Faerlie Amazing Profile: The creators of the German fairytale tradition

The Brothers Grimm by Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, 1855

It is the last day of the month and that means it’s time for a fairytale creator profile. For the month of March, we take a look at the Brothers Grimm and their contribution to the fairytale genre.

Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm were The Brothers Grimm. They were academics, linguistics, cultural researchers, authors and the accidental entertainers responsible for some of the best-known fairytales. Amongst them, Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Rumpelstiltskin and Little Briar Rose (better known as Sleeping Beauty). Anything but sweet and soothing bedtime tales in their original publication, their stories have been translated into over 160 languages and have been read worldwide and are loved by audiences of all ages.

The two brothers were born in Hanau, near Frankfurt in Germany to Philipp Wilhelm Grimm, a lawyer serving as Hanau’s town clerk, and Dorothea Grimm, his wife. They were of a large family of nine children – eight boys and one girl, although only six of the nine survived infancy.

Jakob Ludwig Karl Grimm was the second son, born on January 4, 1785. His brother Wilhelm Karl Grimm was born a year later on February 24, 1786. The two were close as children and remained so their entire lives, spending very little time apart, even after Wilhelm’s marriage to Henriette Dorothea Wild in 1825. By the time Jakob had reached age eleven, the most prominent male figures in their lives had passed away, leaving the family in dire straits and forcing them to move from an idyllic countryside lifestyle to an urban settlement. Following their father’s death, the two sons began to pursue careers and educations in law. Instead, they found their niche in linguistics as professors specialising in the history and structure of phonetics in past German languages and their relation to other languages. This later became known as Grimm’s Law.

Their main focus was, thus, linguistics. However, it was through this line of study and work, that they were encouraged by Friedrich von Savigny, one of their University of Marburg professors, to take an interest in past cultures. The famous Grimm’s fairytales were merely a byproduct of their research and what they considered to be their ‘real’ work.

After coming into contact with the linguistic facet of folktales, the two brothers, patriots at heart, were determined to preserve their German heritage through their work with linguistics and folktales. They collected and transcribed tales from peasants but found their richest source of folklore amongst the middle and aristocratic classes who had heard the tales from their servants and nursery maids. The stories were a representation of life in the early 1800’s as generations of central Europeans knew it – unpredictable and often cruel. 

‘Perhaps it was just the right time to record these tales, as those who should have been preserving them are becoming rarer ... All of these tales contain the essence of German myth, which was deemed forever lost.’

- The Brothers Grimm, Preface of Kinder- und Hausmärchen, 1812.

The Brothers Grimm portrait, 1843

It wasn’t until after the first volume of their first edition of their collection titled ‘Kinder- und Hausmärchen’ was published in 1812 that they became aware of the audience their tales had found amongst children. This was not the academic readership that they had envisaged but in response, considering they were living in poverty with only one meal a day at the time of its publishing, the Grimms and numerous editors began purifying the content. The violent and explicit nature of the tales was toned down, becoming less graphic and cruel and more charming, humorous and primly moral. 

Wilhelm’s warmer personality and interest in music and literature made him the ideal character to develop the presentation of their fairytale collection while Jakob, a pedantic workaholic by nature, was more at ease with scholarly work, compiling research and developing their language and grammar theories. However, neither had a head for finances. They soon found themselves being cheated out of earnings by their publisher with little or no course of action available to them due to cleverly composed copyright contracts. Still, they persisted.

They published a second volume of ‘Kinder- und Hausmärchen’ in 1815, taking the number of Grimm's fairytales from 82 to 155. A second edition was released in 1819 with significant changes to the previous edition and an additional five new tales. It was this volume that served as the basis for the first translations of their collection in many languages. This was followed by a third edition in 1837 with seven new fairytales, a fourth edition in 1840 with another ten tales, a fifth edition in 1843 with sixteen new additions and a sixth edition in 1850 with a total of 200 Grimm’s fairytales.

The Grimm Brothers were very much aware that their tales were not entirely German. At the time, the stories existed in similar versions in other European countries that had already produced published fairytale collections. Nevertheless, Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm became the creators of the German fairytale tradition.

Bronze statue of the Brothers Grimm outside
the Rathaus, or city-hall in Kassel, Germany 

Considering their academic and literary output it seems fitting that they spent most of their professional lives as librarians and professors at various universities. A little known fact, however, about these two seemingly reserved devout Christians is that they were fired from the University of Gottingen for political reasons. It was an age of nationalist pride in a country that, at the time, was anything but united. The Holy Roman Empire had barely been dissolved. What we now know as Germany consisted of 39 states that were independently ruled by an assortment of Royal Families, with nothing in common apart from their language. The brothers were relieved from their posts due to them being two of the Gottingen Seven. The new king of Hanover proposed to abolish the constitution granted to Hanover by his predecessor and in response, seven scholars, the Grimms included, refused to swear an oath to King Ernst August and engaged in open protest. Considering the patriotism of the Grimms and the German Romantic spirit with its focus on national culture, that was popular in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, it is understandable why the preservation of Germanic folklore was so important to the two brothers.

In addition to their compendium of fairytales, they also produced several other works. This includes, amongst others, two volumes of German legends (‘Deutsche Sagen’), writings on the history of linguistics and folklore titled ‘Altdeutsche Waelder’ (Old German Forests) and a detailed thirty-two volume German dictionary. They began work on this major undertaking in 1838 and it was completed only in 1960. 

Needless to say, the Grimm Brothers did not live to see its final edition. Both brothers died while working on their dictionary as professors at the University of Berlin. Wilhelm Grimm passed away on December 16, 1859 after completing the letter D, and his brother collapsed at his desk four years later, on September 20, 1863 after completing A, B, C and E - leaving behind a fairytale legacy matched by few others.