Grimms' Fairy Tales

Grimms' Fairy Tales is a collection of German folk tales, including "Snow White" and "Hansel and Gretel". Its original title means "Children's and Household Tales".

In 1812, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were brothers in their twenties living in Kassel, a town in central Germany. Their father had died when they were boys, which left the family poor. Jacob now supported his younger siblings on a librarian's salary. His employer was Jérôme Bonaparte, Napoleon's brother, because French armies had conquered the region and made Kassel the capital of a new kingdom.

The occupation gave their project its urgency. Germany was not yet one country, only a patchwork of states under foreign pressure. The brothers believed that old stories held a shared German culture, and they feared it would vanish if nobody wrote it down. They had studied law, but their professor, Friedrich Carl von Savigny, had opened his library of old texts to them. Then Clemens Brentano, a poet who collected folk songs, asked them for tales. They sent him a manuscript in 1810. He never used it, so they decided to publish on their own.

Legend pictures the brothers walking from village to village and listening to peasants. The truth is more domestic. Most storytellers came to them, and many were educated young women from families they knew. One was Dortchen Wild, a neighbor who later married Wilhelm. Others were the Hassenpflug sisters, who descended from Huguenots, French Protestants who had fled to Germany. That is why some of these "German" tales resemble the French ones printed by Charles Perrault in 1697. Dorothea Viehmann, a tailor's wife from a nearby village, told them dozens more.

The first volume appeared in Berlin at Christmas 1812, with 86 tales. A second followed in 1815. Sales were slow, because it was a scholar's book, heavy with notes, and reviewers found it too rough for children. So Wilhelm kept rewriting for forty-five years. Across seven editions he smoothed the style and removed hints of sex, though much of the violence stayed. A short illustrated edition in 1825, inspired by a successful English translation, finally won over families.

From there the book traveled far. It has been translated into more than 160 languages, and its method helped create the study of folklore. Walt Disney built his first feature film on "Snow White" in 1937. The Nazi regime also promoted the tales as an expression of a pure German spirit, which the book's mixed origins quietly contradict. In 2005, UNESCO added the brothers' own copies to its Memory of the World Register. They are kept in Kassel, their margins filled with handwritten notes.