I’m a couple days late, but Happy 233rd Birthday to Wilhelm Grimm, the younger of the Brothers Grimm brothers. In honor of his birthday, I thought we’d get to know a little bit about two of the most famous fairy tale storytellers in the world.
During their lifetimes, they contributed more to the study of fairy tales and folklore, and the culture of Germany itself, than any other scholar, collector, or author in the field. They’re venerated by many for their collections of tales, but also for their work in linguistics and philology. It’s even stated that they’re one of the most important German scholars of their time.
So who are they, really? Here are seven interesting facts about the dynamic duo that virtually began the golden age of fairy tales.
They originally went to law school.
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were the oldest of five surviving brothers and one surviving sister born in the late 1700s. At the start of the 1800s they were both studying law at the University of Marburg to become lawyers like their father, who died when Jacob, the eldest, was only eleven.
However, their interests changed when encountering scholars and academics there. For instance, Friedrich Karl von Savigny, a professor and historian, influenced their investigative skills and their interest in the past, and philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder’s passion for folk poetry was probably their first encounter with folklore.
Their mother died in 1808, and they were forced to find jobs to provide for their families. This lead them to librarian and secretary jobs, which they maintained off and on as they continued their work with German language studies and this new area of folklore.
They suffered a national identity crisis more than once.
When the brothers were born, Germany wasn’t named Germany. They were born in Hanau, Hesse-Kassel, which was a small Germanic kingdom of sorts among other small Germanic kingdoms. So it was a part of what is now Germany before Germany existed as we know it.
When they were still in their twenties, Napoleon, who was going around collecting kingdoms at the time, snatched up Hesse-Kassel and gave it to his brother Jérôme, who held onto it for about seven years. For those seven years the French occupied the brothers’ home, and Jacob even worked as a librarian for Jérôme for a time.
Not directly for Jérôme of course, but still.
The French also used this time of occupying Germanic states and kingdoms to steal their culturally relevant artifacts, which Jacob later helped retrieve with his good friend professor Savigny.
After the French, however, came the Electors of Hesse-Kassel, William I and William II, of whom the brothers weren’t fans. The Electors were getting rid of all the French influence and anything else that was too liberal for the time. William II must not have liked the brothers either, because he refused to allow their advancement after the death of a senior colleague. Thus the brothers moved to another kingdom, Hanover, to lecture at the University of Göttingen.
But Hanover got a new king while they were living there. Eight years after they established themselves at the university, the brothers joined five other professors in political protest against the king’s decision to do away with the “too liberal” constitution in place at the time. The seven were dismissed and Jacob and two others were forced to leave Hanover altogether.
So they moved to Prussia, another small Germanic kingdom, and lectured at the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin. They were highly successful here, but also witness to the Revolution of 1848, in which many citizens of Germanic states and kingdoms argued and fought for a unified kingdom called Germany. Which didn’t happen until after the brothers had died.
Phew. Yeah. A lot was going on.
They didn’t set out to collect fairy tales at first — a friend did.
While studying at the University of Marburg, the brothers met a man named Clemens Brentano. Brentano’s family knew the famed German poet Goethe personally, and he himself wrote folk tales and poems. We actually have him to thank for the collection of Grimm fairy stories because it was he, and a mutual friend of theirs named Achim von Arnim, who asked the brothers to collect the tales so he — not the brothers, who were studying language and history more than folk tales — could publish the collection.
The brothers actually kept a copy of their work after sending the manuscript off to Brentano. Which was good, because Brentano apparently lost his copy while he was living in a monastery.
Arnim persuaded them to publish their collection, which had grown since that first manuscript they sent to Brentano. So they did, publishing the first version in 1812, with another volume following in 1815.
They believed the most pure form of a culture and language could be found in its folklore.
The brothers were, first and foremost, scholars of language and history. They worked on several projects throughout their life, but dealt often with folklore and mythology. In these old stories, they began to recognize threads that created a unique culture among the people around them. This lead to a theory that culture could be found rooted in the linguistic history of its people.
In other words, you can understand a culture of a people group just by reading or hearing their stories.
Not just any stories, though. The old ones. The retold ones. According to the brothers, modern literature was just too empty of the soul that could be found in folk stories. Though there were a lot of good things in modern literature, it lacked the connections to bind people together. Folk tales, folk poems, folk songs — these elements of storytelling culture didn’t. They even explained this in their preface to their second edition of their collection.
“Wherever the tales still exist, they continue to live in such a way that nobody ponders whether they are good or bad, poetic or crude. People know them and love them because they have simply absorbed them in a habitual way. And they take pleasure in them without having any reason.”
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Preface, 1819
Which, in my opinion, perfectly answers the question of why fairy tales are still loved today.
Their first edition of fairy tales held stories very different than what we know today.
Originally, when the brothers were collecting the tales for their first edition, it was out of a sense of preservation. With the world changing around them, they no doubt feared these examples of pure culture would be lost forever. But between 1812 and 1857, the brothers revised their book, which they called Kinder- und Hausmärchen, or Children and Household Tales, seven times. Each time, the stories got a little softer as other collectors or informants came forward with different versions of the tales found within.
The book is called Children and Household Tales because originally these stories were meant for a wider audience. Often the stories they collected were simply tales traded between servants or workers to pass the time. Some were suitable for children, but many were not.
Jack Zipes’ article “How the Grimm Brothers Saved the Fairy Tale” showcases some of these changes. For instance, there’s a fairy tale I love called “Bearskin,” about a poor soldier who accepts a deal with the devil in order to escape poverty and loneliness. If, after seven years, he doesn’t break his deal, he keeps his soul and walks away a rich man. The beginning is different in the 1812 version, which is called “The Devil in the Green Coat.”
In the 1812 tale, the Grimms portrayed an oppressed, timid young man, abandoned in the woods by his brothers. He accepts the devil’s green coat that will enable him to survive for seven years if he doesn’t shave or clean himself. In the much longer 1857 version there are echoes of the Napoleonic wars: The protagonist is a discharged and homeless soldier who is treated poorly by his family and then turns to the devil for survival.
Jack Zipes, How the Grimm Brothers Saved the Fairy Tale
Other examples of shocking first edition details include Snow White having an evil and jealous mother, not stepmother, and Rapunzel becoming pregnant via the visiting prince.
Wilhelm Grimm is often cited as the artist behind the “softening” of these tales. He had a knack for writing the tales in a way that preserved their folkloric feel. But by the time the 1857 edition rolled around, there was less seen of the raw, often violent folktales and more of the moral stories for children we recognize today.
They actually invented the study of fairy tales as a scientific research subject.
The Grimm brothers didn’t just collect fairy tales and throw them together. They also kind of invented the model for how to collect and tell these stories. They actually designed a thorough and rigorous method for both the collection and the research of folk narratives.
They also took careful notes on the stories, such as how things differed between versions, and how one storyteller’s dialect affected a story as opposed to another. When they initially wrote the stories down, they wrote them as true to the teller as they could. No fluffing up the details or fixing the grammar. Or so they said. There has been some debate about this recently.
Nevertheless, they more or less created themselves as the first, or one of the first, fairy tale scholars in history. And their work has all but cemented the “style” of a fairy tale as we know it today.
Towards the end of their life, they focused on writing the first comprehensive German dictionary.
And it wasn’t just a dictionary. It included etymology of the words, variants for those words, their semantic development, and idioms and phrases for how to use each word casually and formally. This endeavor was so great, the dictionary didn’t get officially finished until 1960 — over one hundred years after they began the project.
This dictionary was literally a language lexicon. It’s the German version of what you academics and word nerds know as the Oxford English Dictionary.
Wilhelm saw the project through the letter D. Jacob died as they were reaching letter F.
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm weren’t just storytellers, they were scholarly legends. They worked tirelessly to preserve their heritage and the culture that was threatening to die around them, and yet also heavily influenced that culture themselves. In fact, their Kinder- und Hausmärchen has sold so many copies around the world, it rivals Shakespeare’s works and the Bible. In Germany, the two books you’d most often find in every single household was the Bible and their book of fairy stories.
They still hold a lot of influence today, as we’re still seeing new retellings of their Snow White, Cinderella, Rapunzel, Little Red Riding Hood, and Sleeping Beauty. Like their own audience, we’ve absorbed their stories in a habitual way, and often love them without really having a specific reason.
The fairy tale world as we know it wouldn’t exist today without the important work of the Brothers Grimm. While they were hardly the only collectors, or even the most extensive collectors, they helped paved the way for future fairy tale scholarship as well as giving us dozens of tales we’re still seeing today.
So Happy Birthday, Wilhelm Grimm. Thank you for your groundbreaking work.
I obtained most of my information and direct quotes from these three articles, plus knowledge I knew from previous research. Links in the titles!
- Britannica’s article on the Brothers Grimm
- Jack Zipes’ article “How the Grimm Brothers Saved the Fairy Tale” from Humanities magazine
- Chi Luu’s article “The Fairytale Language of the Brothers Grimm” from JSTOR’s Daily newsletter