by Maria Tatar
For the Grimms, the fairy tales published in 1812 and 1815 represented the “last echoes of ancient myths.” These stories belonged to a pagan past, and it was the duty of scholars everywhere to preserve what had been passed down from one generation to the next as faithfully as possible. “In the fairy tales,” Wilhelm Grimm wrote in his preface to a collection of Danish ballads, “a world of magic is opened up before us, one which still exists among us in secret forests, in underground caves, and in the deepest sea, and it is still visible to children. . . . [These fairy tales] belong to our national poetic heritage, since it can be proved that they have existed among the people for several centuries.” What attracted the Grimms to folklore was not only its historical value but also its poetic core. The ancient myths and modern fairy tales captured existential mysteries and truths higher than those articulated by philosophers and scholars.
The year 1813 witnessed the end of French occupation, and in the following year Jacob was appointed to the Hessian Peace Delegation and spent time in the diplomatic service in both Paris and Vienna. After the peace treaties were signed, Jacob returned home and joined Wilhelm as librarian in the Royal Library in Kassel. For more than a decade the Grimms worked side by side, pursuing their scholarly mission, publishing massive volumes with such titles as German Legends, German Grammar, Ancient German Law, and German Heroic Legends. Jacob Grimm’s German Grammar alone took up 3,854 pages. These were the years that Jacob was to refer to as “the quietest, most industrious, and perhaps also the most fruitful period” of his life.
But much as the brothers are often idealized as scholarly soul mates who labored side by side to produce extraordinarily learned tomes, their relationship was not without friction. In 1822 Wilhelm wrote to his friend Achim von Arnim about Jacob’s temperament, explaining why his brother was not suited for an academic post: “He has neither the desire nor the composure for communicating and presenting in class. In fact he is generally both excited and belligerent and is therefore not well suited for communal activities where each person has his place. He tends by nature to engage in criticism, and he has nurtured this tendency, so that he always sees the worst side of things first. . . . I often worry about this condition, but then he is also extremely sensitive, often believing that he has been abandoned or neglected. He acts unhappy about that, but in fact he is the one who alienates people with his testy nature.” The less industrious of the two brothers, Wilhelm conceded that he had few real scholarly ambitions and that he had spent most of his life “submitting” to his brother’s will in things.
Jacob remained a bachelor his entire life. In 1825 Wilhelm married Dorothea Wild, the daughter of a pharmacist in Kassel and the great-granddaughter of a famous philologist. Wilhelm considered the marriage “God’s best blessing.” The brothers lived in the same household and continued as librarians until 1829, when the first librarian of the Royal Library died and the elector of Kassel failed to appoint either of the two to the vacant post. The elector, who had greeted a copy of the first volume of Jacob’s German Grammar with the observation that he hoped the author was not neglecting his official duties, turned down the Grimms’ applications for the promotion. Jacob and Wilhelm resigned their positions and traveled to Göttingen, where Jacob accepted a post as professor of German linguistics and law and as head librarian, and where Wilhelm was appointed librarian and then professor. The university library in Göttingen had the largest and finest collection in Hesse, and it became the first lending library in Germany. The elector is said to have remarked on the Grimms’ departure: “So the Grimms are leaving. What a loss! They have never done anything for me.” But within a matter of weeks, he began to understand the real loss in prestige his kingdom had suffered, and he made a belated offer to the Grimms, who had by then already committed themselves to the move to Göttingen.
In 1837 King Ernst August II succeeded to the throne of Hannover and made it his first duty of business to dissolve parliament and to revoke the constitution of 1833. All civil servants were required to swear a personal oath of allegiance. The Grimms, along with five other renowned professors, signed a protest document in which they reaffirmed their loyalty to the constitution of 1833 and rejected the notion that the king could revoke it. All seven were dismissed from their posts just a few weeks later, and three of the professors, among them Jacob Grimm, were ordered to leave the kingdom within three days or go to prison. The “Göttingen Seven,” as the dissident professors were called, became renowned for their protest against tyranny. In a public address to students and professors, Jacob cited Martin Luther: “The freedom of Christian men must give us the courage to resist our ruler if it turns out that he acts against the spirit of God and if he offends human rights.” Forced into exile, Jacob was obliged to leave Göttingen. “It is not the arm of justice but sheer power that forced me to leave the country,” Jacob wrote in an essay on his dismissal from the university. Still, the majority of the Grimms’ university colleagues sided with the monarch and offered no resistance to the royal decrees. The protest marked a real watershed in the lives of the Grimms, for, at the time, their stand was not considered at all heroic by many. Savigny, for example, remained on cordial terms with the Grimms, but his refusal to endorse their actions carried with it a silent reproach. There were efforts to raise money on behalf of the brothers, but there were also many who blamed the seven professors for the academic troubles that plagued Göttingen in the years following the protest. The king of Hannover remained untroubled by his actions, famously remarking that all you needed was money to secure the services of “dancers, whores, and professors.”
Wilhelm Grimm soon joined Jacob in Kassel, where the brothers both received a warm reception. But with no secure source of income, they had to rely on occasional earnings and on friends. Still, the Grimms managed to continue their scholarly efforts, launching the German Dictionary, the German equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary. In 1838 they announced their venture in a newspaper published in Leipzig: “It is one of the gifts of human nature to be able to discover sweetness in what is bitter and to find fruit in privation. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, assailed at the same time by the same fate, after a long and fruitless wait for a German state to appoint them to some post, have found the courage to assure and strengthen their future. They are undertaking a great German Dictionary . . . which will contain the vast wealth of our fatherland’s language from Luther to Goethe.” The vast enterprise demanded an extraordinary commitment to labors that were exacting and often tedious—“words seemed to emerge from every nook and cranny.” At times they seemed engaged in an effort that required, as they themselves put it, the focused concentration and Herculean effort of chopping wood for the better part of the day.
In 1840 the king of Prussia offered the brothers a generous stipend at the University of Berlin and at the Academy of Sciences, where they were to continue work on their dictionary. “The king’s generosity,” Jacob observed, “will allow us the leisure needed to complete our task.” The brothers moved with Dorothea and the three children to more capacious living quarters in the Prussian capital.
During the Revolution of 1848, Jacob Grimm was elected to parliament, but hopes for reform dwindled as the Grimms watched one compromise after another erode the possibility of democratic rule. The brothers retired from active politics, and Jacob retired from his academic position in 1848, with Wilhelm following his example four years later. In the remaining years of their lives, they continued work on their monumental German Dictionary, getting as far as the letter F and the word Frucht (“fruit”).
With so many projects containing the term Deutsch (“German”/“Germanic”) in the title, the Grimms could easily be seen as promoting nationalistic aims. Yet the brothers’ preoccupation with Germanic traditions was less symptomatic of chauvinistic zeal than of an effort to mobilize linguistics, history, and folklore to understand a culture. In many ways, the Grimms were more cosmopolitan than nationalistic, for they
were always eager to use a comparative approach to identify cultural differences and what gave rise to them. Wilhelm Grimm studied Danish ballads, songs, and folktales, in addition to translating Scottish songs. Jacob translated Reynard the Fox and compared Low German, French, Dutch, and Latin variants of the epic. The brothers collaborated on a translation of The Elder Edda and on Old French and Old English epics and romances. Their correspondents included Sir Walter Scott in Scotland, the translator Edgar Taylor in England, the Norwegian folklorists Peter Christian Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, and the folklorist Alexander Afanasev in Russia.
In 1859 Wilhelm Grimm died at age seventy-three of complications from heart and liver ailments. In his eulogy, Jacob referred to his brother as the Märchenbruder, or fairy-tale brother, suggesting that he was both the ideal brother and also the brother who had done the lion’s share of the work on the Children’s Stories and Household Tales. Jacob continued work on the German Dictionary, at times writing in bed, with a pillow propping him up. He died four years later in 1863. At the request of the brothers, their tombstones in Berlin bear the simple inscriptions “Here lies Wilhelm Grimm” and “Here lies Jacob Grimm.”
PREFACE TO VOLUME I OF THE FIRST EDITION OF CHILDREN’S STORIES AND HOUSEHOLD TALES
hen a storm or some other calamity from the heavens destroys an entire crop, it is reassuring to find that a small spot on a path lined by hedges or bushes has been spared and that a few stalks, at least, remain standing. If the sun favors them with light, they continue to grow, alone and unobserved, and no scythe comes along to cut them down prematurely for vast storage bins. But near the end of the summer, once they have ripened and become full, poor devout hands seek them out; ear upon ear, carefully bound and esteemed more highly than entire sheaves, they are brought home, and for the entire winter they provide nourishment, perhaps the only seed for the future. That is how it all seems to us when we review the riches of German poetry from earlier times and discover that nothing of it has been kept alive. Even the memory of it is lost—folk songs and these innocent household tales are all that remain. 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 them and passing them on from one generation to the next. These are our thoughts after surveying this collection. At first we were convinced that much had been lost in this area too, and that the only tales still left were the ones we already knew, which others tell in different forms (as is always the case). But ever on the watch for everything that still remains of this poetry, we also wanted to get to know these different versions, and much that was new came to light unexpectedly. Even though we were not able to make broad inquiries, our collection grew so much from year to year that now, after some six years have passed, it seems rich to us. We realize, of course, that we may still be missing a great deal, but we are also gratified by the thought that we have the most and the best of the lot. Everything has been collected, with a few exceptions as noted, from oral traditions in Hessen and in the Main and Kinzig regions of the Duchy of Hanau, from where we hail. For that reason, we have happy memories about every single tale. Few books have been produced with so much pleasure, and we are delighted to thank publicly all those who had a part in it.
It is probably just the right time to gather these tales, since those who have been making an effort to preserve them are becoming ever harder to find (to be sure, those who know them still know a great deal, because people may die, but the stories live on). The custom of telling tales is, however, on the wane, just as all the cozy corners in homes and gardens are giving way to an empty splendor that resembles the smile with which one speaks of these tales—a smile that looks elegant but costs so little. Where the tales still exist, they live on and no one worries about whether they are good or bad, poetic or vulgar. We know them and we love them just because we happen to have heard them in a certain way, and we like them without reflecting on why. Telling these tales is an extraordinary custom—and this too the tales share with everything immortal—that one must like it no matter what others say. At any rate, one quickly discovers that the custom persists only in places where there is a warm openness to poetry or where there are imaginations not yet deformed by the perversities of modern life. In that very spirit, we do not intend to praise these tales or even to defend them against opposing views: their very existence suffices to protect them. Anything that has succeeded in bringing so much pleasure so often, and has at the same time inspired and instructed, carries its own inner justification and must have issued from the eternal wellspring that bedews all life, even if it is only a single drop enclosed by a small, protective leaf, yet shimmering in the rosy dawn.
These stories are suffused with the same purity that makes children appear so wondrous and blessed to us: they have the same bluish white, flawless, shining eyes (that small children so love to grab at),1 which are as big as they will ever get, even as other parts of the body remain delicate, weak, and awkward for use on earth. Most of the events in these stories are so basic that many readers will have encountered them in real life, but, like all things true to life, they appear fresh and moving. Parents have no food left, and, as a result, have to cast out their children, or a hardhearted stepmother makes them suffer2 and would like to see them die. Or siblings find themselves all alone in the woods, the wind frightens them, they are afraid of wild animals, but they stand by each other with the loyalty you would expect. Little Brother knows how to find his way back home again, or, if he has been bewitched, Little Sister leads him around in the form of a fawn and collects greens and mosses for his bed; or she sits silently and sews him a shirt of star flowers to break a magic spell. The entire range of this world is clearly defined: kings, princes, faithful servants and honest tradesmen, above all fishermen, millers, colliers, and herdsmen (those who have stayed close to nature) make an appearance; everything else is alien and unknown to that world. As in myths that tell of a golden age, all of nature is alive; the sun, the moon, and the stars are approachable, give gifts, and can even be woven into gowns; dwarfs mine metals in the mountains; mermaids leap in the water; birds (doves are the most beloved and the most helpful), plants, and stones all speak and know just how to express their sympathy; even blood can call out and say things. This poetry exercises certain rights that later storytelling can only strive to express through metaphors. The easy, innocent familiarity between large and small is indescribably endearing, and we get more pleasure from a conversation between the stars and a poor child abandoned in the woods than from hearing the music of the spheres. Everything beautiful is golden and strewn with pearls; there are even golden people living there; misfortune, by contrast, is a dark power, a dreadful cannibalistic giant who is, however, vanquished, since a good woman who knows just how to avert misfortune stands ready to help. These narratives always end by opening the prospect of boundless happiness. Evil is also neither inconsequential nor something close to home, and not something very bad, to which one could grow accustomed, but something terrible, black, and wholly alien that you cannot even get near. The punishment of evil is equally terrifying: snakes and poisonous reptiles devour their victims, or the evil person dances to death in red-hot iron shoes. Many things have their own obvious meanings: a mother gets her real child back just when she manages to get a laugh out of the changeling that familiar spirits have substituted for her own child; the life of a child similarly begins with a smile and continues in joy, and when it smiles in its sleep, angels are talking with it. A quarter hour of each day is exempt from the power of magic, and then the human form steps forth in freedom, as if no power could envelop us completely. Every day offers moments when man can rid himself of everything that is false and can see clearly; on the other hand, the magic spell is never completely broken, and a swan’s wing is left in place of an arm. Or because a tear was shed, an eye is lost with it. Or worldly cleverness is humbled, and the numbsku
ll alone, ridiculed and despised by everyone, yet pure of heart, has good fortune. In these features we can see the basis for the moral precept or for the relevant object lesson that can be derived so readily from these tales; it was never their purpose to instruct, nor were they made up for that reason, but a moral grows out of them, just as good fruit develops from healthy blossoms without help from man. The proof of all authentic poetry is that it is never without some connection to real life and returns to it, just as clouds return to their place of birth once they have watered the earth.
The essence of these stories seems to us as follows: outwardly they resemble all folktales and legends. Never fixed and always changing from one region to another, from one teller to another, they still preserve a basic core. They are, however, clearly distinguishable from local folk legends, which are attached to real places or historical figures, and of which we have not included any examples here, although we have collected a good many and intend to publish them at a later date. We have often included several variants of one and the same tale owing to the pleasingly distinctive tone of the variations; the less significant we have put in an appendix; but all in all we have collected as faithfully as was possible for us. It is also clear that these tales were forever being created anew as time went on, but for just that reason their core must be very old. The age of some can be shown to be almost three centuries, for there are allusions to them in Fischart and Rollenhagen (which are noted where appropriate), but beyond doubt they are older than that, even if lack of evidence makes direct proof impossible. There is only one sure piece of evidence, and it is built on the tales’ connections with heroic epics and indigenous animal fables. But this is not the right place to go into details. We have said something about this matter in the appendix.