The Heroic Industry of the Brothers Grimm
—“Hänsel and Grethel”
In an 1846 letter to the Athenaeum, English writer William Thoms coined a term, “folklore.” He wondered whether some new scholar might do for British culture what Jacob Grimm had done for German. Jacob was the more prominent of the Grimms, but his life and work were inconceivable without the companionship and contributions of his younger brother, Wilhelm. The work for which they are most celebrated today, Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales), was a collaboration in which Wilhelm eventually played the dominant editorial role. The two brothers shared a bed when young, and lived side by side for most of their lives, pursuing some of the most prodigious scholarship imaginable. Since their deaths (Wilhelm in 1859, Jacob in 1863), so many legends have accrued about their lives and works that they almost seem fairy-tale figures themselves, quaint Hobbit-like creatures trawling the peasantry for stories. Nothing could be further from the truth, which is why Ann Schmiesing’s brief, eloquent and moving biography, The Brothers Grimm, is bound to prove enlightening to English-language readers.[1]
The Tales (first published in two volumes, 1812 and 1815) were famous in England before they were fully appreciated in the German kingdoms and electorates. Edgar Taylor’s selection and translation, entitled German Popular Stories, appeared in 1823, with twelve plates by George Cruikshank, later known for his illustrations of Dickens. That book was something of a bestseller, a status the Grimms never achieved in the German kingdoms during their lifetimes. More recently, editions of the Fairy Tales, as they are commonly known, have sold as well as the Bible. My own copy is entitled The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales—with a misplaced apostrophe, as if the brothers were a single figure—and illustrated by Arthur Rackham. An editorial note says it “uses as its source Margaret Hunt’s 1897 translation, which was originally commissioned by the publisher George Bell of London.” It’s a moneymaking scheme using a text in the public domain, and I do not know how many liberties might have been taken with the prose.
It is also an utterly charming book, clearly one of the treasures of world literature. In 2005, Schmiesing reports, Children’s and Household Tales was named “a UNESCO ‘Memory of the World’ heritage document.” I find it as hard to conceive of a life without these stories as I do a literature without the Iliad and the Odyssey. They are funny, so violent that one can easily imagine them being censored or banned, and profoundly true to human psychology, even when the world they depict contains talking animals and magic potions. The tales jolt us with cannibalism, beheadings galore, sexual innuendo, parents (and stepparents) who are evil or ineffectual, amoral heroes like Thumbling, and people who die of joy as well as grief. The world is unstable yet full of wonders and transformations, a place where natural piety can prevail or be easily crushed. The very first story in the book, “The Frog-King, or Iron Henry,” opens with “olden times when wishing still helped one.” In the second story, a cat and mouse form an unlikely food-seeking partnership that does not end well: “‘All gone’ was already on the poor mouse’s lips; scarcely had she spoken it before the cat sprang on her, seized her, and swallowed her down. Verily, that is the way of the world.” Life in the fairy tales is often nasty, brutish and short, and even happy endings are sometimes happy only for a time.
This “way of the world” includes evocations of class struggle and gender roles that are not always edifying, and at least one heartless example of anti-Semitism, “The Jew in the Thorn Bush”—but such details remind us how little our world differs from theirs.
While I am tempted to dwell on this one book (to which I will return in time), it comprises only a fraction of the Grimms’ scholarly output. The tale Professor Schmiesing tells in her biography is also one of a violent and unstable world, where illness, war and revolution might have prevented the Grimms from accomplishing anything at all. Their endurance and devoted labor, not to mention the general open-mindedness with which they proceeded and the family bonds and friendships they fostered, make them very much the heroes of their own story.
*
They were complicated heroes, of course.
The nineteenth century saw the rise of nationalisms we now take for granted. Revolutions in the American colonies and France had exploded or reshaped old aristocracies, and the Napoleonic Wars only temporarily dismantled and restored them. Greece emerged first as an independent nation in about 1830. There were later independence movements in Norway, the Italian reorganization, and finally in 1871 the unification of Germany. Each of these movements posed questions of national identity, at their best emphasizing language and culture more than race and ethnicity. If we are a nation, what language do we speak? What stories do we tell? The scholarship of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm became foundational for German identity, which later made their work exploitable by the Nazis. Though Jacob had studied Hebrew among his many languages, there is no doubt, Schmiesing argues, “Jacob and Wilhelm would evince anti-Semitic prejudice both in the choice of texts in their various collections and in numerous comments in their correspondence and other writings.” Schmiesing acknowledges these flaws without letting them overwhelm the brothers’ accomplishments. On the whole, their loyalties were with liberty.
They grew up in the last years of the Holy Roman Empire, Schmiesing writes, “that patchwork quilt of polities that had long been ‘neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire,’ as Voltaire famously quipped.” Jacob was born in 1785, Wilhelm the following year, so they were Romantics by generation, just a few years older than Byron and Shelley. They were also Romantics by disposition, sceptical of monarchy, devoted to free speech, opposed to the censorship of literature and the arts. They lived in Hessen, the state that had supplied so many troops to the British fighting in America. Of their younger siblings, Ludwig became a significant artist, while the rest led less successful lives, sometimes financially dependent on the older brothers.
Their father, Philipp Wilhelm, served as Hanau town clerk, a post that gave the family trappings of prosperity. “The house’s exterior was light red with tan-colored doors,” Schmiesing writes, “and its ground-floor drawing room was wallpapered with images of huntsmen, some of whose visages the Grimm boys naughtily augmented with penciled-in beards.” They had servants and a garden, and their mother, Dorothea, “could often be found knitting or sewing in the upstairs sitting room. There, by the large German stove, Jacob recalled her washing him with warm water to which she added a splash of wine.”
Schmiesing, a professor and administrator at the University of Colorado Boulder, has researched her subject deeply and makes vivid use of original documents such as letters, diaries and memoirs left by the brothers. She portrays a family in which the older boys were given every advantage, but also charged with the responsibility to succeed in life. When their father was promoted to district magistrate in Steinau, their new home included a small farm, and this proximity to both nature and town life fostered the boys’ lifelong curiosity.
Then came the shock of their father’s death in 1796, followed by financial instability that made Jacob, as oldest son, a driven worker. The brothers went to school in the town of Kassel, which eventually became the happiest of their homes even when they struggled to earn a living there. Much of their livelihood was secured through friendships with patrons like Friedrich Carl von Savigny, a jurist and historian who benefitted from their scholarly assistance. As Napoleon rose to power in France, the brothers were studying at the University of Marburg. Their home, Hessen-Kassel, became an electorate, and then, in 1807, part of the Kingdom of Westphalia, ruled by Napoleon’s brother Jérôme. The Holy Roman Empire had been dissolved in 1806.
The Grimms began their scholarly careers working for other writers, like Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim. Jacob steeped himself in medieval studies, including law and literature, publishing an essay on the Nibelungenlied, a work that would later prove crucial for Richard Wagner. He made his living as librarian to King Jérôme. Wilhelm, too, pursued scholarship and translation work, slowed by a heart ailment that periodically sidelined him for the rest of his life.
Beholden as they were to the aristocracy, they were also part of the revolutionary ferment of their time. Romanticism fostered folkloric studies out of its broad critique of authority, its search for authenticity in sources deemed primitive, closer to nature and therefore truer than conventional beliefs. Collections of traditional English and Scottish ballads had influenced Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge, who were also searching for a new validity. Professor Schmiesing writes,
As they turned against French literary influence, German writers and critics were also influenced by British collections of folk songs. In the 1760s, Scottish writer James Macpherson published his translations of Gaelic poems purported to be written by the third-century Celtic hero Ossian. Suspicion arose that Macpherson had at best found only fragments of songs and stories and had fabricated the rest. . . . In 1773, Johann Gottfried Herder published “Ossian and the Songs of Ancient Peoples,” in which the term Volkslied (folk song)—adapted from the English “popular song”—appeared for the first time. Herder saw in the folk song the most authentic expression of poetry.
Such associations of authenticity with folk tradition remain with us today. They guided Yeats and Auden and stand behind the selection of Bob Dylan for the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The same questions underlay everything the Grimms ever wrote. For much of his life, Jacob was such a believer in authenticity that he opposed translations of early works in favor of scholarly annotations of original texts. Yet he was also not the sort of reactionary who wants language to freeze in its conventions. He believed languages changed organically, he celebrated dialects and all his life opposed the German tradition of capitalizing nouns. With regard to translation, Wilhelm was more adaptable, often seeking a way to make early works more accessible to the reading public.
Although the Grimms spent little time in Heidelberg, they were associated with the school of Heidelberg Romanticism, which “focused on uncovering the Germanic past and the folk literature it had produced” out of “the need to assert German identity against French hegemony.” They knew, as they gathered their fairy tales from various sources—most often educated women rather than the peasantry—that many of these tales already existed in the seventeenth-century French writer Charles Perrault’s stylish tellings. With their versified morals, Perrault’s versions acted as a foil for the Grimms, who sought rougher and more genuinely Germanic versions, usually leaving their tales unresolved, whimsical, more open to interpretation.
After the first edition of the Märchen, Jacob became less involved with later iterations. Wilhelm collected more stories, including at least twenty from an actual peasant storyteller both brothers enjoyed, Dorothea Viehmann, whose image adorned later editions of the book, giving it the appearance of a peasant oral tradition. The brothers collaborated on German Legends and other books, but Jacob’s projects veered away from popular storytelling. In 1822, a revised edition of his monumental German Grammar contained a “description of sound shift” in language now known as Grimm’s Law, a major contribution to linguistics. He also published works on German law and mythology and a two-volume History of the German Language. His mind was so jammed with erudition that it clotted his prose and, when the brothers were finally granted academic positions, made him the less popular lecturer of the two. Wilhelm had the instinct for entertainment.
I struggle to convey just how much labor both men undertook. They published prolifically. They either founded or were present at the founding of several academic disciplines. Honors came, but slowly. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, Jacob served as secretary to the German legation at the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), where the German Confederation was founded. As one of his diplomatic responsibilities, which painfully interfered with his scholarship, he sought the return of artworks looted from Germany by the French. Eventually, both brothers were relieved to return to Kassel as librarians for a period they deemed the happiest of their lives. Wilhelm married Henriette Dorothea Wild in 1825, and they began a family, but their household always included the bachelor Jacob, and sometimes more of their needy siblings. They were a blended family, but a happy one until a series of miscommunications resulted in their leaving Kassel.
For nearly a decade, 1829–1837, they held posts at the university in Göttingen, a Hanoverian town they found much less congenial. The death of England’s Hanoverian king, William IV, in 1837 created yet another crisis. Hanover’s laws forbade the new English queen, Victoria, William’s niece, from acting as elector, simply because she was a woman. Instead, the late king’s brother, Ernst August, became Elector of Hanover, where he proceeded to suspend the diet and declare himself no longer bound by the country’s constitution. The Grimms were among seven scholars who protested. They became known as the Göttingen Seven, immediately lost their positions and were placed in considerable danger of worse. Eventually they returned to Kassel, then moved for their final years to Berlin, where friends helped them receive lectureships at the university. There were other upsets and controversies in their lives, but Berlin proved on the whole a happy home for the brothers working away in their adjacent offices. One passage from Schmiesing’s book hints at the life they led:
Piles of books and manuscripts topped their desks, tables, and bookcases; peeping out amid these piles were not only large inkwells, feather pen holders, paperweights, and containers of blotting sand, but also the various mementos that cheered them as they labored. Jacob’s workspace featured shells, stones, fossils, a pine cone, a small bust of Dante Alighieri, a bear figurine, a sculpture of a lioness, a statuette depicting Briar Rose, and a child’s doll seated on a doll’s chair. Wilhelm’s desk sported a petrified fish, a piece of feldspar, a female figurine from the second century BCE, a green statuette of an Egyptian king, and a centuries-old carved sandstone sculpture of a man’s head.
They were interested in everything. The final project of their lives became a massive German Dictionary, comparable to the OED. By the time of their deaths, they had only made it as far as the letter F. The dictionary was ultimately completed by others in 1961.
*
Whatever their sources, however much Wilhelm tinkered with their texts over many complete and smaller editions, the fairy tales retain an uncanny vitality. Reading them in my seventieth year, I find myself reintroduced to the wonderful. “The Two Brothers” tells of twin huntsmen who take separate journeys. One of them slays a dragon in order to win a princess, but while he sleeps, exhausted by his battle, a rival beheads him. You can tell he’s one of the good guys, because he has befriended several animals, who come to his aid with a magic herb:
The lion put the huntsman’s head on again, and the hare placed the root in his mouth, and immediately everything united together again, and his heart beat, and life came back. Then the huntsman awoke, and was alarmed when he did not see the maiden, and thought, “She must have gone away whilst I was sleeping, in order to get rid of me.” The lion in his great haste had put his master’s head on the wrong way round, but the huntsman did not observe it because of his melancholy thoughts about the King’s daughter. But at noon, when he was going to eat something, he saw that his head was turned backwards and could not understand it, and asked the animals what had happened to him in his sleep.
This is only the halfway mark of a relatively long tale in which the head is restored to its proper outlook, the twin brothers are reunited, and the huntsman gets the girl, but it’s a wild ride getting there.
Then there’s the servant, “Faithful John,” who in another tale offends his king by obeying the prophecy of three ravens and sucking three drops of blood from the young queen’s breast to restore her to life. John is turned to stone, much to the king’s regret. The king inquires what might be done to bring his faithful servant back to life, and John without missing a beat asks him to behead his own two sons and “sprinkle me with their blood.” The king obeys the servant, a nice inversion of hierarchies, and John returns to life. John puts the children’s heads back on, which would surely be a relief to any little listeners in the room. The ending is typically Grimm: “Then they dwelt together in much happiness until their death.”
Death is never denied in the tales, nor are poverty, disfigurement and hunger. In “Godfather Death,” a physician defrauds Death and in punishment descends to a cave below the earth:
There he saw how thousands and thousands of candles were burning in countless rows, some large, others half-sized, others small. Every instant some were extinguished, and others again burnt up, so that the flames seemed to leap hither and thither in perpetual change. “See,” said Death, “these are the lights of men’s lives. The large ones belong to children, the half-sized ones to married people in their prime, the little ones belong to old people; but children and young folks likewise have often only a tiny candle.”
You can find primal sources for horror stories here. Children listening to them respond with mixtures of terror and laughter, delight and dread. They don’t require embellishment or excessive detail. Least of all do they require explanations for the actions in the tales. People do things. People behave in all kinds of ways, as they do in life.
Because they are generally unexplained, the tales have provided a happy hunting ground for psychologists and interpreters of all kinds. We have the obvious danger of the wolf in “Little Red-Cap,” but we also have the very particular bond forged between child and grandparent, and Little Red-Cap out gathering flowers like Persephone before her hellish encounter. The speed with which child and grandmother are gobbled up by the wolf is one thing, but so is the delight in finding them alive when a hunter or woodsman cuts open the belly of the wolf.
The poet Robert Bly found in “Iron John” a parable of manhood, how young men need to learn from a wild spirit something of their own natures. He produced a bestselling book from the material. Eudora Welty took “The Robber Bridegroom,” with its sexual menace and cannibalism, and turned it into a modern novella with the same title. My wife still misses her copy of “The Juniper Tree,” illustrated by Maurice Sendak. It’s a wild tale, set “long ago, quite two thousand years,” in which a childless woman dies of joy after giving birth to “a child as white as snow.” Here again we find cannibalism as grim as any you might find in the Greek myths. The widowed father remarries, and his second wife has a daughter. It’s this mother, not the one who died of joy, who becomes a murderess, making sausage of her dead stepson. Her punishment comes in the revelation of her crimes by a prophetic bird in a juniper tree: “Then the mother stopped her ears, and shut her eyes, and would not see or hear, but there was a roaring in her ears like the most violent storm, and her eyes burnt and flashed like lightning.” The evil mother is crushed by a millstone, and the remaining family celebrate, magically reunited, “and they went into the house to dinner, and ate.” That last detail is a killer.
So much can be done with tone. The tales have an economy and lightness in the telling that makes all sorts of atrocities nearly bearable, all sorts of magic possible. One of the oldest stories, “Hänsel and Grethel,” dates as far back as the Great Famine in the Middle Ages, when parents might have abandoned children in a forest because they could not afford to feed them. The Grimms turned the mother into a stepmother, hardly softening the crime, and the children are saved by their ingenuity, deceiving not only their parents, but also the witch who wants to eat them. In the end, it’s Grethel who gives the old woman a push into the flaming oven and cooks her like a goose.
Even the most familiar stories like “Cinderella” retain the charm of unexpected details. Look at the beautiful simplicity of the opening:
The wife of a rich man fell sick, and as she felt that her end was drawing near, she called her only daughter to her bedside and said, “Dear child, be good and pious, and then the good God will always protect thee, and I will look down on thee from heaven and be near thee.” Thereupon she closed her eyes and departed. Every day the maiden went out to her mother’s grave and wept, and she remained pious and good. When winter came the snow spread a white sheet over the grave, and when the spring sun had drawn it off again, the man had taken another wife.
So much is conveyed here about character, time and the natural world, because Cinderella’s piety is natural piety, respect for nature more than conventional Christian belief. Set aside Disney’s version of the story and read it again. Anne Sexton used it in one of her best books, Transformations,finding in it a wry feminist parable. Justice is cruel in the story, but we rejoice in its lessons about cruelty and judgment.
Somehow I have to end this, and without finding a mouse out of which I could make a fur cap, I will have to go on outside the confines of this review, immersed in these inexhaustible tales.
[1] THE BROTHERS GRIMM: A Biography, by Ann Schmiesing. Yale University Press. $35.00.