Grimms

Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786-1859)

The Brothers Grimm are world famous for their collection of Märchen (fairy tales), which are constantly being republished, retold and adapted.

Jacob and Wilhelm were the oldest of six siblings. They had a happy childhood in Hanau (near Frankfurt am Main) and in Steinau an der Straße, where their father was a magistrate. In 1802 and 1803 respectively they became students at the University of Marburg. Jacob studied law with Friedrich Karl von Savigny, a conservative jurist. In 1805 Jacob was Savigny’s assistant on a nine-month visit to Paris. On 2 December 1805, Napoleon defeated the Austrians and the Russians at the Battle of Austerlitz, which caused the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. The brothers found work as librarians in the Royal Library in Kassel, which was at the time the capital of the new Kingdom of Westphalia (1807-1813), ruled by Napoleon’s brother Jérôme Bonaparte.

Previous collections of Volksmärchen (folk tales) had been published by Johann Karl August Musäus and Benedikte Naubert in the 1780s, but they lacked the immediacy and the cultivated naivety of the Grimm’s tales. The Grimms were also influenced by Ludwig Tieck’s Volksmärchen (1797, 3 volumes).

The Grimms’ tales were first published as Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales, abbreviated by scholars as KHM) in two volumes in 1812 and 1815. The brothers dedicated their collection is dedicated to the writer Bettina von Arnim.

The brothers began collecting these tales in Kassel, inspired by their friends Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, who had published a collection of folk songs, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Boy’s Magical Horn, 2 vols, 1805 and 1808). Jacob and Wilhelm got their first stories from the middle-class family next door: the apothecary’s wife Dorothea Catharina Wild and her daughters Margarete Wild, Henriette Dorothea Wild and Marie Elisabeth Wild. They also collected stories told by their sister Lotte’s friends, the Hassenpflug sisters Amalia, Johanna and Marie (whose father would later become a district administrator). Their mother, Jeanette Hasenpflug, came from a Huguenot family from Dauphiné in southeastern France. She provided the Grimms with a version of Puss-in-Boots which they included in their first edition.

The brothers sent their initial transcripts of thirty tales to Clemens Brentano on 17 October 1810. These transcripts were rediscovered in the twentieth century. They were first published by Heinz Rölleke in 1975 (see further reading in German, below).

Between the first volume in 1812 and the second volume in 1815, the Grimms met another important source: Dorothea Viehmann (1755-1815), a tailor’s widow, who sold her garden produce to them. They printed at least eighteen of Dorothea Viehmann’s stories, and used the variants she gave them to revise many more tales. The second edition of the KHM appeared in 1819-1822 (3 vols).

In 1825 the Grimms became professors at Göttingen University. The same year, Wilhelm married Dorothea; Jacob remained a bachelor but continued to live with them. In 1837 the brothers were dismissed from their posts at Göttingen for refusing to sign an oath of allegiance to Ernst Augustus, King of Hanover. They moved to Berlin at the invitation of the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhelm IV, and began work on their Dictionary of the German Language, available here. Jacob was a delegate to the Parliament in Frankfurt am Main during the liberal democratic revolution of 1848.

The Grimm’s tales include:

Der Froschkönig (KHM 1); The Frog Prince

Marienkind (KHM 3); Our Lady’s Child

Der Wolf und die sieben Jungen Geißlein (KHM 5); The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats

Rapunzel (KHM 12)

Hänsel und Gretel (KHM 15); Hansel and Gretel

Von dem Fischer un syner Frau (KHM 19); The Fisherman and his Wife

Aschenputtel (KHM 21); Cinderella

Rotkäppchen (KHM 26); Little Red Riding Hood

Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten (KHM 27); The Musicians of Bremen

Von dem Machandelboom (KHM 47); The Juniper Tree

Dornröschen (KHM 50); Sleeping Beauty

Schneewittchen (KHM 53); Snow White

Rumpelstilzchen (KHM 55); Rumpelstiltskin

The Grimms’ tales are available here in German, English, French, and many other languages:

https://www.grimmstories.com/en/grimm_fairy-tales/index

Around the same time as the Grimms published their Märchen, E. T. A. Hoffmann was publishing his famous tales.

Modern authors who draw on the Grimms include Günter Grass, Angela Carter, Irmtraud Morgner and Kerstin Hensel.

English Translations

Joyce Crick (translator), Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm: Selected Tales (Oxford World’s Classics) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); republished as Snow White and Other Tales

David Luke (translator), Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm: Selected Tales (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982)

Maria Tatar (translator), The Fairest of Them All: Snow White and 21 Tales of Mothers and Daughters (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020)

Jack Zipes (translator), The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, 3rd edition (New York: Bantam, 2003)