Guardians of the Fairy Tale

f Guardians of the Fairy Tale:
The Brothers GrimmBy Thomas O'Neill Once upon a time there lived in Germany two brothers who loved a good story—one with magic and danger, royalty and rogues. As boys they played and studied together, tight as a knot, savoring their childhood in a small town. But their father died unexpectedly, and the family grew poor. One brother became sickly; the other, serious beyond his years. At school they met a wise man who led them to a treasure—a library of old books with tales more seductive than any they had ever heard. Inspired, the brothers began collecting their own stories, folktales told to them mostly by women, young and old. Soon the brothers brought forth their own treasure—a book of fairy tales that would enchant millions in faraway places for generations to come. | |
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.

"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." | | * * * |

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: "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.

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. | | * * * | 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.

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. | | | | * * * | | 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. | | | * * * | | | | 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. | | |