Grimm Brothers @ nationalgeographic.com Become a member! Each month brings stories about the most extraordinary characters of allMother Earth and her six billion children. The Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, named their story collection Children's and Household Tales and published the first of its seven editions in Germany in 1812. The table of contents reads like an A-list of fairy-tale celebrities: Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel, the Frog King. Dozens of other charactersa carousel of witches, servant girls, soldiers, stepmothers, dwarfs, giants, wolves, devilsspin through the pages. Drawn mostly from oral narratives, the 210 stories in the Grimms' collection represent an anthology of fairy tales, animal fables, rustic farces, and religious allegories that remains unrivaled to this day. Grimms' Fairy Tales, as the English-language version is usually called, pervades world culture. So far the collection has been translated into more than 160 languages, from Inupiat in the Arctic to Swahili in Africa.

In the United States book buyers have their choice of 120 editions. As a publishing phenomenon the Grimms' opus competes with the Bible. And the stories and their star characters continue to leap from the pages into virtually every media: theater, opera, comic books, movies, paintings, rock music, advertising, fashion. The Japanese, perhaps the most ravenous of all the Grimms' fans, have built two theme parks devoted to the tales. In the United States the Grimms' collection furnished much of the raw material that helped launch Disney as a media giant. Cinderella and Snow White easily hold their own with the new kids on the block, whether Big Bird or Bart Simpson. As for the brothers, they are recognized as pioneers in the field of folklore research. Their crystalline fairy-tale stylethe Grimms extensively edited and rewrote drafts of the narrativeshas influenced generations of children's writers and paved the way for other masters of the genre, from Hans Christian Andersen to Maurice Sendak. But the Grimms' stories do not speak only to the young. "The age for hearing these fairy tales is three years to death," says Elfriede Kleinhans, a professional storyteller in Germany.

"Our world can seem so technical and cold. All of us need these stories to warm our souls." Top * * * Such lasting fame would have shocked the humble Grimms. During their lifetimes the collection sold modestly in Germany, at first only a few hundred copies a year. The early editions were not even aimed at children. The brothers initially refused to consider illustrations, and scholarly footnotes took up almost as much space as the tales themselves. Jacob and Wilhelm viewed themselves as patriotic folklorists, not as entertainers of children. They began their work at a time when Germany, a messy patchwork of fiefdoms and principalities, had been overrun by the French under Napoleon. The new rulers were intent on suppressing local culture. As young, workaholic scholars, single and sharing a cramped flat, the Brothers Grimm undertook the fairy-tale collection with the goal of saving the endangered oral tradition of Germany. For much of the 19th century teachers, parents, and religious figures, particularly in the United States, deplored the Grimms' collection for its raw, uncivilized content.

An American educator in 1885 railed: "The folktales mirror all too loyally the entire medieval worldview and culture with all its stark prejudice, its crudeness and barbarities." Offended adults objected to the gruesome punishments inflicted on the stories' villains. In the original "Snow White" the evil stepmother is forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes until she falls down dead. In "The Goose Maid" a treacherous servant is stripped, thrown into a barrel studded with sharp nails, and dragged through the streets. Even today some protective parents shy from the Grimms' tales because of their reputation for violence. Despite its sometimes rocky reception, Children's and Household Tales gradually took root with the public. The brothers had not foreseen that the appearance of their work would coincide with a great flowering of children's literature in Europe. English publishers led the way, issuing high-quality picture books such as Jack and the Beanstalk and handsome folktale collections, all to satisfy a newly literate audience seeking virtuous material for the nursery. Once the Brothers Grimm sighted this new public, they set about refining and softening their tales, which had originated centuries earlier as earthy peasant fare.

In the Grimms' hands, cruel mothers became nasty stepmothers, unmarried lovers were made chaste, and the incestuous father was recast as the devil. In the 20th century the Grimms' fairy tales have come to rule the bookshelves of children's bedrooms. And why not? The stories read like dreams come true: Handsome lads and beautiful damsels, armed with magic, triumph over giants and witches and wild beasts. They outwit mean, selfish adults. Inevitably the boy and girl fall in love and live happily ever after. Read me another one, please. And parents keep reading because they approve of the finger-wagging lessons inserted into the stories: Keep your promises, don't talk to strangers, work hard, obey your parents. According to the Grimms, the collection served as "a manual of manners." Americans fell in love with the Grimms' tales when Walt Disney in 1937 released his animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the first of three wildly popular Disney adaptations. In converting a short story into an 80-minute musical, the Disney studio sweetened the material, giving the dwarfs names like Sneezy and Happy.

In Cinderella (1950) Disney frosted the plot by adding a carriage that turns into a pumpkin at the stroke of midnight. Top * * * The Grimms' texts have undergone so many adaptations and translations, often with the intent of censoring objectionable material such as the violence meted out to villains or of making the themes more relevant to contemporary tastes, that most of us know them only in their sanitized versions. The dust-jacket copy of a recent translation plaintively wonders if all the retellings don't "greatly reduce the tales' power to touch our emotions and intrigue our imaginations." In a fourth-grade classroom in Steinau, Germany, the town where the Grimms spent part of their childhood, I listened as the storyteller Elfriede Kleinhans, an opponent of prim retellings, asked the boys and girls how the princess managed to turn a frog into a prince at the climax of the "The Frog King," the first tale in the Grimms' collection. "She kissed it," the children sang out. "No," said Kleinhans. "She threw the ugly frog at the wall as hard as she could, and it awoke as a prince.

That's what the real story says." The children looked as if they didn't believe her. Scholars and psychiatrists have thrown a camouflaging net over the stories with their relentless, albeit fascinating, question of "What does it mean?" Did the tossing of the frog symbolize the princess's sexual awakening, as Freudian psychologist Bruno Bettelheim asserted, or does the princess provide a feminist role model, as Lutz Röhrich, a German folklorist, wondered, by defying the patriarchal authority of her father, the king? Ormaybea frog is just a frog. The tales have also fallen prey to ideologues and propagandists. Theorists of the Third Reich in Germany turned Little Red Riding Hood into a symbol of the German people, saved from the evil Jewish wolf. At the end of World War II, Allied commanders banned the publication of the Grimm tales in Germany in the belief that they had contributed to Nazi savagery. On campuses across Europe and the United States during the 1970s, the Grimms' tales were scorned for promoting a sexist, authority-ridden worldview. "Madness Comes From Fairy Tales" was scrawled on walls in Germany.

Some of the stories were rewritten to accommodate certain political tastes. A revision of "Cinderella," for example, has the heroine organizing a union of local maids, prompting the king to arrest her, after which she emigrates to the U.S. to escape the tyranny of kings and queens. Asked about this landslide of commentary by shrinks and scholars and ideologues, Bernhard Lauer, director and curator of the Museum of the Brothers Grimm in Kassel, Germany, looked sadly at me and protested, "The tales are literary masterpieces! They are not recipes for everyday life." Top * * * Enthralled since childhood by the geography of the Grimms' talesthe ominous forests, the brooding castles, the firelit cottages and clamorous village streetsI traveled to Germany to see if I could trace the contours of my imaginary map and possibly discover who these Brothers Grimm really were and how they became the preeminent cartographers of make-believe. My plan was to visit towns in Hesse where the brothers lived and worked to find out who told them the stories and how much the Grimms doctored what they heard.

And I would roam the back roads to see if landscapes evoked by the fairy tales still lingered in the Hessian countryside. Snow streaked the ground in brushstrokes as I drove east from Frankfurt and its glass skyscrapers into Grimm country. Except for their final years in Berlin, Jacob and Wilhelm spent most of their lives in the small towns and provincial cities of today's state of Hesse in the German midsection, close to whatonce upon a timewas the border with East Germany. Except for the autobahn's ribbon of concrete and roadside clusters of metal silos, the Hessian countryside today might look remarkably familiar to the Grimms. Red-roofed villages nestle in the folds of hills and along river valleys. Stone castles rise from nearby heights, sprouting towers and battlements. Fields that will later ripen with corn and beets roll toward thick forests that frame the horizon like the borders of a woodcut. The oldest of six children, Jacob and Wilhelm were born a year apart in the mid-1780s in Hanau, a market town less than a day's carriage ride from Frankfurt.

Their father, Philipp, the son of a clergyman, was educated in law and served as Hanau's town clerk, a solid middle-class vocation. Father Grimm preached a life of faith, zealous work, and family loyalty. Their mother, Dorothea, gave the boys freedom to wander the countryside where, as Wilhelm later noted, their "collector's spirit" was born as they chased down butterflies and bugs. Nothing remains of the Grimms' birthplace in Hanau. Like most of the houses they occupied, it was destroyed by aerial bombing during World War II. A bronze statue of the brothers sits in front of the Rathaus, or city hall. It features two long-haired men in frock coats absorbed in reading a book, their greatest joy. Tourists regularly gather at its base, their own noses stuck in books, usually travel guides. The statue marks the beginning of the Deutsche Märchenstrasse, or German Fairy-tale Road , a 370-mile [600-kilometer] route that meanders through central Germany to sites associated with the Grimms or to picturesque places that simply put the traveler in a fairy-tale mood.

By 1791 the family had moved northeast to Steinau, another small trade center, where the father took the position of district magistrate. The Grimms lived well in a large turreted stone house that doubled as the local courthouse. It survives today as a museum of Grimm manuscripts and memorabilia, with revolving exhibits of contemporary fairy-tale illustrators. At the center of Steinau stands a gaunt 16th-century castle ringed by a grassy moat. Wandering one night through the tiny town, the kind of quiet, uneventful town "where the fox and hare say good night to each other," as the Germans say, I entered the moon-shadowed courtyard of the castle and listened to my boots ringing on the cobblestones. In so many of the Grimms' tales an aspiring commoner is ushered into just such a royal space, challenged to make a princess laugh or to bring back three golden hairs from the devil's head. Success meant riches and a royal bride. When the Grimms wrote of castles in their tales, perhaps they remembered this boyhood place. The Steinau years marked the end of ease and innocence for Jacob and Wilhelm.

In 1796 their father died at the age of 44. Dorothea was forced to move her family of six children out of the government residence. With financial help from Dorothea's sister, a lady-in-waiting for a Hessian princess, Jacob and Wilhelm, at 13 and 12, were sent north to the city of Kassel to attend the Lyzeum, an upper-crust high school. Sharing the same room and bed, the boys coped with loneliness and social slights by studying for ten hours a day. They proved themselves brilliant students, graduating at the top of their classes. The physical effort took its toll on Wilhelm, however. Already of delicate health, he suffered a serious asthma attack at school. Weak lungs and recurring illnesses would vex him the rest of his life. "We know from his letters that Jacob walked this route many times," Fischer said. "In one he complained that there are more steps on the streets than stairs in the houses." We continued past a spiky Gothic church, an organ booming inside, to a three-story stone house just below the town castle.

It was here that a young aristocratic law professor, Friedrich Carl von Savigny, impressed by Jacob's appetite for learning, opened his private library to the older Grimm brother. That changed Jacob's life. He spent hours poring over Savigny's collection of rare manuscripts of medieval epics and hero's tales. The experience awoke in Jacob a passion for deciphering and saving ancient German literature and folktales, a cause that his younger brother would also embrace. Jacob did not look and act the part of a fiery activist. Short and sturdy, he was by temperament an introvert, his whole being dedicated to bookish research. At Marburg he would decline invitations to stroll the countryside, saying he preferred "a walk in literature." Fellow students called him "the old one." Wilhelm, a determined scholar like his brother, was more outgoing. "Wilhelm had an eye for women, and women had an eye for him," Heinz Rölleke, a Grimm scholar at the University of Wuppertal, told me. Fervent letters passed between Wilhelm and Jenny von Droste-Hülshoff, a wealthy young woman whom he met in a storytelling circle. Class differences foiled any chance of marriage.

Wilhelm at the age of 39 would marry a childhood friend, Dortchen Wild, daughter of a pharmacist and herself a prominent source of fairy tales for the collection. Jacob, a lifelong bachelor, was by far the dominant partner intellectually, initiating most of their projects. Yet the brothers worked well together, signing their joint undertakings simply "Brothers Grimm." Top * * * Children's and Household Tales, their great collaboration, began in an almost offhand fashion. Immersed in editing and translating medieval manuscripts, the brothers started to gather fairy tales as a favor for a friend planning a collection of German folk literature. After several years the Grimms had assembled 49 tales, taking a few from old books, the rest from acquaintances in Kassel. But when the friend failed to produce the collection, the brothers decided to expand their efforts and publish their own volume. Collecting fairy tales must have provided Jacob and Wilhelm a welcome distraction from their living circumstances. Their mother had died in 1808. Money grew scarcer. Employed as a librarian for the detested resident French ruler, Jacob could barely support his five siblings. Wilhelm was sick from asthma and a weak heart and was unable to work.

In 1812, the year the fairy tales were first published, the Grimms were surviving on a single meal a daya hardship that could explain why so many of the characters in their book suffer from hunger. Though new editions of the fairy tales continued to appear until 1857, two years before Wilhelm's death, collection of almost all the oral tales took place when the brothers were in their impressionable 20s. Altogether some 40 persons delivered tales to the Grimms. Many of the storytellers came to the Grimms' house in Kassel. The brothers particularly welcomed the visits of Dorothea Viehmann, a widow who walked to town to sell produce from her garden. An innkeeper's daughter, Viehmann had grown up listening to stories from travelers on the road to Frankfurt. Among her treasures was "Aschenputtel" Cinderella. With the exception of Viehmann, the brothers rarely identified their correspondents. Their names and the tales credited to them were learned in most cases only after careful study of the margin notes in the brothers' personal copies of the Tales.

The true identity of one of the most important informantsa certain "Marie"came to light only in the mid-1970s. Marie was credited in the notes with narrating many of the most famous tales: "Rotkäppchen" (Little Red Riding Hood), "Schneewittchen" (Snow White), and "Dornröschen" (Sleeping Beauty). Herman Grimm, the oldest son of Wilhelm and guardian of the Grimms' legacy after the brothers' deaths, contended for many years that the Marie in question was the old housekeeper of Wilhelm's in-laws. It took a close reading of the annotations by Heinz Rölleke of the University of Wuppertal to reveal that the storytelling Marie was in fact Marie Hassenpflug, a 20-year-old friend of their sister, Charlotte, from a well-bred, French-speaking family. Top * * * I encountered a likeness of Marie on a wall in Wolfgang Hassenpflug's house in Rinteln.

Herr Hassenpflug, a retired engineer with a poet's head of unruly white hair, is the great-great-grandson of Charlotte Grimm, known as Lotte in family circles. In 1822, he explained, 29-year-old Lotte left the household of her five brothers and married a longtime family friend, Ludwig Hassenpflug, a brother of Marie. Because the direct lines of Jacob and Wilhelm appear to have died out with the death of Wilhelm's daughter in 1919, Wolfgang Hassenpflug now finds himself the inheritor of many Grimm family treasures, as well as mementos from the Hassenpflug lineage. The walls of Hassenpflug's elegant stone house are hung with original portraits of the Grimm brothers and of their sister and her familycopperplate prints all etched by a third brother Grimm, Ludwig. Marie looks out with large soulful eyes, her thin face framed by dark curls. For my visit Hassenpflug's wife, Gerda, dressed a table for lunch with one of Lotte's original damask tablecloths, with "LG" stitched in one corner.

Wolfgang told the story of Marie's "rediscovery" and explained how the family's French-Huguenot background influenced her storytelling ability. "Like the Grimms she grew up in Hanau, which at the time was a very French town," Hassenpflug said. "Her nursemaids naturally told French stories. The Grimms may at first have thought Marie's tales all came from Hesse, but the famous ones we now know came from France and the book by Charles Perrault." Marie's wonderful stories blended motifs from the oral tradition and from Perrault's influential 1697 book, Tales of My Mother Goose, which contained elaborate versions of "Little Red Riding Hood," "Snow White," and "Sleeping Beauty," among others. Many of these had been adapted from earlier Italian fairy tales. In the second edition of their own collection the Grimms acknowledged the deep international roots of many of their tales. Included in their notes are references to variants from many other cultures, including Russian, Finnish, Japanese, Irish, and Slavic.

Long before the Grimms' time, storytelling thrived in the milieu of roadhouses, barns, and, perhaps most energetically, in the Spinnstuben, the spinning chambers of peasant women. During winter nights women softened the long hours of spinning flax into yarn by entertaining themselves with tales spiced with adventure, romance, and magic. The Grimm tales feature many spinners, most famously in "Rumpelstiltskin," in which a poor miller's daughter, ordered by a king to spin straw into goldfailure means death, success a royal marriageenlists the aid of a devilish little man, Rumpelstiltskin. Top * * * Given that the origins of many of the Grimm fairy tales reach throughout Europe and into the Middle East and Orient, the question must be asked: How German are the Grimm tales? Very, says scholar Heinz Rölleke. Love of the underdog, rustic simplicity, sexual modestythese are Teutonic traits. The coarse texture of life during medieval times in Germany, when many of the tales entered the oral tradition, also colored the narratives. Throughout Europe children were often neglected and abandoned, like Hänsel and Gretel.

Accused witches were burned at the stake, like the evil mother-in-law in "The Six Swans." "The cruelty in the stories was not the Grimms' fantasy," Rölleke points out. "It reflected the law-and-order system of the old times." Possibly the most German touch of all is the omnipresence of the forest, the place where fairy-tale heroes confront their enemies and triumph over fear and injustice. Rural German society traditionally depended on the Wald. The forest was where farmers grazed their pigs on acorns, royals hunted deer, and woodcutters selected logs for the massive beams still seen in the half-timbered barns and houses of Hessian towns. Storytellers knew that to place characters in a dark trackless woods would stir up associations of danger and suspense. "The forest was not seen as a safe place. Townspeople would avoid it," forester Hermann-Josef Rapp told me as we drove wet logging roads through the Reinhardswald, a large forest in the hills of northern Hesse. "There were outlaws and illegal hunters.

And Germans have always been afraid of wolves." Nowadays the Reinhardswald is thick with beech and introduced spruce, serving local sawmills. But to behold those mighty oaks that were the preferred species in most Grimm fairy tales, one has to visit a remnant forest near Sababurg Castle. Rapp, a trunk of a man in a green oilskin jacket, led me into that forest one day in a pouring rain. Here massive, arthritic-looking oaks, some of them 400 years old or more, loomed like Gothic ruins. I spooked myself staring at the thick, grasping limbs, the wild hairlike mosses, the knobby eyes, the holes that gaped like mouths. How could Little Red Riding Hood's mother ever have let that sweet little girl go into such woods as these? Despite the strong Germanic flavoring of the tales, the first edition sold poorly. At the Grimms museum in Kassel, director Bernhard Lauer placed the brothers' personal copy of the first edition in front of me, handling it as if it were a Fabergé egg.

"It's the most valuable thing in the museum," he said, "Only a few of the original 900 copies still exist. The paper quality was very poor." Mild commercial success did not come until 1825, when the Grimms published the Small Edition, a condensed collection of 50 stories with illustrations by their brother Ludwig. The 1825 volume, of which 1,500 copies were printed, is even rarer than the 1812; only four or five copies survive in libraries. With the debut of the cheaply priced Small Edition, the Grimms had at last figured out who their true audience was: children. By the second edition in 1819 Wilhelm had taken over the lead responsibility for the fairy tales, Jacob having turned his attentions to a scholarly exegesis on German grammar. Wilhelm proved an inspired editor. By streamlining plots to emphasize action, weaving into the narrative old proverbs and folk poems, and using poetic language to set scenes, Wilhelm created a style that remains a model for fairy-tale writing. Wilhelm continued to polish and reshape the tales up to the final edition of 1857.

Comparisons of the various editions reveal that in his effort to make the stories more acceptable to children and their middle-class parents, Wilhelm removed any hint of sexual activity, such as the premarital couplings of Rapunzel and the prince who climbed into her tower. He also added Christian motifs, accented the child-rearing lessons of the tales, and emphasized gender roles. Though the brothers implied that they were mere recorders of tales, such literary and moral restylings of oral narratives were apparently crucial to bring the tales into the mainstream. "Yet despite all Wilhelm's additions," Rölleke said, "the cores of the stories were left untouched." The editorial fingerprints left by the Grimms betray the specific values of 19th-century Christian, bourgeois German society. But that has not stopped the tales from being embraced by almost every culture and nationality in the world. What accounts for this widespread, enduring popularity? Bernhard Lauer points to the "universal style" of the writing. "You have no concrete descriptions of the land, or the clothes, or the forest, or the castles.

It makes the stories timeless and placeless." The tales allow us to express "our utopian longings," says Jack Zipes of the University of Minnesota, whose 1987 translation of the complete fairy tales captures the rustic vigor of the original text. "They show a striving for happiness that none of us knows but that we sense is possible. We can identify with the heroes of the tales and become in our mind the masters and mistresses of our own destinies." Fairy tales provide a workout for the unconscious, psychoanalysts maintain. Bruno Bettelheim famously promoted the therapeutic value of the Grimms' stories, calling fairy tales the "great comforters." By confronting fears and phobias, symbolized by witches, heartless stepmothers, and hungry wolves, children find they can master their anxieties. Bettelheim's theory continues to be hotly debated. But most young readers aren't interested in exercising their unconscious. My 11-year-old daughter, Lucy, thinks it's cool that witches cast spells and that heroines always seem to get their man. Boys I know go for stuff like the cloak that makes a hero invisible and a rifle that never misses. The Grimm tales in fact please in an infinite number of ways.

Something about them seems to mirror whatever moods or interests we bring to our reading of them. This flexibility of interpretation suits them for almost any time and any culture. Jacob and Wilhelm moved on from their jobs as librarians in Kassel to teach at universities in Göttingen and Berlin. Between them they published more than 35 books. The brothers also made a name for themselves as patriots, risking their livelihoods by speaking out in favor of democratic reform. But in their last years they retreated from politics and teaching to concentrate on writing the German Dictionary, one of the most ambitious scholarly projects of 19th-century Europe. The brothers did not live to finish the dictionary or to see the fulfillment of their abiding dream: the founding in 1871 of the German nation. Wilhelm died of an infection in 1859 at the age of 73. Jacob in his eulogy bestowed upon his beloved Wilhelm the name Märchenbruder, the "fairy-tale brother." Jacob died four years later. He had just finished writing the dictionary definition for Frucht, or fruit, a fitting end to a fertile life.

The Brothers Grimm, for the final fairy tale in their collection, chose a short, parable-like tale called "The Golden Key." A poor boy goes out into a wintry forest to collect wood on a sled. In the snow he finds a tiny key and near it an iron box. The boy inserts the key. He turns it. He lifts the lid. That is where the story ends. For once the brothers avoid a tidy ending. Instead, they have issued a golden invitation, since accepted by countless readers, to open the brothers' books with the key of the imagination. Only then can readers discover what wonderful things await them. AbeBooks:Tales That Live Forever: 200 Years of the Brothers Grimm Home > Rare Book Room > Tales That Live Forever: 200 Years of the Brothers Grimm Tales That Live Forever: 200 Years of the Brothers Grimm by Arthur Rackham (various editions) On December 20, 1812, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published a book called Children's and Household Tales (Kinder- und Hausmärchen in German) and helped popularize one of the most enduring aspects of Western popular culture – the fairy tale.

Their collection of folktales contains stories that have become so well known that they have taken on lives of their own. The adventures of Hansel and Gretel, Snow White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel are so famous that the original research by the Brothers Grimm has been somewhat forgotten. The Brothers Grimm did not originate the stories. They were scholarly researchers and linguists who selected the stories from various dialects and regions, and then published them as a collection. The Grimms collected folktales for many years before becoming a publishing phenomenon. That historic first volume of tales contained 86 stories and the second volume, published in 1814, had 70 stories. Many of those tales had been handed down in the oral tradition but some had already been published. Those early volumes pulled no punches. There was often something very nasty in the woods and villains were punished with brutal violence. The toning down process began soon after and continues to the present day with the likes of Disney and the hundreds of children’s book publishers who reprint the stories each year.

Hansel and Gretel illustrated by Kay Nielsen The brothers owe much to the French author Charles Perrault (1628-1703) who helped create fairy tales as a literary narrative with his versions of Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and Puss in Boots. The Grimm tales feature almost every important storytelling theme imaginable. Good versus evil, life and death, love and hate, cleverness and stupidity, courage and cowardice, magic and adventure, and golden heroes and flawed heroes. The characters are vivid, which made the stories ideal for illustration and later for cinema. “They take basic human situations - wife, husband, father, son, king, subject, life, death - and illustrate them with such simplicity and clarity that they can't help resonating throughout the ages,” said English author Philip Pullman in an interview with the BBC. Notable artists who have illustrated the tales include Arthur Rackham , Walter Crane , Edmund Dulac , Kay Nielsen, Pauline Baynes, Wanda Gag, Mervyn Peake, Maurice Sendak, Adrienne Adams, Mercer Mayer, Gordon Browne, Margot Zemach and Nancy Ekholm Burkert.

The 1909 Arthur Rackham first edition is famous in the rare book world. It was not all witches, frogs and princes for the Grimms. They also devoted years to compiling a vast German dictionary (remember Germany as a nation did not exist until 1871) but both brothers died before its completion. The Deutsches Wörterbuch is significant because it also offered origins for each word. Wilhelm died in 1859 and Jacob in 1863. 10 Facts about the Brothers Grimm › Play Video A Selection of Grimmsï¿½ Fairy Tales Project MUSE - The Poets' Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales (review) Wolfgang Mieder The Poets’ Grimm: 20th Century Poems from Grimm Fairy Tales. Edited by Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Claudia Carlson. Ashland, OR: Story Line Press, 2003. 287 pp. This anthology of twentieth-century fairy-tale poems is a publishing desideratum finally come true.

My own compilation entitled Disenchantments: An Anthology of Modern Fairy Tale Poetry (Hanover, NH: UP of New England, 1985) has been out of print for a number of years, and it was high time that someone undertook the necessary task of editing a new collection of this fascinating subgenre of lyric poetry. Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Claudia Carlson have put together a superb anthology, and they are to be commended for their careful and sensitive selection of poems. They have purposely stayed away from duplicating authors and poems from my earlier anthology. In fact, only 14 of the 78 authors included in Disenchantments also appear (usually with different texts) in The Poets' Grimm, with the latter volume featuring poems by 112 poets. This handsomely produced book with its fairy-tale-like low price is thus a treasure throve of fairy-tale poetry, a volume designed for the general reader but also most suitable for the classroom. Disenchantments had found considerable use in English and folklore classes, especially in Women's Studies courses, Honors programs, and first-year special topics seminars.

There is no doubt that this new and more comprehensive anthology would be a perfect textbook, and I hasten to urge its adaptation both on the advanced high school and college level. The two editors provide a mere six-page introduction, arguing convincingly that earlier fairy-tale poetry usually consisted of retellings of commonly known fairy tales, to wit poems by Alfred Tennyson, Bret Harte, John Greenleaf Whittier, and James Whitcomb. This modus operandi changed at the beginning of the twentieth century, when poets well versed in the fairy-tale tradition started to reinterpret the tales or parts of them in innovative and thought-provoking fashion. As I have argued in my entry on "Poetry and Fairy [End Page 331] Tales" in Jack Zipes's The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2000), "the basic message of most 20th-century poems based on or at least alluding to fairy tales is one that this is a world of problems and frustrations, where nothing works out and succeeds as in these beautiful stories of ages past.

And yet, by composing their poems around fairy-tale motifs, these authors if only very indirectly seem to long for that miraculous transformation to bliss and happiness" (388). This is certainly very obvious in the fairy-tale poems of some of the best English-language poets as, for example, Randall Jarrell, Anne Sexton, Sara Henderson Hay, Olga Broumas, Hayden Carruth, Louise Glück, Galway Kinnell, Maxine Kumin, Lisel Mueller, Allen Tate, and Jane Yolen. As expected, these poets are represented in The Poets' Grimm, but the editors have also included many less-known poets, among them Regie Cabico, Mike Carlin, Anna Denise, Meg Kearney, Elline Lipkin, Margaret Rockwell, Maria Tarrone, and Estha Weiner. For the most part, these poets and the many other authors who have written one or more fairy-tale poems reinterpret the Grimm tales in a humorous, parodic (at times nonsensical), ironical, cynical, or satirical fashion, thereby turning the positive wisdom of the tales into so-called anti-fairy tales. The themes of the poems are as universal as the insights into the human condition expressed in the traditional tales.

Every imaginable human or social problem is treated, from love to hate, from politics to war, from marriage to divorce, from decency to criminality, and from sexual politics to emancipation. But there are also themes of deception, vanity, loneliness, manipulation, lovelessness, manipulation, frustration, and power. The happy ending of the fairy tales is transformed to express the complexities and anxieties of the modern age that seems far removed from the world of fairy tales. But it is the juxtaposition of the original tales with the innovative interpretations in these poems that leads to effective and insightful poetic communication. There is indeed something for everyone in these modern fairy-tale poems. Glancing over the useful pages of "About the Authors" (261-72; it would have been useful to include the years of birth), one is inclined to agree with the editors that there appear to be "more poems on this subject by women than by men" (xiii). They are also correct in arguing that fairy tales "offer to girls and women prominent stereotypes with which they must grapple—beauty, stepsister, stepmother, witch, crone, princess, and of course 'prince charming'" (xiii).

Appropriately the anthology includes a section of poems entitled "The Grimm Sisterhood," with the remaining nine sections grouping poems under such headings as "Mapping the Ways," "Spinning the Tales," "Voices & Viewpoints," "Spell Binding & Spell Breaking," "Magical Objects," "Desire & Its Discontents," "Variations & Updates," "Ever After, or a Few Years Later," and "Living the Tales." While some of these thematic titles speak for themselves, [End Page 332] others appear to be so general that most of the poems could have appeared under them. In any case, the editors decided to group their rich poetic materials under these ten themes rather than according to the dominant fairy tale under discussion in the individual poems. This was their choice to make, and this arrangement certainly overcomes the unavoidable repetitiousness of reading, for example, one poem after another about "Cinderella." For anybody wishing to find those poems that treat a particular fairy tale, the editors have included an invaluable "Index of Poems by Tale" (283), and there is also a useful and necessary "Index of Authors and Titles" (284-286).

As expected from cultural literacy considerations, the majority of the poems deal with such fairy tales as "Sleeping Beauty," "Cinderella," "The Frog Prince," "Hansel and Gretel," "Little Red Riding Hood," "Rapunzel," "Rumpelstiltskin," and "Snow White." This was also the case with my Disenchantments, of course. However, Beaumont and Carlson have now also unearthed and included poems based on such lesser-known Grimm fairy tales as "Brother and Sister," "The Fisherman and His Wife," "Foundling," "The Goose Girl," "The Juniper Tree," "The Maiden Without Hands," "Snow White and Rose Red," and others. This is a clear indication that the editors have cast their net very wide and deep indeed, making their anthology an extremely valuable poetry collection for cultural and literary historians, folklorists, psychologists, and above all for students and general readers. Clearly the editors had to make difficult decisions about which poems by what authors to include in their splendid anthology. There was no need to register earlier poems from the nineteenth century that retell the basic tales.

Not wanting to overlap too much with Disenchantments, they "weighted [their collection] more heavily toward the last half of the 20th century, including a generous sampling of the substantial body of fairy-tale poetry that has been published since 1985" (xiii). The anthology is thus clearly a complement to Disenchantments while at the same time also going far beyond it. Nevertheless, not even Beaumont and Carlson were able to include all of the fairy-tale poems they had located, especially since "the mining of fairy tales for the making of poems proceeds unabated in the new [21st] century" (xvi). There are still many fairy-tale poems to be anthologized, and perhaps Beaumont and Carlson are already at work on a future volume that will be needed in due time. Be that as it may, I did a bit of checking in my own archive, and here is a short selected list of poets and poems that have not been included in Disenchantments or The Poets' Grimm.

The two editors might enjoy adding this information to their holdings, assuming that they do not know much of it already: Moniza Alvi, "Red Ridinghood's Plan" (1993), Rae Armantrout, "As We're Told [Snow White]" (2002), Claire Bateman, "The Frog Princess" (1990), Jody Gladding, "But What about the Stepsisters [Cinderella]" (1993), [End Page 333] Maria Jacobs, "Ball-frog and Story" (1986), Paulette Jiles, "Snow White" (1988), Penny Kemp, "The Law of Sevens" (1984), Leslie Miller, "Cinderella" (1977), Sarah Provost, "The Frog Prince" (1986), Anne Scott, "The Thread [Hansel and Gretel]" (1973), Edith Sitwell, "The Sleeping Beauty" (1954), Jane O.

Wayne, "To the Uninvited [Sleeping Beauty]" (1984), and Sheila Wingfield, "Rapunzel" (1984). That would be a small selection of female authors.

But there are plenty of male poets as well who deserve to be included in future fairy-tale poetry anthologies, among them: Tom Absher, "Fable: Hansel" (1981), Henri Cole, "The Prince Enters the Forest [Sleeping Beuty]" (1988), Roz Cowman, "The Lost Witch Sings of Lost Children [Hansel and Gretel]" (1989), Peter Davison, "Sleeping Beauty Variations" (1977), John Dickson, "Cinderella" (1982), Len Gasparini, "Separated [Rapunzel]" (1980), John Haines, "In the House of Wax—VII" (2001), Andrew Harvey, "In Fairy Stories [general]" (1985), Adrian Henri, "Any Prince to Any Princess [Rapunzel]" (1986), Kevin Ireland, "A Popular Romance [Frog Prince]" (1970), Jan Kemp, "Cinderella" (1987), Michael Longley, "Graffiti [Frog Prince]" (1969), Ed Madden, "F

rog Prince" (1994), Don McKay, "A Child's Hearse in the Huron County Museum [Cinderella]" (1980), John Medeiros, "Rapunzel" (1994), John Newlove, "Under the Civilized Skin the Savage Har Har [Rapunzel]" (1972), W.

H. Oliver, "Rumpelstiltskin" (1980), Felix Pollak, "Cinderella Revisited" (1973), Kenneth Radu, "Aschenputtel's Sisters" (1984), Tennessee Reed, "Disney's Cinderella" (2003), Robert Service, "Cinderella" (1958), David R. Slavitt, "The Prince [Sleeping Beauty]" (1994), Jon Stallworthy, "End of a Fairy Tale [Sleeping Beauty]" (1970), and Walter Wangerin, "Kinder- und Hausmärchen [general]" (1987). Space does not permit listing more names, titles, and bibliographical information, but perhaps male poets write more fairy-tale poems than people tend to think. One is reminded of the proverb "Seek, and ye shall find" (Matthew 7:7). With Beaumont's and Carlson's comprehensive anthology now readily available, it is to be hoped that literary scholars and folklorists will be more eager to study this subgenre of lyric poetry in greater detail.

The somewhat disappointing "Selected Bibliography" (279-82) provided by the editors lists no scholarship on fairy-tale poems as such, save perhaps Alicia Ostriker's "Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythology," in Signs 8 (1982-83): 68-90, dealing at least in part with Anne Sexton's fairy-tale poetry. There is, of course, some scholarship on her, Hays, Jarrell, and others that touches on fairy-tale issues, but much more research into this poetic subgenre is desirable. One of the best studies, albeit in German, is Barbara von Bechtolsheim's "Die Brüder Grimm neu schreiben: Zeitgenössische Märchengedichte amerikanischer Frauen" (diss., Stanford U, 1987). But this dissertation deals only with female poets and does not cover many of the more [End Page 334] recent authors included in Beaumont's and Carlson's anthology. The time has surely come for additional dissertations, articles, and books on this fascinating subject matter.

One thing is for certain, The Poet's Grimm, splendidly edited by Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Claudia Carlson, will become a classic in the vast literature on fairy tales. It deserves to be read and studied, and it should be sold by the thousands to general readers, students, and scholars. The price of the book is incredibly reasonable, and the Story Line Press deserves much praise for making this anthology available to readers of English everywhere in the world. Altogether this anthology is a most welcome and appreciated addition to the world of fairy tales, and the editors are to be congratulated for their labors—it's like a fairy tale come true to have The Poets' Grimm on the book market. Wolfgang Mieder Brothers Grimm saved classic fairy tales by changing them forever - CSMonitor.com Brothers Grimm saved classic fairy tales by changing them forever Latest News Google celebrated the 200th anniversary of 'Grimm's Fairy Tales' on Thursday. Google View Caption of There's a certain irony to "Grimm's Fairy Tales." Two-hundred years ago today, Jacob Grimm and his younger brother Wilhelm published a collection of folk tales.

The Grimms didn't write these stories; they collected tales that had been handed down from generation to generation. The Brothers Grimm worried that industrialization would erase these classics from memory. So they set out to protect these ancient tales. However, in preserving this rich tradition, the Brothers Grimms changed the stories forever. Many readers would be shocked to look at the first-edition stories of Rapunzel, The Frog Prince, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, or Snow White . Their plots have changed a lot over the years. Recommended: The 20 most fascinating accidental inventions Disney sanitized them, scrubbing away the unsavory parts. Hollywood further reworked them with the recent Kristen Stewart film "Snow White and The Huntsman," the animated movie "Tangled," and Matt Damon 's "The Brothers Grimm." ABC and NBC borrowed from the brothers with last year's TV series "Grimm" and "Once Upon A Time." Author Philip Pullman completely rewrote the stories in his new book, "Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm." Photos of the Day Photos of the Day 01/19 In fact, even Jacob and Wilhelm changed the fairy tales from one edition to another.

Even though the Grimms's collection was originally titled "Children's and Household Tales," the book was not written for kids. The brothers imagined their "Fairy Tails" as an academic anthology. It was the work of scholars, compiled by and for serious adults. However, as the books became more popular, the Grimms faced harsh criticism. Parents found the stories far too dark. Churches thought they were not Christian enough. So, the Brothers Grimm started editing. The wicked mothers of Snow White and Hansel and Gretel turned into wicked stepmothers. They stripped out sexual references, such as in Rapunzel. In the original "Grimm" version, an evil witch holds Rapunzel captive in a tower. One day, a prince visits her in secret. He later escapes without alerting the witch, but Rapunzel spills the beans. How? She innocently asks why her dress doesn't fit anymore. For some reason, it's now too tight around the belly. It didn't take long for the witch to realize that Rapunzel was now pregnant. In later editions, the Brother Grimm took out this and other references to premarital sex.

As prurient material came out, some of the violence actually intensified – especially the punishments for sinful villains. The third Grimm brother, Emil, added Christian symbols into the illustrations. For example, Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother soon had a Bible on her bedside table. The brothers published 17 different editions between 1812 and 1864 – plenty of time to "correct" these tales. In a way, it's fitting that everyone from Disney to Mr. Pullman has reworked "Grimm's Fairy Tales." The Grimms gathered their stories from European oral tradition. The whole reason that the Brothers Grimm wanted to preserve these stories was because they'd been passed down over so many generations – and no doubt tweaked, embellished, and censored along the way. As the "Fairy Tales" grew more conservative, they also became more popular. Parents finally felt comfortable reading them to kids, giving these traditional tales new momentum. Now, 200 years later, we still know the story of Rapunzel, Cinderella, and Snow White – even if some of the details disappeared into history. It leads one to wonder: If Jacob and Wilhelm had not redacted their stories, would we still know about them today?

For more on how technology intersects daily life, follow Chris on Twitter @venturenaut . Next up Get the Monitor stories you care about delivered to your inbox. Daily Brothers Grimm Complete: Books | eBay Brothers Grimm Complete Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales collects more than two hundred tales set down by. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the early decades of the nineteenth century, among them some of the best-loved and most famous... Condition: | 104 sold This elegant edition of Grimm's Complete Fairy Tales includes all our cherished favorites—Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin, Little Red Cap, and many more—in their original versions. With specially designed... | 61 sold They are the stories we've known since we were children. Sleeping Beauty. But the works originally collected by the Brothers Grimm in the early 1800s are not necessarily the versions we heard before b... Buy It Now Free Shipping GRIMM'S COMPLETE FAIRY TALES - leatherbound with gold accents, gilt page edges, and a ribbon marker. ITEM CONDITION: This book is in Very Good condition. It has no stamps, bookplates, or names inside. | 21 sold Brothers Grimm's Complete Grimm Fairy Tales Book Hardcover Illustrated by Arthur Rackham.

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Question: Who first published and popularised the stories Snow White, Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty and Red Riding Hood?
Answer: The Brothers Grimm