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.
The project began in 1806, with Jacob taking a more scholarly approach and Wilhelm doing most of the selecting and collecting. The Grimms' first volume of »Children's and Household Tales« (»Kinder- und Hausmärchen«) appeared in 1812 and contained 82 numbered stories; a second volume, containing an additional 70 stories, was published in 1815.
The tales, filled with fantastic talking animals, evil stepmothers, witches, magical objects and lovely royals, appeared in ten regional dialects as well as in high German. The collection included original versions of perennial hits like »Rumpelstiltskin,« »Rapunzel,« »Sleeping Beauty« (»Dornröschen«) and of course »Cinderella« and »Snow White« (»Schneewittchen«).
How did the brothers pull together the 152 stories in their magnus opus? »For the longest time, urban myth had it that the Grimms went all over rural Hessia and Westfalia to collect those stories from old women, grandma-style,« says Bettina Matthias, a German professor at Middlebury College. »However, recent studies have demonstrated that they had some sort of 'call for stories' out, that they asked people to come to their home.«
While the true origin of some of the stories remains controversial - some »sister stories« can be found in the oral traditions of countries as far away as China - »it seems a fact that most are actually folktales, and that the Grimms, in the 19th century's enthusiasm for rediscovering the folkish aspects of Germanity, went out of their way [to get them],« says Matthias.
Jacob and Wilhelm's goal was an academic one: to authentically capture German stories as they'd been told and passed down from generation to generation, and present their collection as a scholarly work. But the books were immediate bestsellers, and children found the stories as compelling as their parents did.
This wasn't always a good thing, since not all of the tales were rated G. For example, the original version of »Rapunzel« had the title character consorting rather intimately with her prince. The Grimms made changes, and by the time the seventh edition of their volumes appeared in 1857, the most horrific tales - like »How the Children Played the Game of Slaughter With Each Other« (»Wie Kinder Schlachten miteinander gespielt haben«) - as well as problematic details in less offensive stories, had been removed or toned down.
Even so, certain gruesome stories like »Van den Machandelboom« (in which a stepmother chops up a son and buries his bones under a tree, but serves the boy's flesh in a hearty stew to his father) made the final cut. And while the later Rapunzel stays chaste in her tower, she somehow gives birth to twins after her prince has been sent away - with his eyes poked out by thorns.
The stories collected in »Children's and Household Tales« weren't the brothers' only contribution to German folklore scholarship, with Jacob and Wilhelm publishing two volumes of German legends in 1816 and 1818. Also known for his work on the German language, Jacob published a great deal of work dealing with linguistics, grammer and mythology.
As a team, the brothers got a good start in compiling the first comprehensive German dictionary (they made it to F before their deaths; it took their successors over a century to finish). The brothers also took professorial posts in universities in cities like Göttingen - where they were political activists at a time when a fragmented Germany was coming together as a country - and Berlin, where they died within four years of each other, in 1859 and 1863.
The stories themselves, though, live on - in a way. Many of the tales, unfortunately, have been changed by folks who've often completely ignored the tradition the brothers were so careful to capture. Part of the blame can be placed on bad translation: The first of many English translations of the fairy tales was completed by Edgar Taylor and was published in two volumes in 1823 and 1826 - here, Snow White is called Snow Drop. Some fault rests with animator Walt Disney.
»I think the biggest and maybe most corrupting modifications [of the Grimms' Fairy Tales] came from Disney,« says Matthias. »The transition from the book to the screen already limits the imaginative power of the tales, and the story is tailored to fit a certain romantic (Hollywoodian) cliché and the voice of the folk narrator has gotten lost in Disney's magical plastic world.« Matthias has often noticed that her students don't recognize the originals as the »real« stories, because popular culture has altered them so much.
In the Grimms' »real« world, our lovely Snow White - at age seven deemed »the fairest« by a talking mirror - is sent by her evil queen stepmother into the woods with a hunter. The queen demands not the heart portrayed in the Disney telling but a liver and lung as proof that the hunter killed little Snow. Instead, he leaves her in the woods. There, Snow meets not Grumpy and Co., but seven nameless, non-singing dwarves. When the queen's talking mirror reveals that Snow is still alive, the enraged queen mounts a country-wide search, eventually finding the girl and »killing« her with a poison apple. The dwarves put Snow into a glass coffin, where she stays as beautiful as in life.
She's ultimately found by a prince, but this young royal doesn't even think of kissing her, instead having his servants carry the coffin away. When they stumble on a rough mountain path, the shaking causes Snow to spit up the poison apple and wake up. And here's the best part: Snow gets sweet revenge at her wedding to the prince, an event at which she makes her stepmother wear red-hot slippers until she dances herself to death.
Despite the changes that time, translations and Tinseltown have wrought on the tales, the Grimms are still recognized as some of the very first scholars to honor the idea of transferring spoken folklore to the printed word, a valuable contribution to cultural and literary studies.
The real Snow White had enough gumption to take care of the queen, and even if the Disney stories are not true to the originals, they're a bit of a fairy-tale story in themselves. With such a rich history and tales of fantasy, we can all live happily ever after.
A little bird told him
»Cinderella« (Aschenputtel) is arguably one of the best loved stories in the Grimm collection, but the tale isn't exclusively German. Slightly differing versions of the rags-to-riches story of a young scullery maid with an evil stepmother and two nasty stepsisters come from throughout Europe, Scandinavia and as far away as the Middle East. In fact, Disney's 1950 animated film Cinderella is closer to a French version transcribed by folklorist Charles Perrault in the 1700s than it is to the Grimm tale. The French Cinderella has a magical fairy godmother who gives her glorious dresses and accessories. She gets a pumpkin coach pulled by horses transformed from mice. The slipper she loses is made of glass. The German Aschenputtel, on the other hand, gets her clothing from birds who alight on a tree planted on her real mother's grave and has a non-pumpkin coach. Her slipper is made of gold. Both tales have the princely ball run over several evenings, not just one night. The one consistency is that midnight is always the time of reckoning, and that Cinderella has to hightail it out of the festivities, fast. The Grimm story (like most of the tales in the brothers' collection) is more violent than Perrault's tale. Here, the stepsisters are beautiful but cruel, and when the prince searches for the woman who fits the golden shoe, the stepsisters attempt to fit by cutting off either a toe or a heel - birds singing about bloody feet betray them to the prince. Every Grimm edition after 1819 has birds peck out the eyes of the stepsisters as punishment for their evil deeds. The French version of the tale is lighter all around. Not only is there a jolly fairy godmother and a cast of colorful animals, but the ending is far happier. Here, the stepsisters simply jam their feet into a tight shoe (no blood, no gore) and Cinderella marries them off to lords in her new husband's court, eyes intact. Here, they all live happily ever after. Just like Disney.
Kimberly Bradley, 33, is a New York journalist presently living in the forests of northern Minnesota in a house made of gingerbread.
