by Maria Tatar
Few books have enjoyed the extraordinary popular appeal, critical acclaim, and commercial success of the Children’s Stories and Household Tales. With the Bible and Shakespeare, the Grimms’ collection ranks among the best-selling books of the Western world. “In an old-
fashioned household,” Baron Münchhausen reports, “Grimms’ fairy tales occupied a position midway between the cookbook and the hymnal,” and, as a celebrated teller of tall tales, he must surely have consulted it frequently. In 1944, even when the Allies were locked in combat with Germany, W. H. Auden decreed the Grimms’ collection to be “among the few indispensable, common-property books upon which Western culture can be founded.”
Today adults and children the world over read the Grimms’ tales in nearly every shape and form: illustrated or annotated, bowdlerized or abridged, faithful to the original German or fractured, parodied or treated with reverence. Considered timeless in content and universal in appeal, the stories have found their way into a variety of international media ranging from opera and ballet to film and advertising. Perpetually appropriated, adapted, revised, and rescripted, they have become a powerful form of cultural currency, widely accepted and in a state of rapid and constant circulation. There are the many operatic Bluebeards, the scores of dancing swan maidens, the countless cinematic Cinderellas, and vast numbers of Little Red Riding Hoods making their way through the woods of Madison Avenue ads.
The power of the Grimms’ cultural legacy—the role of their book as a childhood primer and storytelling archive used the world over—makes it all the more important to return to their project and take its measure. The stories they collected may have a German twist to them, but they capture anxieties and fantasies that have deep roots in childhood experience. In the imaginative world opened up by fairy tales, children escape the drab realities of everyday life to indulge in the cathartic pleasures of defeating those giants, ogres, monsters, and trolls also known as grown-ups. There they encounter and explore the great existential mysteries and profound enigmas of the adult world. What better tool, as the child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim has suggested, for learning how to navigate reality and for figuring out how to survive a world ruled by adults?
Long before Bettelheim analyzed the therapeutic value of the family conflicts in fairy tales, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin endorsed the way in which fairy tales teach children “to meet the forces of the mythical world with cunning and with high spirits.” If Bettelheim valued the “moral education” provided by the fairy tale, Benjamin intuitively recognized that the moral calculus of the fairy tale is not without its complications and complexities. Do we applaud Gretel when she shoves the witch into the oven? Should we cheer when Snow White’s wicked stepmother dances to her death in red-hot iron shoes? Should we laugh when Rumpelstiltskin tears himself in two? Does “happily ever after” include witnessing the bodily torture of fairy-tale villains?
Those who expect to find role models for children in fairy tales will be deeply disappointed. Parents will look in vain for so-called family values in stories that show us a widower wooing his daughter, a woman lacing up and suffocating her stepdaughter, and a father turning over his daughter to a greedy king. But these stories all meet one important requirement for a good children’s book: they show the triumph of the small and meek over the tall and powerful.
Through the lens of these traditional tales, even when they fail to meet today’s standards of political correctness, we can meditate on what these tales meant in times past and consider how they continue to resonate with the dramas of family life in our own day and age. Even if, and especially because, stories were told “once upon a time,” in another time and place, they can provide opportunities for reflecting on cultural differences, on what was once at stake in our life decisions and what is at stake today. While turning the pages of the Grimms’ Children’s Stories and Household Tales, we tune in to “once upon a time,” discovering in the drama of the written words our own anxieties and desires writ large.
In this volume, I have tried to capture the letter and the spirit of those written words and to let them speak for themselves. Yet because the tales come from long ago and far away, readers may appreciate introductions to a few of the tales, in particular the ones that have a global reach, migrating from one culture to another. As noted, magic happens in fairy tales, and that magic is both metamorphic and metaphorical. It transforms with its spells, promoting perpetual shape-shifting, but it also challenges us to find hidden meanings, the latent meaning lurking beneath the manifest content. “The Frog King” works out courtship anxieties in symbolic terms; “Little Red Riding Hood” is our cultural story about innocence and seduction; “The Fisherman and His Wife” tells us about the monstrosity of desire for power; “Hansel and Gretel” takes up primal fears about abandonment; and “Cinderella” is our rags-to-riches story about the underdog who makes good against all odds. These are stories worth pondering, and my hope is that the commentary below will resonate with readers to stimulate productive conversations about the Brothers Grimm and the stories that have become their cultural legacy to us all.
“THE FROG KING”
The Grimms led with the fairy tale about a princess and her frog suitor because they considered it to be among the oldest in their collection. It is also a story that yokes beauty and wonder in its very first paragraph: “The youngest [daughter] was so lovely that even the sun, which had seen so many things, was filled with wonder when it shone upon her face.” Some may see “The Frog King” as an odd choice for the opening fairy tale, especially since the hero of the title is disenchanted not by a kiss but through an act of violence: “The princess became really annoyed, picked up the frog, and threw him with all her might against the wall.” “The Frog King” seems to endorse defiance and passion—rather than the liberating act of compassion found in “Beauty and the Beast”—as the means of release from the spell cast by an evil witch. Set in a time “when wishes still come true” (literally when wishing “still helped”), the story of the Frog King also upholds the value of action.
A story about an erotically ambitious frog offers many opportunities for bawdy humor, and the Grimms, once they became aware of the social value of their collection, made certain that the princess and her disenchanted suitor do not retire for the night together, as they did in the earliest recorded version of the tale. Instead the two go straight to the king and request permission to marry. The Grimms also added lessons in etiquette and honesty. When the desperate princess refuses to let the frog in, her father reminds her about the importance of honoring promises. This first tale in the collection offers a perfect illustration of how the Grimms toned down and removed the sexual humor that had once entertained adults and added maxims with the hope of teaching children the importance of obedience.
Competing versions of this story were recorded in the Grimms’ annotations. One variant describes a bargain that has to do with the frog’s ability to transform the murky waters of a spring into clear water. Two haughty sisters spurn the frog’s offer, while the third and youngest of the trio accepts the offer of clear water in exchange for love and affection. When the frog arrives at the princess’s doorstep, she reminds herself of her promise and lets him in. The creature sleeps under the princess’s pillow, and this symbolic demonstration of devotion releases him from the spell. Another version adds a sequel to the story that charts the fortunes of the prince, who marries a false bride and is liberated from her when the true princess, disguised as a man, rides behind the coach of her beloved. Loud cracking noises catch the attention of the prince, who discovers his true bride when she tells him that the sounds are made when the bands around her heart start to break. We can see here a clear parallel to the episode about Faithful Henry in “The Frog King”—he too is liberated once his master is disenchanted.
The Scottish “Well at the World’s End” was noted by the Grimms as a close folkloric cousin of “The Frog Kin
g.” They quoted its refrain, which bears some resemblance to the verse in their story:
Open the door, my hinny, my hart.
Open the door, mine ain wee thing;
And mind the words that you and I spak
Down in the meadow, at the well-spring.
“LITTLE RED RIDING HOOD”
“Little Red Riding Hood was my first love,” Charles Dickens once confessed. “I felt that if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood, I should have known perfect bliss.” Dickens was most likely familiar with the Grimms’ version of the tale and not the tale once told around the fireside by adults to a multigenerational audience. That tale featured a trickster heroine who did not have to rely on a hunter to liberate her. “The Story of Grandmother,” a French version of “Little Red Riding Hood” that reaches back several centuries, shows the not-so-innocent heroine eating the flesh and blood of her grandmother, performing a striptease for the wolf, and then asking to go outside to relieve herself before getting in bed with the wolf. Once outdoors, the girl runs back home, outwitting the Gallic predator.
Charles Perrault published the first literary version of “Little Red Riding Hood” in his Tales of Mother Goose in 1697. His “wicked wolf” throws himself on the girl and gobbles her up before she can escape. His Little Red Cap never emerges from the belly of the wolf. The Grimms, well aware of a competing version of “Little Red Riding Hood” in France, created a heroine who, once rescued by a hunter, vows never to disobey her mother.
Both Perrault and the Grimms worked hard to excise the ribald grotesqueries of the original peasant tales. They rescripted the events to produce a cautionary tale that accommodated a variety of lessons about vanity and idleness. Little Red Riding Hood has a “good time” gathering nuts, chasing butterflies, and picking flowers, and it is not by chance that the pleasure-seeking girl falls into the hands of a savage wolf. The Grimms’ version erased all traces of the playfulness in oral versions and placed the action in the service of teaching lessons to the child inside and outside the book.
Critics of this story have played fast and loose with its elements, displaying boundless confidence in interpretive pronouncements that cast the wolf as an allegorical figure representing night and winter, as a beast suffering pregnancy envy, and (during the Third Reich in Germany) as a rapacious Jew. To be sure, the tale itself, by depicting the conflict between a weak, vulnerable protagonist and a fierce, powerful antagonist, lends itself to a certain interpretive elasticity. But the multiple interpretations do not inspire confidence, with some critics reading the story as a parable of rape, others as a blueprint for female development, and still others as a seasonal allegory.
“Little Red Riding Hood” taps into many childhood anxieties, but especially into one that psychoanalysts call the dread of being devoured. If some children find Perrault and the Brothers Grimm too violent, others will squeal with delight when the wolf devours the girl. And for those who are irritated by Little Red Riding Hood’s failure to perceive that the creature lying in her grandmother’s bed is a wolf, James Thurber’s “The Little Girl and the Wolf” and Roald Dahl’s “Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf” (in Revolting Rhymes) are healthy antidotes to the traditional tale. In Thurber’s version, we learn that “a wolf does not look any more like your grandmother than the Metro-Goldwyn lion looks like Calvin Coolidge.” The girl takes out an automatic and shoots the wolf dead. “It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be,” Thurber concludes in the moral appended to the tale. And Roald Dahl’s Little Red Riding Hood “whips a pistol from her knickers.” In a matter of weeks, she is sporting a “lovely furry wolfskin coat.”
Cinematic adaptations have moved in many different directions, from Neil Jordan’s In the Company of Wolves (1985), based on a story by the British novelist Angela Carter, to Matthew Bright’s Freeway (1996), but they unfailingly emphasize the erotic elements in the story. Oddly, the sweet, innocent heroine of the Grimms’ story has come to figure in our culture as a seductively alluring young woman who has been recruited to sell everything from rental cars and Pepsi to Max Factor lipstick and Chanel perfume.
“THE FISHERMAN AND HIS WIFE”
In The Thousand and One Nights, there is a story called “The Fisherman and the Genie.” It tells of an impoverished fisherman who casts his net into the sea three times, catching worthless objects on each occasion. On his fourth try, he brings up a copper jar containing a genie who threatens to kill him, despite the fisherman’s pleas for mercy. The fisherman manages to outwit the genie and to put him back into the jar.
The Grimms’ story may well have been inspired by the tale from the Orient. The painter Philipp Otto Runge sent the story to the Grimms in 1809, and they decided to include it in their collection as an example of an authentic folktale (it was written down in plattdeutsch, a Low German dialect). Like “The Fisherman and the Genie,” the Grimms’ tale presents a series of repetitive events leading up to a climactic moment in which the supernatural manifests itself. In “The Fisherman and His Wife,” we have a cumulative tale, one that repeats and intensifies requests until finally the wrath of the heavens returns the fisherman’s wife to her original social and domestic misery.
Magic may be present in the tale—wishes are repeatedly fulfilled no matter how outrageous they may be—but the story fails to end with the social elevation usually found in fairy tales. Instead there is a cautionary lesson about the importance of remaining satisfied with your station in life, an idea that runs counter to the spirit of the utopian fantasies in fairy tales. The fisherman’s wife, with her unbridled ambition, offers an example of the monstrosity of greed but also of feminine power. She stands in sharp contrast to her patient, long-suffering husband, who is satisfied with modest improvements to his life.
In their annotations, the Grimms pointed to the existence of multiple versions in which both husband and wife indulge in excess. One variant features a couple named Domine and Dinderlinde, who aspire to become God and the mother of God. Despite complaints from colleagues that this particular tale was not really a fairy tale for children, the Grimms kept “The Fisherman and His Wife” in their collection, for it represented to them a consummate example of folk poetry.
“HANSEL AND GRETEL”
Set in a time of famine, “Hansel and Gretel” belongs to a class of tales designated by folklorists as “The Children and the Ogre.” Addressing anxieties about starvation, abandonment, and being devoured, it shows two children joining forces to defeat the monsters at home and in the woods. Like Jack, Tom Thumb, or Finette Cendron, Hansel and Gretel enter the abode of a monster and succeed in turning the tables on their bloodthirsty antagonist. They return home with material goods in the form of jewels or gold.
Sibling solidarity is rare in fairy tales (same-sex siblings are nearly always rivals), and “Hansel and Gretel” is unique in displaying the advantages of cooperating to defeat a villain. Hansel may take the lead at the beginning of the tale, soothing Gretel’s fears and using his wits to find a way back home, but Gretel outsmarts the witch, tricking her into entering the oven.
The two siblings in the Grimms’ version of the “The Children and the Ogre” may seem somewhat restrained and pious for modern sensibilities, but they were youthful insurgents by nineteenth-century standards, eavesdropping on the parents’ nighttime conversations, deploying a ruse to get back home, greedily feasting on the house of the witch, and running off with the witch’s hoard of jewels after Gretel pushes her into the oven. Determined to find a way back home, Hansel and Gretel together survive what children fear more than anything else: abandonment by parents and exposure to monstrous predators.
Stepmothers are the chief villains in the Grimms’ collection, and “Hansel and Gretel” is no exception to that rule. In the Grimms’ story, the stepmother is eager to take the children out into the woods (“we’ll be rid of them”), while the father is upset by
the idea of leaving the children to starve (“Who would have the heart to leave those children all alone in the woods?”). In “Tom Thumb,” a French analogue in Charles Perrault’s Tales of Mother Goose, it is a cruel giant who plots to abandon the children, and their mother pleads with her heartless husband to keep the children at home, even if it means watching them starve to death. The gender of the villain out in the woods seems determined by the gender of the evil parent at home: the children in “Hansel and Gretel” match wits with a witch, while Tom Thumb battles a male ogre. If home is the site of poverty, lack, and scarce resources, the home of the villain offers food in excess. The witch’s house has a cake roof and windows of sugar, and the witch serves the children “milk and pancakes, with sugar, apples, and nuts.” The challenge for the youthful protagonists is to transfer the wealth of the villain to their own home, ensuring a happy ending that reunites the children with their father (whose wife has died). Both Hansel and Gretel return home and enable their father to live happily ever after in wealth and abundance.
In Engelbert Humperdinck’s 1893 operatic version of the story, the children neglect their chores and are sent into the woods to collect berries. There they help themselves to pieces of a house made of gingerbread and are captured by a witch who wields both a rope and a wand. Both children push the witch into the oven and use the witch’s wand to lift a spell placed on the many children who had been turned into gingerbread by the witch. Steven Spielberg’s film Jurassic Park, with its two siblings pursued by hungry female dinosaurs and its brainy girl who saves the day with her programming skills, has been seen as a modern version of “Hansel and Gretel.” Although the story has not been recycled as frequently as, say, “Little Red Riding Hood” or “Cinderella,” it has much potential as a story of fortitude, resilience, and resourcefulness in the face of daunting threats.