Who were the brothers Grimm and which fairy tales have factual origins?

There once were two brothers. Surname of Grimm. Lots of fairytales did they make up. Is that correct though? How real were they, and did they make up every single story that is attributed to them, or did they just rip them off from the prevailing folklore of the times?

And were they German or English? Grimm doesn’t sound particularly German to me, that’s why I ask.

And just what are the exact origins of these fairytales? If you readthis article by Cecil it tells of the origins surrounding the Pied Piper of Hamlin tale. How many more of the fairytales had origins like this?

And why do so many fairytales seem to have an inherently adult theme behind all of them? Like a sinister darker side?

You see what I mean? For example if you read (sorry, I know we’re all a little old for this but it does make for a fascinating insight into the minds of 13th century Europeans) Little Red Riding Hood it seems to sort of have the overtones of sexual harrassment. Think about it; a beautiful little girl, dressed in red (the colour of blood - life and passion - like sexual allurement) being chased by what seems like a horny animal who wants to “gobble her up”. If these stories were written for children, what the hell kind of swinging parents did they have?

Or am I just reading too much into these fairytales? Are they really all just sweet little stories of love and intrigue and romance?

Here’s a homepage

http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm.html

German.

Jacob & Wilhelm Grimm were scholars who, among other things, collected folklore. This ment going out in the boonies and recording stories from old people. Then they’d publish the stuff to preserve it.

Get your hands on those stories as they were first published. They’ll make your socks drop. There was a lot more death and destruction in 'em.
I can only offer that the rough peasant tales the Grimm’s preserved were from a different time when executions and bear baiting were spectator sports

They were German. One of the brothers, Jacob Grimm, was produced some very important work in the field of linguistics- most notably Grimm’s law which showed how the sounds of letters changed in Germanic languages compared to other Indo-European languages such as Latin, Greek or Sanskrit.

oops scrap that ‘was’ from the first line.

My copy of the Complete Fairy Tales…* contains an introduction by Jack Zipes and here are some of the most relevant points he makes (paraphrased in my words):

Jacob and Wilhelm were the oldest surviving children of Philipp and Dorothea Grimm, born in Hanau near Frankfurt in 1785 and 1786 respectively.

They didn’t write the stories from scratch, but gathered them from folk sources all over Germany (and some other European countries) and published them, initially, in collaboration with their writer friend Clemens Brentano. Some of the tales had already been published before, the rest were collected from friends and other contacts they got to hear about.

Although they didn’t write the tales, their dark nature seems to mirror the hardship of their own lives. Their father died when they were eleven and ten respectively, they had to support their mother and four younger siblings as soon as possible and they combined studying German folk literature with law school and whatever day jobs they could pick up. Their mother died in 1808, they were both unemployed at various times, Wilhelm had a heart condition and Germany was at war with Napoleon’s France. Nothing to smile about there I think you’ll agree.

The first stuff they published by themselves were academic studies of traditional literature, but they published the first volume of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales) in 1812.

According to Zipes, their favoured method of collecting was not to travel around the German countryside, but to invite storytellers to their homes and have them tell the tales aloud, which the Grimms would then write down. Apparently most of these storytellers were educated young women from good families, and they’d been told the stories by their nursemaids etc. during their own childhood.

They also toned down the adult nature of some of the stories, most likely in mind of the sensitivity of their audiences’ bourgeois parents. The earliest editions were not primarily intended for children, however, and had been peasants’ fireside stories for all ages.

*pub. Bantam Books 1992

“The Uses of Enchancement” by Bruno Bettleheim traces the origins of the tales and explains them psychologically. Any decent library should have a copy.

Whistlepig

Yes, it is THAT Bruno Bettleheim for those of you who recognize the name.

Take everything Bettelheim wrote with a whole saltcellar.

There’s a letter in Skeptical Enquirer Jan/Feb 2001 from Gray Hunter that commented on some related to Martin Gardner articles about LRRH and Bettelheim in the two previous issues.

The link that you have provided gives another link to some of the fairytales as they were published by the brothers Grimm. However I do not know if these are the originals that you are referring to.

The link is:

Is this it? I’ll admit they’re a lot worse than I thought they were. But they still seem written as if for kids. Maybe these translated versions were tamed for reading/interpretation for the upper classes in the 19th Century?

Does anyone have any reliable websites that give a psychological interpretation of fairytales and their moral/social significance? I’m gonna try and get my hands on Bettelheim’s book. Should make for interesting reading.

I found this for any one who is interested:

Link

Yes, but going back much earlier, Chaucer had his randy Wife of Bath sport red stockings–not green–to advertise that she was open for business. The Whore of Babylon described in Revelation gave birth to the term “scarlet woman.” Maybe the simplicity of dying a garment red, as well as the fact that red was colorfast and did not run as easily as did some other colors, provided a metaphor for becoming a scarlet woman. It is as easy as dying cloth red to become promiscuous, and as hard to become pure again as it is for the dyed cloth to lose its color.

Does anyone know the oldest usage of “scarlet woman” to mean a promiscuous woman, and if there is a comparative phrase in German?

With considerable understatement, the Brothers Grimm observed that some of the stories they collected appeared to be found with many variations in other countries.

A case in point is the story of Aschenputtel.

This is essentially the story of Cinderella as told earlier in The Tales of Perrault. There are some interesting differences though. For instance, while Cinderella relies on her fairy godmother, Aschenputtel does things because “a little birdy” tells her.

Comparing versions of fairy can say something about national sensibilities, I think. Some years ago Time or Newsweek (can anyone tell them apart?) editorialized abuot how modern versions of fairy tales “water down” events. As an example, they cited a modern edition of Cinderella which says that she forgave her wicked stepsisters and even arranged marriages for them.

This, in fact, is what Perrault had said happened. In the later version from the Grimms, they have their eyes pecked out by birds on Cinderella’s wedding day.

There must be plenty of other versions besides; variations of the story have been traced both to ancient China and to ancient Egypt.

The story of The Pied Piper of Hamelin appears to be unique–or at least highly unusual–in the Grimm canon in that it seems to refer to a real event, even if we are no longer sure what that real event was. Incidentally, this story is not included in the Grimm’s famous collection of 201 fairy tales (which are always numbered 1-200, preserving a printing error in the first edition where the last two stories were given the same number). Rather, it appears in a later, smaller collection.

While not a fairy tale from the Grimms, the story of Dick Whittington and his cat is at least partially true. There really was a poor boy by that name who grew up to be Lord Mayor of London. He left his money as an endowment for a children’s hospital. Did he really start his fortune by selling a stray cat he had adopted, and did he really imagine he heard the church bells in London calling him to turn back when he was ready to give up and go back to his village? Who knows?

One can find numerous instances in mythology in which a story apparently alludes to a real event. Perseus went to Crete to kill the Minotaur in his labyrinth because the King of Crete demanded that Greeks be sent each year as sacrifices. Archeologists have established that there were mazes on Crete and, further, people were thrown to a bull (or bulls) in an arena.

Similarly, while Zeus may not have changed into a bull to carry Europa across the sea, Herodotus began his History by telling about the Greek sailors who abducted and raped a Phoenician woman named Europa, and of the trouble which ensued.

Some myths and fairy tales seem to be straightforward parables. Narcissus and Echo talks about how you can’t get your self-image from other people–yet you can’t know yourself all by yourself either. Eros and Psyche is about how sometimes you have to trust your emotions in place of pure cold reason–even the names of the characters is a clue.

The Tales of the Brothers Grimm, though, generally seem pretty murky when taken as designed to teach a moral. This may have to do in part with they having been oral traditions which were heard and misheard, repeated and misrepeated, over a very long time.

Of related interest are nursery rhymes. A great many of these appear to have been satirical in nature when first published. Francois Perrault published the original Mother Goose, and it is taken to contain oblique references to scandals at the French court. Hardly any of the rhymes now called Mother Goose rhymes are included in his work, as the name has come to be a kind of generic term. Nevertheless, a great many of the Mother Goose rhymes which aren’t “really” Mother Goose rhymes are likewise taken to be satirical in intent.

There are probably a good many bogus interpretations circulating though. For instance, I’ve read several times that “Ring Around a Rosie” refers to the Black Death. And I’ve read that there is no record whatever of the song being known prior to the 19th Century.

Some historians have suggested that Humpty Dumpty was Cardinal Wolsley, who rode high as the Lord Chancellor, and ended his last days sick and penniless, cared for in a convent.

I’ve read that there really was a Jack Horner. He got rich overnight, and their is some speculation that it was by unscrupulous means. I think the “what a good boy am I” line may refer to his boring people with self-important bragging about his success–sort of an early Donald Trump or Ted Turner.

A final point: the Brothers Grimms were lawyers. Add them to the list with Gandhi, Lincoln, etc. of people who were attornies but seem to have been all-round neat guys anyway.

Make that “attorneys”. You’d think someone who’s been licensed in two states could at least spell it.

Penguin publishes a good collection of stories from the Brothers Grimm, and they do some interesting things with it. For instance, the brothers wrote a few of their stories in regional dialect. To replicate this, some stories are translated so they sound as though they are told by a person speaking a distinctive dialect. For instance, the story of The Griffin’s Tale (one of my all-time favorites) is told in an Irish dialect.