List 3

Such bowdlerizing went on for a half century.

In Grimms’ Fairy Tales there is a story called “The Stubborn Child” that is only one paragraph long.

Maria Tatar seems to be inheriting the position of dean of fairy tales, and in her “Annotated Brothers Grimm” (2004)—this is one of Norton’s series of copiously annotated classics—she apparently feels that she can afford to be nice to everyone.

The premodern tale tellers might also be thought of as descendants of the scops of the Anglo-Saxon Dark Ages or of the griots of West Africa, men whose job it was to carry stories.

In the words of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in “The Madwoman in the Attic,” she is “patriarchy’s ideal woman.”

Finally, she sinks into utter passivity, immobilized in a glass coffin, waiting for her prince to come.

They come in, clobber you over the head, and then go away.

Biographers say that they had markedly different personalities—Jacob was difficult and introverted, Wilhelm easygoing—but this probably drew them closer.

In Grimms’ Fairy Tales there is a story called “The Stubborn Child” that is only one paragraph long.

When, at the end, she reneges on the deal, he becomes so angry that he tears himself in two.

That was their other lodestar: their work.

The other kind of fairy tale, the ancestor of the literary variety, is the oral tale, whose origins cannot be dated, since they precede recoverable history.

In Grimms’ Fairy Tales there is a story called “The Stubborn Child” that is only one paragraph long.

Biographers say that they had markedly different personalities—Jacob was difficult and introverted, Wilhelm easygoing—but this probably drew them closer.

Louis Snyder, in his book “Roots of German Nationalism” (1978), has a whole chapter on what he sees as the Grimms’ celebration, and encouragement, of pernicious national traits: “obedience, discipline, authoritarianism, militarism, glorification of violence,” and, above all, nationalism.

Then she laughs in the wolf’s face, rips off his shirt, and throws that, too, into the fire:


She will lay his fearful head on her lap and she will pick out the lice from his pelt and perhaps she will put the lice into her mouth and eat them, as he will bid her, as she would do in a savage marriage ceremony.

The reason that most people value fairy tales, I would say, is that they do not detain us with hope but simply validate what is.

A typical, if especially appalling, case is “The Juniper Tree.”

The other kind of fairy tale, the ancestor of the literary variety, is the oral tale, whose origins cannot be dated, since they precede recoverable history.

Nazism fed on many trends that, previously, had been harmless—for example, the physical-culture movement of the early twentieth century, the fad for going on nature hikes and doing calisthenics.

Above all, any matter unsuitable for the young had been expunged.

The Grimms grew up in the febrile atmosphere of German Romanticism, which involved intense nationalism and, in support of that, a fascination with the supposedly deep, pre-rational culture of the German peasantry, the Volk.

Wilhelm remained faithful to folklore, and it was he who, after the second edition of “Household Tales” (1819), did all the editorial work on the later editions, the last of which was published in 1857.

In “The Frog Prince,” he says, the reason the princess dislikes the amphibian in question is that the “tacky, clammy” feel of a frog’s skin is connected to children’s feelings about the sex organs.

Others of the stories have spunky heroines.

The historian Robert Darnton compares the oral tale tellers to the Yugoslavian bards studied in the twentieth century by Albert Lord and Milman Parry, in the effort to understand how the Homeric epics were composed.

In “The Frog Prince,” he says, the reason the princess dislikes the amphibian in question is that the “tacky, clammy” feel of a frog’s skin is connected to children’s feelings about the sex organs.

The folklore scholar Maria Tatar supplies three sentences from the brothers’ original draft of “Briar Rose,” which we call “The Sleeping Beauty”:


[Briar Rose] pricked her finger with the spindle and immediately fell into a deep sleep.

Every narrator reinvents the tale.

That is, these women at least have some gumption, unlike the little Barbies they are trying to eliminate.

In the Grimms’ time, industrialization was starting to simplify or eliminate certain domestic chores.

The Grimms grew up in the febrile atmosphere of German Romanticism, which involved intense nationalism and, in support of that, a fascination with the supposedly deep, pre-rational culture of the German peasantry, the Volk.

To align the tale with the hearthside tradition, the author may also employ a certain naïveté of style.

If ever there was a stimulus to German intellectuals’ belief in a German people that was culturally and racially one, and to the hope of a politically unified Germany, this was it.

But scholars tend to associate fairy tales with women, at home, telling stories to one another to relieve the tedium of repetitive tasks such as spinning (which often turns up in these narratives).

In response, she picks him up and hurls him against a wall, whereupon he explodes and his little guts dribble down the plaster.

Still today, certain people, notably feminists, would like to move them to the back shelves of the library, because, so often, the villain is a woman, doing violence to girls, and also because the girls seldom resist.

Wilhelm remained faithful to folklore, and it was he who, after the second edition of “Household Tales” (1819), did all the editorial work on the later editions, the last of which was published in 1857.

The rewritings that seem most persuasive are sometimes more unsettling than the Grimm versions—for example, Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves,” inspired by “Little Red Riding Hood.”

To align the tale with the hearthside tradition, the author may also employ a certain naïveté of style.

The folklore scholar Maria Tatar supplies three sentences from the brothers’ original draft of “Briar Rose,” which we call “The Sleeping Beauty”:


[Briar Rose] pricked her finger with the spindle and immediately fell into a deep sleep.

Such are the mysteries of literary criticism.

But soon afterward they began a different project, which culminated in their famous book “Nursery and Household Tales” (“Die Kinder- und Hausmärchen”), first published in two volumes, in 1812 and 1815, and now generally known as Grimms’ Fairy Tales.

Each woman would add or subtract a little of this and that, and so the story changed.

This makes some of the notes in her edition bewilderingly latitudinarian—she nods to Zipes, to Bettelheim, to Gilbert and Gubar.

In the Grimms’ time, industrialization was starting to simplify or eliminate certain domestic chores.

Presumably, as your child is nodding off, you are supposed to give her a shake and tell her how the prince’s rescue of Snow White reflects the hegemony of the patriarchy.

Biographers say that they had markedly different personalities—Jacob was difficult and introverted, Wilhelm easygoing—but this probably drew them closer.

Most important, the brothers, especially Wilhelm, revised the tales thoroughly, making them more detailed, more elegant, and more Christian, as one edition followed another.

Finally, she sinks into utter passivity, immobilized in a glass coffin, waiting for her prince to come.

Fortunately, this causes him to turn into a prince, but, even if he hadn’t, many of us would have endorsed her action.

But soon afterward they began a different project, which culminated in their famous book “Nursery and Household Tales” (“Die Kinder- und Hausmärchen”), first published in two volumes, in 1812 and 1815, and now generally known as Grimms’ Fairy Tales.

Bettelheim argued that fairy tales, by allowing children to attach their unsavory repressed desires to villains (dragons, witches) who were then conquered, helped the children to integrate and control such desires.

A dildo was once affixed to her hand, apparently in celebration of International Women’s Day.

Above all, any matter unsuitable for the young had been expunged.

A gnome, Rumpelstiltskin, offers to do the job for her.

They claim that they did not change what Viehmann or the others said: “No details have been added or embellished.”

Writers reluctant to part with the Grimm tales suggested that we go on reading them to our children but point out the poisonous stereotypes they contain.

Zipes, a professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, has written sixty books on or of folk tales: critical studies, collections, translations.

Eventually, their specialties diverged somewhat.

“We’ll cook him up in a stew.”

As for the scarcity of resources, Robert Darnton has written that a peasant’s basic diet around that time consisted of a porridge of bread and water, sometimes with a few homegrown vegetables thrown in.

This is an admirable scruple, but a puzzling one, because it is largely absent from other Grimm tales, many of which feature mutilation, dismemberment, and cannibalism, not to speak of ordinary homicide, often inflicted on children by their parents or guardians.

While Bettelheim tells us that fairy tales help us adjust, Jack Zipes has said the opposite: that the value of fairy tales is that they teach us not to adjust, because the oppressive society in which we live is something we should refuse to adjust to.

Bettelheim argued that fairy tales, by allowing children to attach their unsavory repressed desires to villains (dragons, witches) who were then conquered, helped the children to integrate and control such desires.

The blizzard will die down.

Young men fresh from reading Plutarch at university began sharing stories about what the troll said to the woodcutter, and publishing collections of these Märchen, as folk tales were called.

But scholars tend to associate fairy tales with women, at home, telling stories to one another to relieve the tedium of repetitive tasks such as spinning (which often turns up in these narratives).

This is an admirable scruple, but a puzzling one, because it is largely absent from other Grimm tales, many of which feature mutilation, dismemberment, and cannibalism, not to speak of ordinary homicide, often inflicted on children by their parents or guardians.

Louis Snyder, in his book “Roots of German Nationalism” (1978), has a whole chapter on what he sees as the Grimms’ celebration, and encouragement, of pernicious national traits: “obedience, discipline, authoritarianism, militarism, glorification of violence,” and, above all, nationalism.

In the Grimms’ time, industrialization was starting to simplify or eliminate certain domestic chores.

In the first edition, Rapunzel, imprisoned in the tower by her wicked godmother, goes to the window every evening and lets down her long hair so that the prince can climb up and enjoy her company.

W. H. Auden once described the Grimm-sanitizers as “the Society for the Scientific Diet, the Association of Positivist Parents, the League for the Promotion of Worthwhile Leisure, the Cooperative Camp of Prudent Progressives.”

Then she laughs in the wolf’s face, rips off his shirt, and throws that, too, into the fire:


She will lay his fearful head on her lap and she will pick out the lice from his pelt and perhaps she will put the lice into her mouth and eat them, as he will bid her, as she would do in a savage marriage ceremony.

In any case, she says, such characterizations are unfair to Jews.

Nazism fed on many trends that, previously, had been harmless—for example, the physical-culture movement of the early twentieth century, the fad for going on nature hikes and doing calisthenics.

Another virtue of Tatar’s edition is that she has isolated, at the end, a group of “Tales for Adults”—stories that she feels should be examined by parents before they are read to children.

In “The Frog Prince,” he says, the reason the princess dislikes the amphibian in question is that the “tacky, clammy” feel of a frog’s skin is connected to children’s feelings about the sex organs.

After the Second World War, there was a powerful movement in the United States for realism and wholesomeness in children’s books.

No more cannibal stews but, rather, “Judy Goes to the Firehouse.”

Here it is, in a translation by the fairy-tale scholar Jack Zipes:


Once upon a time there was a stubborn child who never did what his mother told him to do.

As he puts it, fairy tales may “expose the crazed drive for power that many individual politicians, corporate leaders, governments, church leaders, and petty tyrants evince and to pierce the hypocrisy of their moral stances.”

Zipes is a Marxist of the Frankfurt school.

Finally, he invades her bed.

In “The Ugly Duckling,” for example, the duck, in envying the swans, shows “a distinct class bias if not racist tendencies.”

Finally, oral tales, when transcribed faithfully, are often barely readable.

But you do not have to be a member of any special political camp to object to the Grimm tales; you only need to be a person interested in protecting children’s mental health.

One camp here consists of the psychoanalytic critics, most notoriously Bruno Bettelheim, whose 1976 book “The Uses of Enchantment” dropped like a hot brick into the tepid waters of children’s literature of that period.

In Grimms’ Fairy Tales there is a story called “The Stubborn Child” that is only one paragraph long.

That way, his daughter will inherit more money.

Such tales, which came into being at the end of the seventeenth century, are original literary works—short stories, really—except that they have fanciful subject matter: unhappy ducks, princesses who dance all night, and so on.

The blizzard died down, leaving the mountains as randomly covered with snow as if a blind woman had thrown a sheet over them, the upper branches of the forest pines limed, creaking, swollen with the fall.

Though their most popular and enduring book was “Household Tales,” they were serious philologists, and, in the last decades of their lives, what they cared about most was their German Dictionary, a project on the scale of the Oxford English Dictionary.

When you turn a page and find that the next story is entitled “How Children Played Butcher with Each Other,” should you worry?

In the Grimms’ time, industrialization was starting to simplify or eliminate certain domestic chores.

Included in this section is “The Stubborn Child,” together with such items as “The Hand with the Knife” and “The Jew in the Brambles.”

In Grimms’ Fairy Tales there is a story called “The Stubborn Child” that is only one paragraph long.

She tries to find some basis for what seems to her the surprising appearance of anti-Semitic feeling in a few of these nineteenth-century stories.

This is an admirable scruple, but a puzzling one, because it is largely absent from other Grimm tales, many of which feature mutilation, dismemberment, and cannibalism, not to speak of ordinary homicide, often inflicted on children by their parents or guardians.

His newest entry is “The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre” (Princeton), but it does little more than repeat the theory of fairy tales that Zipes has been putting forth for several decades.

Toes are chopped off; severed fingers fly through the air.

On a rock at the edge of Copenhagen harbor sits a bronze statue of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid (who, unlike Disney’s, does not get her man).

If ever there was a stimulus to German intellectuals’ belief in a German people that was culturally and racially one, and to the hope of a politically unified Germany, this was it.

Young men fresh from reading Plutarch at university began sharing stories about what the troll said to the woodcutter, and publishing collections of these Märchen, as folk tales were called.

They had political reasons, too—above all, Napoleon’s invasion of their beloved Hesse, and the installation of his brother Jérôme as the ruler of the Kingdom of Westphalia, a French vassal state.

Another virtue of Tatar’s edition is that she has isolated, at the end, a group of “Tales for Adults”—stories that she feels should be examined by parents before they are read to children.

Gilbert and Gubar actually defend the wicked stepmothers, whose arts, they say, “even while they kill, confer the only measure of power available to a woman in a patriarchal culture.”

Though Wilhelm tried to Christianize the tales, they still invoke nature, more than God, as life’s driving force, and nature is not kind.

The historian Robert Darnton compares the oral tale tellers to the Yugoslavian bards studied in the twentieth century by Albert Lord and Milman Parry, in the effort to understand how the Homeric epics were composed.

Marina Warner, in her book on fairy tales, “From the Beast to the Blonde” (1994), says that most modern writers ignore the Grimms’ “historical realism.”

In keeping with those positions, he believes that fairy tales, because they are grounded in a naïve morality, offer us a “counterworld,” which encourages us to step back, consider the dubious morality of our own world, and take steps to reform it.

W. H. Auden once described the Grimm-sanitizers as “the Society for the Scientific Diet, the Association of Positivist Parents, the League for the Promotion of Worthwhile Leisure, the Cooperative Camp of Prudent Progressives.”

And so the tale, without details to attach it to anything in particular, becomes universal.

In sum, the Grimm tales contain almost no psychology—a fact underlined by their brevity.

To provoke such recoil, you do not have to resemble a sex organ.

One is the literary fairy tale, the kind written, most famously, by Charles Perrault, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Hans Christian Andersen.

The widowers tended to remarry, and the new wife often found that her children had to compete for scarce resources with the children of the husband’s earlier union.

The other kind of fairy tale, the ancestor of the literary variety, is the oral tale, whose origins cannot be dated, since they precede recoverable history.

After the war, accordingly, the Allies banned the Grimm tales from the school curricula in some cities.

In response, she picks him up and hurls him against a wall, whereupon he explodes and his little guts dribble down the plaster.

Nazism fed on many trends that, previously, had been harmless—for example, the physical-culture movement of the early twentieth century, the fad for going on nature hikes and doing calisthenics.

His newest entry is “The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre” (Princeton), but it does little more than repeat the theory of fairy tales that Zipes has been putting forth for several decades.

Every narrator reinvents the tale.

The widowers tended to remarry, and the new wife often found that her children had to compete for scarce resources with the children of the husband’s earlier union.

And though ethnic pride was the Nazis’ chief justification for their movement, that wasn’t necessarily the fault of ethnic pride.

When, in “Snow White,” the heroine is being hunted down by the terrible queen-stepmother, she does almost nothing to save herself.

As he puts it, fairy tales may “expose the crazed drive for power that many individual politicians, corporate leaders, governments, church leaders, and petty tyrants evince and to pierce the hypocrisy of their moral stances.”

She asks:


What shall I do with my shawl?

But the reviews and the sales of the Grimms’ first edition were disappointing to them.

Presumably, as your child is nodding off, you are supposed to give her a shake and tell her how the prince’s rescue of Snow White reflects the hegemony of the patriarchy.

In response, she picks him up and hurls him against a wall, whereupon he explodes and his little guts dribble down the plaster.

Zipes decided that the child was a boy.)

Nazism fed on many trends that, previously, had been harmless—for example, the physical-culture movement of the early twentieth century, the fad for going on nature hikes and doing calisthenics.

The king and his retinue had just returned and they too, along with the flies on the wall and everything else in the castle, fell asleep.

They had political reasons, too—above all, Napoleon’s invasion of their beloved Hesse, and the installation of his brother Jérôme as the ruler of the Kingdom of Westphalia, a French vassal state.

At the same time, some writers have recommended that the feminist critics look more closely at the Grimm collection.

Louis Snyder, in his book “Roots of German Nationalism” (1978), has a whole chapter on what he sees as the Grimms’ celebration, and encouragement, of pernicious national traits: “obedience, discipline, authoritarianism, militarism, glorification of violence,” and, above all, nationalism.

Independently, Jacob wrote twenty-one books; Wilhelm, fourteen; the two men in collaboration, eight—a prodigious output.

Maria Tatar seems to be inheriting the position of dean of fairy tales, and in her “Annotated Brothers Grimm” (2004)—this is one of Norton’s series of copiously annotated classics—she apparently feels that she can afford to be nice to everyone.

The Grimms grew up in the febrile atmosphere of German Romanticism, which involved intense nationalism and, in support of that, a fascination with the supposedly deep, pre-rational culture of the German peasantry, the Volk.

In the first edition, Rapunzel, imprisoned in the tower by her wicked godmother, goes to the window every evening and lets down her long hair so that the prince can climb up and enjoy her company.

You get used to the outrages, though.

(This is the trend that Maurice Sendak, to the outrage of many, bucked with “Where the Wild Things Are,” in 1963.)

Perrault had written a famous version of “The Sleeping Beauty” more than a century before—Wilhelm, in expanding “Briar Rose,” probably drew on it—and the story was older than Perrault.

In the words of the English novelist Angela Carter, who wrote some thrilling Grimm-based stories, asking where a fairy tale came from is like asking who invented the meatball.

Eventually, their specialties diverged somewhat.

This suggests that the tales were supplied by humble people, and the brothers say that their primary source, Dorothea Viehmann, was a peasant woman from a village near Kassel.

This is an admirable scruple, but a puzzling one, because it is largely absent from other Grimm tales, many of which feature mutilation, dismemberment, and cannibalism, not to speak of ordinary homicide, often inflicted on children by their parents or guardians.

Wilhelm, when he was in his late thirties, made bold to get married, but the lady in question simply moved into the brothers’ house and, having known them for decades, made the domestic operations conform to their work schedule.

The rewritings that seem most persuasive are sometimes more unsettling than the Grimm versions—for example, Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves,” inspired by “Little Red Riding Hood.”

Bettelheim argued that fairy tales, by allowing children to attach their unsavory repressed desires to villains (dragons, witches) who were then conquered, helped the children to integrate and control such desires.

Many items in the Grimms’ first edition came not from interviewees but from other fairy-tale collections.

Biographers say that they had markedly different personalities—Jacob was difficult and introverted, Wilhelm easygoing—but this probably drew them closer.

Bettelheim argued that fairy tales, by allowing children to attach their unsavory repressed desires to villains (dragons, witches) who were then conquered, helped the children to integrate and control such desires.

In other words, her culture was basically French, and she was no doubt well acquainted with French literary fairy tales, Perrault’s and others’.

The people who supplied the first-edition tales were largely middle class: the brothers’ relatives, friends, and friends of friends.

And so the tale, without details to attach it to anything in particular, becomes universal.

One camp here consists of the psychoanalytic critics, most notoriously Bruno Bettelheim, whose 1976 book “The Uses of Enchantment” dropped like a hot brick into the tepid waters of children’s literature of that period.

Still today, certain people, notably feminists, would like to move them to the back shelves of the library, because, so often, the villain is a woman, doing violence to girls, and also because the girls seldom resist.

If some of this seems comical, it should be said that Zipes, in his books, shows a real love of fairy tales, especially the Grimms’.

According to the novelist Alison Lurie, an expert on children’s books, it is primarily the most popular tales, especially the ones adapted by Disney, that feature the wilting violets.

One camp here consists of the psychoanalytic critics, most notoriously Bruno Bettelheim, whose 1976 book “The Uses of Enchantment” dropped like a hot brick into the tepid waters of children’s literature of that period.

This is an admirable scruple, but a puzzling one, because it is largely absent from other Grimm tales, many of which feature mutilation, dismemberment, and cannibalism, not to speak of ordinary homicide, often inflicted on children by their parents or guardians.

Some stories do tear you apart, usually those where the violence is joined to some emphatically opposite quality, such as peace or tenderness.

Such tales, which came into being at the end of the seventeenth century, are original literary works—short stories, really—except that they have fanciful subject matter: unhappy ducks, princesses who dance all night, and so on.

But the worst thing in the story is that, beyond disobedience, it gives us not a single piece of information about the child.

Bettelheim argued that fairy tales, by allowing children to attach their unsavory repressed desires to villains (dragons, witches) who were then conquered, helped the children to integrate and control such desires.

Had Wilhelm been consorting with the wrong people?

So he has twelve coffins built, each with a little pillow.

So she props up the boy’s body in a chair, puts his head on top, and ties a scarf around the neck to hide the wound.

As for the scarcity of resources, Robert Darnton has written that a peasant’s basic diet around that time consisted of a porridge of bread and water, sometimes with a few homegrown vegetables thrown in.

Here it is, in a translation by the fairy-tale scholar Jack Zipes:


Once upon a time there was a stubborn child who never did what his mother told him to do.

Louis Snyder, in his book “Roots of German Nationalism” (1978), has a whole chapter on what he sees as the Grimms’ celebration, and encouragement, of pernicious national traits: “obedience, discipline, authoritarianism, militarism, glorification of violence,” and, above all, nationalism.

In his view, it was because of that nasty struggle that the Grimm tales so often featured a wicked stepmother.

So she props up the boy’s body in a chair, puts his head on top, and ties a scarf around the neck to hide the wound.

This became a feature of Nazism—an argument for purity, strength, the soil—but it existed also in countries that fought the Nazis, including the United States.

As he puts it, fairy tales may “expose the crazed drive for power that many individual politicians, corporate leaders, governments, church leaders, and petty tyrants evince and to pierce the hypocrisy of their moral stances.”

Perrault had written a famous version of “The Sleeping Beauty” more than a century before—Wilhelm, in expanding “Briar Rose,” probably drew on it—and the story was older than Perrault.

Marina Warner, in her book on fairy tales, “From the Beast to the Blonde” (1994), says that most modern writers ignore the Grimms’ “historical realism.”

Wilhelm, when he was in his late thirties, made bold to get married, but the lady in question simply moved into the brothers’ house and, having known them for decades, made the domestic operations conform to their work schedule.

This is an admirable scruple, but a puzzling one, because it is largely absent from other Grimm tales, many of which feature mutilation, dismemberment, and cannibalism, not to speak of ordinary homicide, often inflicted on children by their parents or guardians.

Louis Snyder, in his book “Roots of German Nationalism” (1978), has a whole chapter on what he sees as the Grimms’ celebration, and encouragement, of pernicious national traits: “obedience, discipline, authoritarianism, militarism, glorification of violence,” and, above all, nationalism.

See! sweet and sound she sleeps in granny’s bed, between the paws of the tender wolf.

In keeping with those positions, he believes that fairy tales, because they are grounded in a naïve morality, offer us a “counterworld,” which encourages us to step back, consider the dubious morality of our own world, and take steps to reform it.

Does the violence in the Grimm collection need a symbolic reading?

In “The Ugly Duckling,” for example, the duck, in envying the swans, shows “a distinct class bias if not racist tendencies.”

And here, after seven successive revisions, is how that passage reads in the final edition of “Household Tales”:


[Briar Rose] took hold of the spindle and tried to spin.

Such tales, which came into being at the end of the seventeenth century, are original literary works—short stories, really—except that they have fanciful subject matter: unhappy ducks, princesses who dance all night, and so on.

The premodern tale tellers might also be thought of as descendants of the scops of the Anglo-Saxon Dark Ages or of the griots of West Africa, men whose job it was to carry stories.

Toes are chopped off; severed fingers fly through the air.

The historian Robert Darnton compares the oral tale tellers to the Yugoslavian bards studied in the twentieth century by Albert Lord and Milman Parry, in the effort to understand how the Homeric epics were composed.

The horses fell asleep in the stables, the dogs in the courtyard, the pigeons on the roof, and the flies on the wall.

But soon afterward they began a different project, which culminated in their famous book “Nursery and Household Tales” (“Die Kinder- und Hausmärchen”), first published in two volumes, in 1812 and 1815, and now generally known as Grimms’ Fairy Tales.

At the same time, some writers have recommended that the feminist critics look more closely at the Grimm collection.

The Grimms grew up in the febrile atmosphere of German Romanticism, which involved intense nationalism and, in support of that, a fascination with the supposedly deep, pre-rational culture of the German peasantry, the Volk.

All around the castle grew a hedge of thorns, concealing everything from sight.

The reason that most people value fairy tales, I would say, is that they do not detain us with hope but simply validate what is.

This is an admirable scruple, but a puzzling one, because it is largely absent from other Grimm tales, many of which feature mutilation, dismemberment, and cannibalism, not to speak of ordinary homicide, often inflicted on children by their parents or guardians.

She bundled up her shawl and threw it on the blaze, which instantly consumed it.

Such an interpretation makes some sense.

Fairy tales tell us that such knowledge, or fear, is not fantastic but realistic.

The other kind of fairy tale, the ancestor of the literary variety, is the oral tale, whose origins cannot be dated, since they precede recoverable history.

To align the tale with the hearthside tradition, the author may also employ a certain naïveté of style.

In the words of the English novelist Angela Carter, who wrote some thrilling Grimm-based stories, asking where a fairy tale came from is like asking who invented the meatball.

This is a hair-raising story, but also, I think, a wishful fantasy—that the children might die without crying.

To provoke such recoil, you do not have to resemble a sex organ.

Since the Second World War, some people have argued that the violence of the Grimm tales is an expression of the German character.

As he puts it, fairy tales may “expose the crazed drive for power that many individual politicians, corporate leaders, governments, church leaders, and petty tyrants evince and to pierce the hypocrisy of their moral stances.”

The folklore scholar Maria Tatar supplies three sentences from the brothers’ original draft of “Briar Rose,” which we call “The Sleeping Beauty”:


[Briar Rose] pricked her finger with the spindle and immediately fell into a deep sleep.

Maria Tatar seems to be inheriting the position of dean of fairy tales, and in her “Annotated Brothers Grimm” (2004)—this is one of Norton’s series of copiously annotated classics—she apparently feels that she can afford to be nice to everyone.

But in the nineteenth century there were fervent nationalist campaigns in most European countries.

Over the years, her head has been sawed off repeatedly; she has been blasted off her rock with explosives.

While Bettelheim tells us that fairy tales help us adjust, Jack Zipes has said the opposite: that the value of fairy tales is that they teach us not to adjust, because the oppressive society in which we live is something we should refuse to adjust to.

In keeping with those positions, he believes that fairy tales, because they are grounded in a naïve morality, offer us a “counterworld,” which encourages us to step back, consider the dubious morality of our own world, and take steps to reform it.

As Tatar has pointed out in her book “The Classic Fairy Tales” (1999), what the Grimms produced falls somewhere between the oral and the literary tale.

Such tales, which came into being at the end of the seventeenth century, are original literary works—short stories, really—except that they have fanciful subject matter: unhappy ducks, princesses who dance all night, and so on.

In “The Frog Prince,” he says, the reason the princess dislikes the amphibian in question is that the “tacky, clammy” feel of a frog’s skin is connected to children’s feelings about the sex organs.

Writers reluctant to part with the Grimm tales suggested that we go on reading them to our children but point out the poisonous stereotypes they contain.

Each year it grew higher, and finally it surrounded the entire castle and grew so thickly beyond it that not a trace of the castle was to be seen, not even the flag on the roof.

The Grimms, in the introduction to their first edition, assert that almost all their material was “collected” from oral traditions of their region and is “purely German in its origins.”

This suggests that the tales were supplied by humble people, and the brothers say that their primary source, Dorothea Viehmann, was a peasant woman from a village near Kassel.

Gilbert and Gubar actually defend the wicked stepmothers, whose arts, they say, “even while they kill, confer the only measure of power available to a woman in a patriarchal culture.”

The historian Robert Darnton compares the oral tale tellers to the Yugoslavian bards studied in the twentieth century by Albert Lord and Milman Parry, in the effort to understand how the Homeric epics were composed.

A. S. Byatt has written that this is the real terror of the story: “It doesn’t feel like a warning to naughty infants.

Tatar offers an example from the first draft of the Grimms’ first edition.

Hence the many fairy-tale collections of the period, including the Grimms’.

The very moment that she felt the prick she sank down into the bed that was right there and fell into a deep sleep.

A typical, if especially appalling, case is “The Juniper Tree.”

After he was lowered into his grave and covered over with earth, one of his little arms suddenly emerged and reached up into the air.

Other writers have proposed that we revise the tales again.

But scholars tend to associate fairy tales with women, at home, telling stories to one another to relieve the tedium of repetitive tasks such as spinning (which often turns up in these narratives).

Some stories do tear you apart, usually those where the violence is joined to some emphatically opposite quality, such as peace or tenderness.

The Grimms were told by friends that some of the material in the first edition was too frightening for children, and they did make a few changes.

Maybe, after this life, we will go to Heaven, as the two little girls who starved to death hoped to.

Most literary tales were derived in some measure from folk sources, and, once they were published, they in turn influenced folk versions.

But no sooner had she touched the spindle than the magic spell took effect, and she pricked her finger with it.

In any case, she says, such characterizations are unfair to Jews.

The family lived in a big house in the Hessian village of Hanau, near Kassel, and the boys received a sound primary education at home.

The Grimms grew up in the febrile atmosphere of German Romanticism, which involved intense nationalism and, in support of that, a fascination with the supposedly deep, pre-rational culture of the German peasantry, the Volk.

Marina Warner, in her book on fairy tales, “From the Beast to the Blonde” (1994), says that most modern writers ignore the Grimms’ “historical realism.”

In his view, it was because of that nasty struggle that the Grimm tales so often featured a wicked stepmother.

When you turn a page and find that the next story is entitled “How Children Played Butcher with Each Other,” should you worry?

Such tales, which came into being at the end of the seventeenth century, are original literary works—short stories, really—except that they have fanciful subject matter: unhappy ducks, princesses who dance all night, and so on.

And though ethnic pride was the Nazis’ chief justification for their movement, that wasn’t necessarily the fault of ethnic pride.

That is the movement that the Grimms joined in their early twenties.

In “The Ugly Duckling,” for example, the duck, in envying the swans, shows “a distinct class bias if not racist tendencies.”

The blizzard died down, leaving the mountains as randomly covered with snow as if a blind woman had thrown a sheet over them, the upper branches of the forest pines limed, creaking, swollen with the fall.

With apparent sympathy, Zipes quotes a writer, Irmela Brender, who, saddened that Rumpelstiltskin is destroyed, when all he ever wanted was a little companionship, has proposed a version in which the miller’s daughter, instead of denying Rumpelstiltskin the baby, invites him to move in with the royal family:


“We could do a lot of things together.

Each year it grew higher, and finally it surrounded the entire castle and grew so thickly beyond it that not a trace of the castle was to be seen, not even the flag on the roof.

Independently, Jacob wrote twenty-one books; Wilhelm, fourteen; the two men in collaboration, eight—a prodigious output.

In “The Frog Prince,” he says, the reason the princess dislikes the amphibian in question is that the “tacky, clammy” feel of a frog’s skin is connected to children’s feelings about the sex organs.

This is an admirable scruple, but a puzzling one, because it is largely absent from other Grimm tales, many of which feature mutilation, dismemberment, and cannibalism, not to speak of ordinary homicide, often inflicted on children by their parents or guardians.

The other kind of fairy tale, the ancestor of the literary variety, is the oral tale, whose origins cannot be dated, since they precede recoverable history.

This seems a perfect example of the psychoanalytic critics’ habitual indifference to the obvious.

Furthermore, this particular frog has been pursuing the princess day and night.

Independently, Jacob wrote twenty-one books; Wilhelm, fourteen; the two men in collaboration, eight—a prodigious output.

Though their most popular and enduring book was “Household Tales,” they were serious philologists, and, in the last decades of their lives, what they cared about most was their German Dictionary, a project on the scale of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Young men fresh from reading Plutarch at university began sharing stories about what the troll said to the woodcutter, and publishing collections of these Märchen, as folk tales were called.

Among the pre-modern populations, she records, death in childbirth was the most common cause of female mortality.

Most important, the brothers, especially Wilhelm, revised the tales thoroughly, making them more detailed, more elegant, and more Christian, as one edition followed another.

As for Viehmann, she was not a peasant but the wife of a tailor.

The horses fell asleep in the stables, the dogs in the courtyard, the pigeons on the roof, and the flies on the wall.

As with sections of the Bible, the conciseness makes them seem more profound.

Such feelings are widespread.

The rewritings that seem most persuasive are sometimes more unsettling than the Grimm versions—for example, Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves,” inspired by “Little Red Riding Hood.”

The book is dazzlingly illustrated, by Walter Crane (the best), Arthur Rackham, Gustave Doré, Maxfield Parrish, and others.

So the child’s mother had to go to the grave herself and smack the little arm with a switch.

In the words of the English novelist Angela Carter, who wrote some thrilling Grimm-based stories, asking where a fairy tale came from is like asking who invented the meatball.

Other collections, geared to children, had been more successful, and the brothers decided that their second edition would take that route.

Indeed, they accurately said more or less the opposite: that, while they had been true to the spirit of the original material, the “phrasing” was their own.

Their first edition was not intended for the young, nor, apparently, were the tales told at rural firesides.

In sum, the Grimm tales contain almost no psychology—a fact underlined by their brevity.

After the war, accordingly, the Allies banned the Grimm tales from the school curricula in some cities.

The historian Robert Darnton compares the oral tale tellers to the Yugoslavian bards studied in the twentieth century by Albert Lord and Milman Parry, in the effort to understand how the Homeric epics were composed.

The Grimms grew up in the febrile atmosphere of German Romanticism, which involved intense nationalism and, in support of that, a fascination with the supposedly deep, pre-rational culture of the German peasantry, the Volk.

They were rescue operations.

Now she starts to worry.

As he puts it, fairy tales may “expose the crazed drive for power that many individual politicians, corporate leaders, governments, church leaders, and petty tyrants evince and to pierce the hypocrisy of their moral stances.”

The widowers tended to remarry, and the new wife often found that her children had to compete for scarce resources with the children of the husband’s earlier union.

But soon afterward they began a different project, which culminated in their famous book “Nursery and Household Tales” (“Die Kinder- und Hausmärchen”), first published in two volumes, in 1812 and 1815, and now generally known as Grimms’ Fairy Tales.

In the Grimm story “The Children Living in a Time of Famine” (Tatar moved this, too, into “Tales for Adults”), a mother says to her two daughters, “I will have to kill you so that I’ll have something to eat.”

Writers reluctant to part with the Grimm tales suggested that we go on reading them to our children but point out the poisonous stereotypes they contain.

His newest entry is “The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre” (Princeton), but it does little more than repeat the theory of fairy tales that Zipes has been putting forth for several decades.

According to the novelist Alison Lurie, an expert on children’s books, it is primarily the most popular tales, especially the ones adapted by Disney, that feature the wilting violets.

To provoke such recoil, you do not have to resemble a sex organ.

W. H. Auden once described the Grimm-sanitizers as “the Society for the Scientific Diet, the Association of Positivist Parents, the League for the Promotion of Worthwhile Leisure, the Cooperative Camp of Prudent Progressives.”

If ever there was a stimulus to German intellectuals’ belief in a German people that was culturally and racially one, and to the hope of a politically unified Germany, this was it.

In sum, the Grimm tales contain almost no psychology—a fact underlined by their brevity.

W. H. Auden once described the Grimm-sanitizers as “the Society for the Scientific Diet, the Association of Positivist Parents, the League for the Promotion of Worthwhile Leisure, the Cooperative Camp of Prudent Progressives.”

This suggests that the tales were supplied by humble people, and the brothers say that their primary source, Dorothea Viehmann, was a peasant woman from a village near Kassel.

Two things sustained the Grimms.

As he puts it, fairy tales may “expose the crazed drive for power that many individual politicians, corporate leaders, governments, church leaders, and petty tyrants evince and to pierce the hypocrisy of their moral stances.”

The mother again says to the girls that they must die: “To which they responded, ‘Dearest Mother, we’ll lie down and go to sleep, and we won’t rise again until Judgment Day.’

Even the fire that had been flaming on the hearth stopped and went to sleep, and the roast stopped crackling, and the cook, who was about to pull the kitchen boy’s hair because he had done something wrong, let him go and fell asleep.

The Grimms, in the introduction to their first edition, assert that almost all their material was “collected” from oral traditions of their region and is “purely German in its origins.”

When, in a jolly tale, a boy sees half a man fall down the chimney, are you supposed to get upset?

W. H. Auden once described the Grimm-sanitizers as “the Society for the Scientific Diet, the Association of Positivist Parents, the League for the Promotion of Worthwhile Leisure, the Cooperative Camp of Prudent Progressives.”

Wilhelm, when he was in his late thirties, made bold to get married, but the lady in question simply moved into the brothers’ house and, having known them for decades, made the domestic operations conform to their work schedule.

As he puts it, fairy tales may “expose the crazed drive for power that many individual politicians, corporate leaders, governments, church leaders, and petty tyrants evince and to pierce the hypocrisy of their moral stances.”

Then Rumpelstiltskin would have first turned pale and then blushed for joy.

In Grimms’ Fairy Tales there is a story called “The Stubborn Child” that is only one paragraph long.

Finally, she sinks into utter passivity, immobilized in a glass coffin, waiting for her prince to come.

In the introduction, they dropped the claim of fidelity to folk sources.

Throw it on the fire, dear one.

Was the child buried alive?

After the war, accordingly, the Allies banned the Grimm tales from the school curricula in some cities.

After he was lowered into his grave and covered over with earth, one of his little arms suddenly emerged and reached up into the air.

Each woman would add or subtract a little of this and that, and so the story changed.

Bettelheim argued that fairy tales, by allowing children to attach their unsavory repressed desires to villains (dragons, witches) who were then conquered, helped the children to integrate and control such desires.

His newest entry is “The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre” (Princeton), but it does little more than repeat the theory of fairy tales that Zipes has been putting forth for several decades.

This suggests that the tales were supplied by humble people, and the brothers say that their primary source, Dorothea Viehmann, was a peasant woman from a village near Kassel.

In the words of the English novelist Angela Carter, who wrote some thrilling Grimm-based stories, asking where a fairy tale came from is like asking who invented the meatball.

They had political reasons, too—above all, Napoleon’s invasion of their beloved Hesse, and the installation of his brother Jérôme as the ruler of the Kingdom of Westphalia, a French vassal state.

Furthermore, this particular frog has been pursuing the princess day and night.

The Grimms, in the introduction to their first edition, assert that almost all their material was “collected” from oral traditions of their region and is “purely German in its origins.”

For that reason, among others, the oral tale was beginning to disappear.

The Grimms grew up in the febrile atmosphere of German Romanticism, which involved intense nationalism and, in support of that, a fascination with the supposedly deep, pre-rational culture of the German peasantry, the Volk.

The purpose was to entertain grownups, during or after a hard day’s work, and rough material was part of the entertainment.

With apparent sympathy, Zipes quotes a writer, Irmela Brender, who, saddened that Rumpelstiltskin is destroyed, when all he ever wanted was a little companionship, has proposed a version in which the miller’s daughter, instead of denying Rumpelstiltskin the baby, invites him to move in with the royal family:


“We could do a lot of things together.

Even people who have never known hunger, let alone a murderous stepmother, still have a sense—from dreams, from books, from news broadcasts—of utter blackness, the erasure of safety and comfort and trust.

Biographers say that they had markedly different personalities—Jacob was difficult and introverted, Wilhelm easygoing—but this probably drew them closer.

Zipes, a professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, has written sixty books on or of folk tales: critical studies, collections, translations.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were born to a prosperous couple (the father was a lawyer), Jacob in 1785, Wilhelm in 1786.

She bundled up her shawl and threw it on the blaze, which instantly consumed it.

As for the scarcity of resources, Robert Darnton has written that a peasant’s basic diet around that time consisted of a porridge of bread and water, sometimes with a few homegrown vegetables thrown in.

When you turn a page and find that the next story is entitled “How Children Played Butcher with Each Other,” should you worry?

Another virtue of Tatar’s edition is that she has isolated, at the end, a group of “Tales for Adults”—stories that she feels should be examined by parents before they are read to children.

In later editions, it is the stepmother who makes the suggestion, and the father repeatedly hesitates before he finally agrees.

W. H. Auden once described the Grimm-sanitizers as “the Society for the Scientific Diet, the Association of Positivist Parents, the League for the Promotion of Worthwhile Leisure, the Cooperative Camp of Prudent Progressives.”

On a rock at the edge of Copenhagen harbor sits a bronze statue of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid (who, unlike Disney’s, does not get her man).

She bundled up her shawl and threw it on the blaze, which instantly consumed it.

The blizzard died down, leaving the mountains as randomly covered with snow as if a blind woman had thrown a sheet over them, the upper branches of the forest pines limed, creaking, swollen with the fall.

In a notable example, the first edition of “Hansel and Gretel” has the mother and the father deciding together to abandon the children in the woods.

It feels like a glimpse of the dreadful side of the nature of things.”

And here, after seven successive revisions, is how that passage reads in the final edition of “Household Tales”:


[Briar Rose] took hold of the spindle and tried to spin.

Fairy tales tell us that such knowledge, or fear, is not fantastic but realistic.

If ever there was a stimulus to German intellectuals’ belief in a German people that was culturally and racially one, and to the hope of a politically unified Germany, this was it.

They had political reasons, too—above all, Napoleon’s invasion of their beloved Hesse, and the installation of his brother Jérôme as the ruler of the Kingdom of Westphalia, a French vassal state.

The historian Robert Darnton compares the oral tale tellers to the Yugoslavian bards studied in the twentieth century by Albert Lord and Milman Parry, in the effort to understand how the Homeric epics were composed.

Louis Snyder, in his book “Roots of German Nationalism” (1978), has a whole chapter on what he sees as the Grimms’ celebration, and encouragement, of pernicious national traits: “obedience, discipline, authoritarianism, militarism, glorification of violence,” and, above all, nationalism.

First, their bond as brothers.

This story stresses the eroticism of the girl’s encounter with the wolf.

According to the novelist Alison Lurie, an expert on children’s books, it is primarily the most popular tales, especially the ones adapted by Disney, that feature the wilting violets.

Indeed, they accurately said more or less the opposite: that, while they had been true to the spirit of the original material, the “phrasing” was their own.

But scholars tend to associate fairy tales with women, at home, telling stories to one another to relieve the tedium of repetitive tasks such as spinning (which often turns up in these narratives).

A. S. Byatt has written that this is the real terror of the story: “It doesn’t feel like a warning to naughty infants.

According to the novelist Alison Lurie, an expert on children’s books, it is primarily the most popular tales, especially the ones adapted by Disney, that feature the wilting violets.

Then she drew her blouse over her head; her small breasts gleamed as if the snow had invaded the room.

In “The Frog Prince,” he says, the reason the princess dislikes the amphibian in question is that the “tacky, clammy” feel of a frog’s skin is connected to children’s feelings about the sex organs.

But the brothers should not be reproached for departing from the original.

As he puts it, fairy tales may “expose the crazed drive for power that many individual politicians, corporate leaders, governments, church leaders, and petty tyrants evince and to pierce the hypocrisy of their moral stances.”

Wilhelm, when he was in his late thirties, made bold to get married, but the lady in question simply moved into the brothers’ house and, having known them for decades, made the domestic operations conform to their work schedule.

The folklore scholar Maria Tatar supplies three sentences from the brothers’ original draft of “Briar Rose,” which we call “The Sleeping Beauty”:


[Briar Rose] pricked her finger with the spindle and immediately fell into a deep sleep.

But scholars tend to associate fairy tales with women, at home, telling stories to one another to relieve the tedium of repetitive tasks such as spinning (which often turns up in these narratives).

After she had done that, the arm withdrew, and then, for the first time, the child had peace beneath the earth.

As he puts it, fairy tales may “expose the crazed drive for power that many individual politicians, corporate leaders, governments, church leaders, and petty tyrants evince and to pierce the hypocrisy of their moral stances.”

Jacob branched out into other areas of German history.

Over the years, her head has been sawed off repeatedly; she has been blasted off her rock with explosives.

That is how many Western empires fell.

There are two varieties of fairy tales.

Wilhelm remained faithful to folklore, and it was he who, after the second edition of “Household Tales” (1819), did all the editorial work on the later editions, the last of which was published in 1857.

This became a feature of Nazism—an argument for purity, strength, the soil—but it existed also in countries that fought the Nazis, including the United States.

This story, with its unvarnished prose, should be clear, but it isn’t.

The unconsenting arm looks more like a symbol.

In keeping with those positions, he believes that fairy tales, because they are grounded in a naïve morality, offer us a “counterworld,” which encourages us to step back, consider the dubious morality of our own world, and take steps to reform it.

His newest entry is “The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre” (Princeton), but it does little more than repeat the theory of fairy tales that Zipes has been putting forth for several decades.

Presumably, as your child is nodding off, you are supposed to give her a shake and tell her how the prince’s rescue of Snow White reflects the hegemony of the patriarchy.

The Grimms, in the introduction to their first edition, assert that almost all their material was “collected” from oral traditions of their region and is “purely German in its origins.”

In a notable example, the first edition of “Hansel and Gretel” has the mother and the father deciding together to abandon the children in the woods.

Then she laughs in the wolf’s face, rips off his shirt, and throws that, too, into the fire:


She will lay his fearful head on her lap and she will pick out the lice from his pelt and perhaps she will put the lice into her mouth and eat them, as he will bid her, as she would do in a savage marriage ceremony.

When, in a jolly tale, a boy sees half a man fall down the chimney, are you supposed to get upset?

In “The Ugly Duckling,” for example, the duck, in envying the swans, shows “a distinct class bias if not racist tendencies.”

Didn’t it trouble her to whip that arm?

Wilhelm, when he was in his late thirties, made bold to get married, but the lady in question simply moved into the brothers’ house and, having known them for decades, made the domestic operations conform to their work schedule.

Then, there are those who believe that the Grimm tales, whatever their cruelty, are indirectly good for us.

Their first edition was not intended for the young, nor, apparently, were the tales told at rural firesides.

The premodern tale tellers might also be thought of as descendants of the scops of the Anglo-Saxon Dark Ages or of the griots of West Africa, men whose job it was to carry stories.

Two things sustained the Grimms.

But the brothers should not be reproached for departing from the original.

A typical, if especially appalling, case is “The Juniper Tree.”

Most literary tales were derived in some measure from folk sources, and, once they were published, they in turn influenced folk versions.

As with the rating committee of the Motion Picture Association of America, what they regarded as unsuitable for the young was information about sex.

Most important, the brothers, especially Wilhelm, revised the tales thoroughly, making them more detailed, more elegant, and more Christian, as one edition followed another.

This story stresses the eroticism of the girl’s encounter with the wolf.

But no sooner does the boy lean over the trunk where the apples are stored than she slams the lid down and cuts off his head.

According to the novelist Alison Lurie, an expert on children’s books, it is primarily the most popular tales, especially the ones adapted by Disney, that feature the wilting violets.

They had political reasons, too—above all, Napoleon’s invasion of their beloved Hesse, and the installation of his brother Jérôme as the ruler of the Kingdom of Westphalia, a French vassal state.

To align the tale with the hearthside tradition, the author may also employ a certain naïveté of style.

On a rock at the edge of Copenhagen harbor sits a bronze statue of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid (who, unlike Disney’s, does not get her man).

It feels like a glimpse of the dreadful side of the nature of things.”

Whatever happened there, we all deserve it.

But soon afterward they began a different project, which culminated in their famous book “Nursery and Household Tales” (“Die Kinder- und Hausmärchen”), first published in two volumes, in 1812 and 1815, and now generally known as Grimms’ Fairy Tales.

He was also heavily influenced by the German philosopher Ernst Bloch and by the student movement of the nineteen-sixties.

W. H. Auden once described the Grimm-sanitizers as “the Society for the Scientific Diet, the Association of Positivist Parents, the League for the Promotion of Worthwhile Leisure, the Cooperative Camp of Prudent Progressives.”

Furthermore, this particular frog has been pursuing the princess day and night.

But you do not have to be a member of any special political camp to object to the Grimm tales; you only need to be a person interested in protecting children’s mental health.

On a rock at the edge of Copenhagen harbor sits a bronze statue of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid (who, unlike Disney’s, does not get her man).

This seems a perfect example of the psychoanalytic critics’ habitual indifference to the obvious.

In the introduction, they dropped the claim of fidelity to folk sources.

Their first edition was not intended for the young, nor, apparently, were the tales told at rural firesides.

Finally, oral tales, when transcribed faithfully, are often barely readable.

One camp here consists of the psychoanalytic critics, most notoriously Bruno Bettelheim, whose 1976 book “The Uses of Enchantment” dropped like a hot brick into the tepid waters of children’s literature of that period.

The horses fell asleep in the stables, the dogs in the courtyard, the pigeons on the roof, and the flies on the wall.

According to the novelist Alison Lurie, an expert on children’s books, it is primarily the most popular tales, especially the ones adapted by Disney, that feature the wilting violets.

Hence the many fairy-tale collections of the period, including the Grimms’.

The blizzard died down, leaving the mountains as randomly covered with snow as if a blind woman had thrown a sheet over them, the upper branches of the forest pines limed, creaking, swollen with the fall.

This is an admirable scruple, but a puzzling one, because it is largely absent from other Grimm tales, many of which feature mutilation, dismemberment, and cannibalism, not to speak of ordinary homicide, often inflicted on children by their parents or guardians.

Biographers say that they had markedly different personalities—Jacob was difficult and introverted, Wilhelm easygoing—but this probably drew them closer.

They had political reasons, too—above all, Napoleon’s invasion of their beloved Hesse, and the installation of his brother Jérôme as the ruler of the Kingdom of Westphalia, a French vassal state.

Nevertheless, the Grimms are premier representatives of the nationalism that became Aryanism in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, and the Nazis were grateful to them.

The family lived in a big house in the Hessian village of Hanau, near Kassel, and the boys received a sound primary education at home.

To Bettelheim, a Freudian, the most important conflict was the Oedipus complex.

Biographers say that they had markedly different personalities—Jacob was difficult and introverted, Wilhelm easygoing—but this probably drew them closer.

Some stories do tear you apart, usually those where the violence is joined to some emphatically opposite quality, such as peace or tenderness.

Jacob carried on for four years, and brought the dictionary up to “F.” Then he, too, died.

But no sooner does the boy lean over the trunk where the apples are stored than she slams the lid down and cuts off his head.

A. S. Byatt has written that this is the real terror of the story: “It doesn’t feel like a warning to naughty infants.

They claim that they did not change what Viehmann or the others said: “No details have been added or embellished.”

In truth, most of the Grimms’ tales cannot be made wholly respectable.

Intellectuals considered this a disaster.

Louis Snyder, in his book “Roots of German Nationalism” (1978), has a whole chapter on what he sees as the Grimms’ celebration, and encouragement, of pernicious national traits: “obedience, discipline, authoritarianism, militarism, glorification of violence,” and, above all, nationalism.

And the wind died down and not a single little leaf stirred on the trees by the castle.

So she props up the boy’s body in a chair, puts his head on top, and ties a scarf around the neck to hide the wound.

Another virtue of Tatar’s edition is that she has isolated, at the end, a group of “Tales for Adults”—stories that she feels should be examined by parents before they are read to children.

But soon afterward they began a different project, which culminated in their famous book “Nursery and Household Tales” (“Die Kinder- und Hausmärchen”), first published in two volumes, in 1812 and 1815, and now generally known as Grimms’ Fairy Tales.

The blizzard died down, leaving the mountains as randomly covered with snow as if a blind woman had thrown a sheet over them, the upper branches of the forest pines limed, creaking, swollen with the fall.

Still today, certain people, notably feminists, would like to move them to the back shelves of the library, because, so often, the villain is a woman, doing violence to girls, and also because the girls seldom resist.

Though their most popular and enduring book was “Household Tales,” they were serious philologists, and, in the last decades of their lives, what they cared about most was their German Dictionary, a project on the scale of the Oxford English Dictionary.

Louis Snyder, in his book “Roots of German Nationalism” (1978), has a whole chapter on what he sees as the Grimms’ celebration, and encouragement, of pernicious national traits: “obedience, discipline, authoritarianism, militarism, glorification of violence,” and, above all, nationalism.

The historian Robert Darnton compares the oral tale tellers to the Yugoslavian bards studied in the twentieth century by Albert Lord and Milman Parry, in the effort to understand how the Homeric epics were composed.

As he puts it, fairy tales may “expose the crazed drive for power that many individual politicians, corporate leaders, governments, church leaders, and petty tyrants evince and to pierce the hypocrisy of their moral stances.”

Louis Snyder, in his book “Roots of German Nationalism” (1978), has a whole chapter on what he sees as the Grimms’ celebration, and encouragement, of pernicious national traits: “obedience, discipline, authoritarianism, militarism, glorification of violence,” and, above all, nationalism.

Most literary tales were derived in some measure from folk sources, and, once they were published, they in turn influenced folk versions.

No doctor could cure him and in a short time he lay on his deathbed.

And though ethnic pride was the Nazis’ chief justification for their movement, that wasn’t necessarily the fault of ethnic pride.

But scholars tend to associate fairy tales with women, at home, telling stories to one another to relieve the tedium of repetitive tasks such as spinning (which often turns up in these narratives).

As he puts it, fairy tales may “expose the crazed drive for power that many individual politicians, corporate leaders, governments, church leaders, and petty tyrants evince and to pierce the hypocrisy of their moral stances.”

And that sleep spread throughout the entire palace.

The purpose was to entertain grownups, during or after a hard day’s work, and rough material was part of the entertainment.

Most literary tales were derived in some measure from folk sources, and, once they were published, they in turn influenced folk versions.

Indeed, they accurately said more or less the opposite: that, while they had been true to the spirit of the original material, the “phrasing” was their own.

The widowers tended to remarry, and the new wife often found that her children had to compete for scarce resources with the children of the husband’s earlier union.

The girl comments that her stepbrother seems pale.

In “The Ugly Duckling,” for example, the duck, in envying the swans, shows “a distinct class bias if not racist tendencies.”

After he was lowered into his grave and covered over with earth, one of his little arms suddenly emerged and reached up into the air.

As with sections of the Bible, the conciseness makes them seem more profound.

The people who supplied the first-edition tales were largely middle class: the brothers’ relatives, friends, and friends of friends.

And the wind died down and not a single little leaf stirred on the trees by the castle.

Nevertheless, the Grimms are premier representatives of the nationalism that became Aryanism in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, and the Nazis were grateful to them.

To align the tale with the hearthside tradition, the author may also employ a certain naïveté of style.

The rewritings that seem most persuasive are sometimes more unsettling than the Grimm versions—for example, Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves,” inspired by “Little Red Riding Hood.”

His newest entry is “The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a Genre” (Princeton), but it does little more than repeat the theory of fairy tales that Zipes has been putting forth for several decades.

Eventually, their specialties diverged somewhat.

Nevertheless, the Grimms are premier representatives of the nationalism that became Aryanism in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, and the Nazis were grateful to them.

Then she laughs in the wolf’s face, rips off his shirt, and throws that, too, into the fire:


She will lay his fearful head on her lap and she will pick out the lice from his pelt and perhaps she will put the lice into her mouth and eat them, as he will bid her, as she would do in a savage marriage ceremony.

Other collections, geared to children, had been more successful, and the brothers decided that their second edition would take that route.

Gilbert and Gubar actually defend the wicked stepmothers, whose arts, they say, “even while they kill, confer the only measure of power available to a woman in a patriarchal culture.”

Intellectuals considered this a disaster.

Though their most popular and enduring book was “Household Tales,” they were serious philologists, and, in the last decades of their lives, what they cared about most was their German Dictionary, a project on the scale of the Oxford English Dictionary.

And here, after seven successive revisions, is how that passage reads in the final edition of “Household Tales”:


[Briar Rose] took hold of the spindle and tried to spin.

When you turn a page and find that the next story is entitled “How Children Played Butcher with Each Other,” should you worry?

And though ethnic pride was the Nazis’ chief justification for their movement, that wasn’t necessarily the fault of ethnic pride.

The widowers tended to remarry, and the new wife often found that her children had to compete for scarce resources with the children of the husband’s earlier union.

Each year it grew higher, and finally it surrounded the entire castle and grew so thickly beyond it that not a trace of the castle was to be seen, not even the flag on the roof.

Such are the mysteries of literary criticism.

To Bettelheim, a Freudian, the most important conflict was the Oedipus complex.

Still, “The Juniper Tree,” which Tatar herself describes as “probably the most shocking of all fairy tales,” is not placed among the “Tales for Adults,” presumably because it is too characteristic, too echt Grimm, to be cordoned off in a special section.

With apparent sympathy, Zipes quotes a writer, Irmela Brender, who, saddened that Rumpelstiltskin is destroyed, when all he ever wanted was a little companionship, has proposed a version in which the miller’s daughter, instead of denying Rumpelstiltskin the baby, invites him to move in with the royal family:


“We could do a lot of things together.

Zipes, a professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota, has written sixty books on or of folk tales: critical studies, collections, translations.

When she enters her grandmother’s cottage, she almost immediately understands what her situation is, but she decides not to be afraid.

When, in a jolly tale, a boy sees half a man fall down the chimney, are you supposed to get upset?

Marina Warner, in her book on fairy tales, “From the Beast to the Blonde” (1994), says that most modern writers ignore the Grimms’ “historical realism.”

With difficulty, the brothers managed to attend a good lyceum and then, as their father would have wished, law school.

Marina Warner, in her book on fairy tales, “From the Beast to the Blonde” (1994), says that most modern writers ignore the Grimms’ “historical realism.”

Though their most popular and enduring book was “Household Tales,” they were serious philologists, and, in the last decades of their lives, what they cared about most was their German Dictionary, a project on the scale of the Oxford English Dictionary.

In later editions, it is the stepmother who makes the suggestion, and the father repeatedly hesitates before he finally agrees.

The historian Robert Darnton compares the oral tale tellers to the Yugoslavian bards studied in the twentieth century by Albert Lord and Milman Parry, in the effort to understand how the Homeric epics were composed.

In response, she picks him up and hurls him against a wall, whereupon he explodes and his little guts dribble down the plaster.

Young men fresh from reading Plutarch at university began sharing stories about what the troll said to the woodcutter, and publishing collections of these Märchen, as folk tales were called.

This seems a perfect example of the psychoanalytic critics’ habitual indifference to the obvious.

The Grimms grew up in the febrile atmosphere of German Romanticism, which involved intense nationalism and, in support of that, a fascination with the supposedly deep, pre-rational culture of the German peasantry, the Volk.

Even the fire that had been flaming on the hearth stopped and went to sleep, and the roast stopped crackling, and the cook, who was about to pull the kitchen boy’s hair because he had done something wrong, let him go and fell asleep.

Marina Warner, in her book on fairy tales, “From the Beast to the Blonde” (1994), says that most modern writers ignore the Grimms’ “historical realism.”

The Grimms, in the introduction to their first edition, assert that almost all their material was “collected” from oral traditions of their region and is “purely German in its origins.”

In other words, her culture was basically French, and she was no doubt well acquainted with French literary fairy tales, Perrault’s and others’.

This is part of a sentence:


Early the next morning the forester goes hunting at two o’clock, once he is gone Lehnchen says to Karl if you don’t leave me all alone I won’t leave you and Karl says never, then Lehnchen says I just want to tell you that our cook carried a lot of water into the house yesterday so I asked her why.

In the words of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in “The Madwoman in the Attic,” she is “patriarchy’s ideal woman.”

Nazism fed on many trends that, previously, had been harmless—for example, the physical-culture movement of the early twentieth century, the fad for going on nature hikes and doing calisthenics.

This suggests that the tales were supplied by humble people, and the brothers say that their primary source, Dorothea Viehmann, was a peasant woman from a village near Kassel.

With apparent sympathy, Zipes quotes a writer, Irmela Brender, who, saddened that Rumpelstiltskin is destroyed, when all he ever wanted was a little companionship, has proposed a version in which the miller’s daughter, instead of denying Rumpelstiltskin the baby, invites him to move in with the royal family:


“We could do a lot of things together.

Later scholars finished the book.

The main reason that Zipes likes fairy tales, it seems, is that they provide hope: they tell us that we can create a more just world.

It feels like a glimpse of the dreadful side of the nature of things.”

He was also heavily influenced by the German philosopher Ernst Bloch and by the student movement of the nineteen-sixties.

The people who supplied the first-edition tales were largely middle class: the brothers’ relatives, friends, and friends of friends.

While Bettelheim tells us that fairy tales help us adjust, Jack Zipes has said the opposite: that the value of fairy tales is that they teach us not to adjust, because the oppressive society in which we live is something we should refuse to adjust to.

In keeping with those positions, he believes that fairy tales, because they are grounded in a naïve morality, offer us a “counterworld,” which encourages us to step back, consider the dubious morality of our own world, and take steps to reform it.

In “The Ugly Duckling,” for example, the duck, in envying the swans, shows “a distinct class bias if not racist tendencies.”

She tries to find some basis for what seems to her the surprising appearance of anti-Semitic feeling in a few of these nineteenth-century stories.

Each year it grew higher, and finally it surrounded the entire castle and grew so thickly beyond it that not a trace of the castle was to be seen, not even the flag on the roof.

With apparent sympathy, Zipes quotes a writer, Irmela Brender, who, saddened that Rumpelstiltskin is destroyed, when all he ever wanted was a little companionship, has proposed a version in which the miller’s daughter, instead of denying Rumpelstiltskin the baby, invites him to move in with the royal family:


“We could do a lot of things together.

And so the tale, without details to attach it to anything in particular, becomes universal.

So she props up the boy’s body in a chair, puts his head on top, and ties a scarf around the neck to hide the wound.

While Bettelheim tells us that fairy tales help us adjust, Jack Zipes has said the opposite: that the value of fairy tales is that they teach us not to adjust, because the oppressive society in which we live is something we should refuse to adjust to.

They pushed it back down and covered the earth with fresh earth, but that did not help.

This became a feature of Nazism—an argument for purity, strength, the soil—but it existed also in countries that fought the Nazis, including the United States.

Then she laughs in the wolf’s face, rips off his shirt, and throws that, too, into the fire:


She will lay his fearful head on her lap and she will pick out the lice from his pelt and perhaps she will put the lice into her mouth and eat them, as he will bid her, as she would do in a savage marriage ceremony.

But you do not have to be a member of any special political camp to object to the Grimm tales; you only need to be a person interested in protecting children’s mental health.

Then she laughs in the wolf’s face, rips off his shirt, and throws that, too, into the fire:


She will lay his fearful head on her lap and she will pick out the lice from his pelt and perhaps she will put the lice into her mouth and eat them, as he will bid her, as she would do in a savage marriage ceremony.

In the words of the English novelist Angela Carter, who wrote some thrilling Grimm-based stories, asking where a fairy tale came from is like asking who invented the meatball.

The girl comments that her stepbrother seems pale.

With difficulty, the brothers managed to attend a good lyceum and then, as their father would have wished, law school.

But you do not have to be a member of any special political camp to object to the Grimm tales; you only need to be a person interested in protecting children’s mental health.

But the worst thing in the story is that, beyond disobedience, it gives us not a single piece of information about the child.

Gilbert and Gubar actually defend the wicked stepmothers, whose arts, they say, “even while they kill, confer the only measure of power available to a woman in a patriarchal culture.”

But the reviews and the sales of the Grimms’ first edition were disappointing to them.

The Grimms grew up in the febrile atmosphere of German Romanticism, which involved intense nationalism and, in support of that, a fascination with the supposedly deep, pre-rational culture of the German peasantry, the Volk.

A. S. Byatt has written that this is the real terror of the story: “It doesn’t feel like a warning to naughty infants.

Wilhelm, when he was in his late thirties, made bold to get married, but the lady in question simply moved into the brothers’ house and, having known them for decades, made the domestic operations conform to their work schedule.

But soon afterward they began a different project, which culminated in their famous book “Nursery and Household Tales” (“Die Kinder- und Hausmärchen”), first published in two volumes, in 1812 and 1815, and now generally known as Grimms’ Fairy Tales.

In the first edition, Rapunzel, imprisoned in the tower by her wicked godmother, goes to the window every evening and lets down her long hair so that the prince can climb up and enjoy her company.

Maria Tatar seems to be inheriting the position of dean of fairy tales, and in her “Annotated Brothers Grimm” (2004)—this is one of Norton’s series of copiously annotated classics—she apparently feels that she can afford to be nice to everyone.

W. H. Auden once described the Grimm-sanitizers as “the Society for the Scientific Diet, the Association of Positivist Parents, the League for the Promotion of Worthwhile Leisure, the Cooperative Camp of Prudent Progressives.”

Still today, certain people, notably feminists, would like to move them to the back shelves of the library, because, so often, the villain is a woman, doing violence to girls, and also because the girls seldom resist.

Jacob branched out into other areas of German history.

So she props up the boy’s body in a chair, puts his head on top, and ties a scarf around the neck to hide the wound.

After the war, accordingly, the Allies banned the Grimm tales from the school curricula in some cities.

Most literary tales were derived in some measure from folk sources, and, once they were published, they in turn influenced folk versions.

The historian Robert Darnton compares the oral tale tellers to the Yugoslavian bards studied in the twentieth century by Albert Lord and Milman Parry, in the effort to understand how the Homeric epics were composed.

The historian Robert Darnton compares the oral tale tellers to the Yugoslavian bards studied in the twentieth century by Albert Lord and Milman Parry, in the effort to understand how the Homeric epics were composed.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were born to a prosperous couple (the father was a lawyer), Jacob in 1785, Wilhelm in 1786.

Such are the mysteries of literary criticism.

But they were not less violent.

However much detail Wilhelm added, the stories are still extremely short.

The Grimms grew up in the febrile atmosphere of German Romanticism, which involved intense nationalism and, in support of that, a fascination with the supposedly deep, pre-rational culture of the German peasantry, the Volk.

Apparently, the Grimms could not bear the idea that the mother, the person who bore these children, would do such a thing, or that the father would readily consent.

This interpretation leads to expectable conclusions.

But soon afterward they began a different project, which culminated in their famous book “Nursery and Household Tales” (“Die Kinder- und Hausmärchen”), first published in two volumes, in 1812 and 1815, and now generally known as Grimms’ Fairy Tales.

Though a scholar might publish this in, say, the Journal of American Folklore, nobody else would try to get anyone to read it.

This is an admirable scruple, but a puzzling one, because it is largely absent from other Grimm tales, many of which feature mutilation, dismemberment, and cannibalism, not to speak of ordinary homicide, often inflicted on children by their parents or guardians.

Bettelheim argued that fairy tales, by allowing children to attach their unsavory repressed desires to villains (dragons, witches) who were then conquered, helped the children to integrate and control such desires.

The family lived in a big house in the Hessian village of Hanau, near Kassel, and the boys received a sound primary education at home.

This became a feature of Nazism—an argument for purity, strength, the soil—but it existed also in countries that fought the Nazis, including the United States.

But you do not have to be a member of any special political camp to object to the Grimm tales; you only need to be a person interested in protecting children’s mental health.

The folklore scholar Maria Tatar supplies three sentences from the brothers’ original draft of “Briar Rose,” which we call “The Sleeping Beauty”:


[Briar Rose] pricked her finger with the spindle and immediately fell into a deep sleep.

And so the tale, without details to attach it to anything in particular, becomes universal.

Each year it grew higher, and finally it surrounded the entire castle and grew so thickly beyond it that not a trace of the castle was to be seen, not even the flag on the roof.

Hence the many fairy-tale collections of the period, including the Grimms’.

In later editions, it is the stepmother who makes the suggestion, and the father repeatedly hesitates before he finally agrees.

And though ethnic pride was the Nazis’ chief justification for their movement, that wasn’t necessarily the fault of ethnic pride.

The main reason that Zipes likes fairy tales, it seems, is that they provide hope: they tell us that we can create a more just world.

In sum, the Grimm tales contain almost no psychology—a fact underlined by their brevity.

In truth, most of the Grimms’ tales cannot be made wholly respectable.