much the same function that print and electronic entertainments have today. Enlivening the evening hours long before the invention of books, newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and film, they not only passed the time but also passed along experience and advice, what the philosopher Walter Benjamin has described as the “wisdom of the story.” Gossip, news, stories: these narratives all shortened the time devoted to mending, sewing, spinning, and repairing tools, the myriad repetitive household chores that required physical concentration but left the mind open to wander and daydream.

  A good storyteller can create plots alive with kinetic energy. Little Red Riding Hood, in early versions of her story, was not always an innocent who strays from the path. In French tales told by peasants, she is a seductive young woman who performs a striptease before the wolf and provides a detailed inventory of the items of clothing removed. Sometimes she is swallowed up whole never to be rescued; sometimes she tricks the wolf into liberating her. Rapunzel’s daily romps up in the tower with the prince are directly connected to her pregnancy and banishment from the tower in early versions of the tale. And Cinderella’s stepsisters, in the version still told to German children today, cut off their toes and heels in an effort to make the slipper fit. Doves chant: “Roo coo coo, roo coo coo, blood is dripping from the shoe.” Those same doves later peck out the eyes of the two stepsisters as they enter and depart the church in which Cinderella celebrates her marriage.

  When Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, born in 1785 and in 1786 in the town of Hanau near Frankfurt am Main, embarked on the project of collecting German folklore, they had in mind a scholarly project that would preserve oral storytelling traditions increasingly threatened by urbanization, industrialization, and rising literacy rates. Hoping to preserve the “pure” voice of the German people and to conserve an oracular form of what they called Naturpoesie (the poetry of nature), they described in the preface to the collection the sites at which the tales had been told: “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 [folk songs and household tales] and passing them on to one generation after another.”

  The Grimms did not reveal much about their sources until 1815, when the second volume of the collection appeared. In that second installment, they praised the storytelling gifts of a “peasant woman” from the village of Zwehrn near Kassel and attributed many of the tales to her. Dorothea Viehmann, as it turns out, was neither a peasant nor a saintly innocent who could channel German Naturpoesie. The wife of a tailor, she was of Huguenot descent and was probably more familiar with French contes de fées than with German Märchen (fairy tales). Still, she remained the star witness for the authenticity of the collection, and her portrait graced its second edition.

  Old myths die hard, and the notion that the Grimms’ informants were cheerful peasants and unlettered folk raconteurs who told their tales to entertain children and stimulate their imaginations has a powerful cultural tenacity. In reality, many of the storytellers from whom the Grimms acquired tales were from their own immediate social circle: members of the Wild family, the Hassenpflugs, and the Haxthausens. There were to be sure many other sources, both literary and personal, and there were also ordinary people who happened to be gifted with the power to recall, retell, or reconstruct traditional tales. Among them were men who did not fit the stereotype of a Mother Goose figure. The retired military man, Johann Friedrich Krause, for example, told the Grimms stories in exchange for old clothes.

  Scholars have sought now for decades to identify the sources of the Grimms’ stories—to go back to fairy tales before their codification in national collections—and to define exactly when these tales were first told and how they were transmitted. By the time that the Brothers Grimm were collecting what they called children’s stories and household tales (Kinder- und Hausmärchen), the narratives existed already in multiple regional variations. Some were literary and some were
oral, and in many cases the Grimms acknowledged French, Italian, or Scandinavian cognates. To be sure, they wanted to preserve “German poetry,” and they believed the tales to be part of an important cultural heritage. But they also recognized that the collection was part of a vast fund of popular culture, with tales circulating the world over in different versions and ceaselessly migrating into different literary genres (fables, sermons, chapbooks, and novels). It may be possible to identify a first print version, but that version most likely derived from undocumented oral sources.

  National pride and scholarly ambition may have inspired the Grimms as they were putting together their anthology. Once the stories were in print, the brothers prided themselves on having created a cultural archive of German folklore. Reviewers, oddly, focused less on scholarly accuracy and importance than on the literary value of the stories. One early critic grumbled about the vast amounts of “tasteless” and “dismal” material in the collection and urged parents to keep the volume out of the hands of children. Two academics were disturbed by the raw tone of the folktales and recommended a bit of artifice to make them more appealing and “natural.” Over the years, the brothers added some stories and deleted others. More important, they made stylistic improvements, almost all in the name of making the volume more child- and parent-friendly.

  For the second of the seven editions published in the Grimms’ lifetime, Wilhelm Grimm polished the prose so carefully that no one could complain about stylistic lapses. Some of the tales grew to double their original length, in part to create a smooth narrative untroubled by abrupt lapses in logic, run-on sentences, and stylistic idiosyncrasies in written transcriptions of oral narratives. What had originally been designed as documents for scholars gradually turned into bedtime reading for children. As early as 1815, Jacob Grimm recognized that there was a real market for a collection oriented toward children as implied readers. To his brother he wrote that the two of them would have to confer closely about the second edition of the “children’s tales,” and he expressed high hopes for strong sales of that revised version of the Children’s Stories and Household Tales.