TIME TRAVEL: TRACKING TALES

Wilhelm (l.) and Jacob Grimm© AKG-Images

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, lived two brothers who made it one of their missions to collect as many German folk stories as they could. The boys, named Jacob and Wilhelm, wandered the land and wrote down everything they heard until they came upon an evil witch living in a house of dark gingerbread ...

Okay, just kidding. This isn't a fairy tale. But everyone knows the fairy tales the Grimm brothers collected - or at least thinks they know them. Years of editing, translation and Disneyfication have obscured where these tales came from, how they were written and just how grim some of them really were.

When Snow White sings »Someday my Prince will Come,« in the 1937 Disney film, not everyone knows that Snow was once a folk tale character, and that her rescue from the jaws of death had more to do with puking than royal kissing. The original story was part of a massive collection of folk tales collected and transcribed by two brothers from the central German city of Hanau - Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm - who have an interesting story of their own.

The brothers' lives were almost as complicated as some of Little Red Riding Hood's (»Rotkäppchen«) wolfen escapades or Cinderella's (»Aschenputtel«) transformation from scullery maid to queen. Jacob, born in 1785, and Wilhelm, born a year later, were sons of a lawyer-turned-town-clerk who died, as well as most of their siblings, when the boys were young. When, in the early 1800s, it came time to study, their destitute mother sent the duo to Marburg to study law. It wasn't long before the brothers began to satisfy a curiosity for German oral tradition and started collecting the tales that are now famous worldwide.