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You’re listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I’m Eric Molinsky.

So much modern fantasy is built on fairy tales like , , , , Red Riding Hood, or . The one thing I always knew about the stories is that they were very dark because life was harsh back then and people were not afraid to tell their children scary fairy tales. I also heard the Grimm brothers had gone into the villages to get these tales directly from the people who had told them for generations. The Grimms were pure folklorists who didn’t have to deal with modern concerns like selling books.

It turns out, that’s not really true. Some of it was PR spin told by publishing companies after the Grimms had died. The real story of how the Grimms ended up writing a book of fairy tales is more complicated, and interesting. And when you break down the misconceptions people have about the Grimms, you can discover how these stories have been influencing us in ways we may not realize.

Let’s start at the beginning. Jacob and were German. They were born in the late 1700s. And the two brothers were incredibly close for their entire lives. Jack Zipes has written numerous books on the Grimms and their fairy tales.

JACK: The father was sort of like he was a lawyer, but also sort of a mayor of this little village or town. They were fairly well off -- unfortunately when their father was, uh, when Willem was 11 and Jacob was 12, the father died. And so, the family status sunk.

RUTH: They suffered real social discrimination.

Ruth Bottigheimer teaches fairy tales at Stony Brook University.

RUTH: They fell into pretty deep poverty from which they were only the two boys were only saved by being taken in by their aunt.

To climb out of poverty, the brothers buried their noses in books, and they grew up to become respected scholars.

RUTH: The Grimm is produced an enormous body of scholarship. Their dictionary is to this day, a wonder of German usage, historical usage from Luther to the present, which meant to the 19th century.

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Publishing fairy tales began a side gig. And they got into it by accident.

A professor, who was a famous folklorist at the time, offered them a job collecting fairy tales – although they didn’t call them fairy tales. That’s the English translation. In German, they called them “children’s and household tales.”

The Grimms were excited about this project. But the professor was not as interested. After they handed him their manuscript, he shelved it for years. So, in 1812, the brothers took back the manuscript and got it published themselves.

The first common misconception about the Grimms is that they only cared about preserving folk tales for academic reasons. In fact, their motivations were actually political.

As you might remember from your high school history class, Germany was not like other European countries. In fact, it wasn’t even a country. During the lifetime of the Grimms, what we call Germany was actually hundreds of little kingdoms that all spoke different versions of German.

The Grimms were very proud of their German heritage, and Ruth says, they saw this folklore project as a way to prove there was a single German folk that should be part of a German nation. And this was a lifelong mission because the German provinces were not united until 1871, after the Grimms had died.

RUTH: They were trying to extract a set of values that would serve as what they called a (German word) not child rearing, but nation rearing, folk rearing book that would have values that they could all unify around.

Which brings me to the second misconception, that the Grimms went into the villages to get these stories directly from the common folk. They tried to do that but didn’t get far. So instead, Wilhelm went to his next-door neighbor, a banker, and interviewed the banker’s daughters about the books they were reading.

RUTH: There was nothing like the pictures of the Grimms out in the countryside, surrounded by chickens, listening to an old lady telling tales. That was a complete fabrication that was made after they, after they died. Their efforts to get stories from the folk didn't work. And in part it's because the folk didn't have those stories that young well brought up boys while girls had these stories, and they had these stories because they had read them in a lot of books that have been published in the 1790s. When there had been something called the blue library of all nations that had brought together fairytales, 3 magic tales, mainly from France, translated them into German, and they were eagerly read.

It’s ironic that the Grimms were trying to find authentically German stories but ended up translating and rewriting a lot of French tales. They would also do research at the library to find earlier versions of these tales from the oldest books they could find.

And Jack Zipes says, the Grimms did get some of their stories through from what we’d call the oral tradition, but they went to very specific people they thought were good storytellers.

JACK: There was also a soldier, an old soldier who, uh, had served in the army and he exchanged, he exchanged tales for them. If they gave him new trousers that he didn't have. And then, uh, there was a woman who was, uh, extremely brilliant and was, uh, had worked in a Tavern on the border between Germany and Holland. And she gave them at least 15 or 20 tales that they recorded. They would hear the tales of they'd run home and write them down, or they would write them down as they heard them

From the beginning, the Grimms were always trying to figure out how make their book appeal to a mass market, but it took a long time. In fact, it didn’t even occur to them to have illustrations until 12 years after their first edition was published.

JACK: They received an English translation who the illustrations by a very famous painter in Great Britain at that time, his name was George Cruikshank. And these, these illustrations were brilliant. And, uh, the book became in England, a bestseller when Yakov saw that. They said, oh my God, we're missing out on something. And also, the publisher said, you know, why don't you do an edition only for the people, and, and you can also do a scholarly edition at the same time.

The third misconception about the Grimms is that they never sanitized these dark stories. That’s not true either.

The early editions of the book didn’t sell very well because the stories were considered too grim – no pun intended. They eventually published seven editions of the fairy tales. Mostly they were focused on improving the language of their storytelling, but some of the changes were made in response to criticism.

In fact, a lot of people were unhappy with their first attempt at the Rapunzel story because it clearly states that the prince impregnated Rapunzel in her tower. 4

Here is the actor Jochen Werner reading from the first version of the tale. This scene was cut from later editions:

READING: At first Rapunzel was frightened, but soon she came to like the young king so well that she arranged for him to come every day and be pulled up. Thus, they lived in joy and pleasure for a long time.

The fairy did not discover what was happening until one day Rapunzel said to her, "Frau Gothel, tell me why it is that my clothes are all too tight. They no longer fit me."

"You godless child," said the fairy. "What am I hearing from you?" She immediately saw how she had been deceived and was terribly angry.

Jack says, sometimes the Grimms would drop stories all together if people complained they were too dark or morally ambiguous.

JACK: For instance, in the first edition of 1812, 1815, there was a tale called how Children Played with Slaughtering. I’ll retell it to you very briefly. They’re once was butcher was slaughtering a pig in a shop and the four children were playing together and they saw the butcher doing this. And one of the boys said, I'm going to be like the butcher. And the other one said, I'm going to be like a pig and, uh, two girls and collect the pig's blood. And so, the older boy took a knife, slit the throat of his, a friend, the two girls started gathering the blood in pots. A man walked by. He was a Councilman horrified that this was going on, grabbed hold of the boy who had slaughtered his friend took him to the council. And there, the mayor said to the rest of the councilmen, what should we do with this boy? And a one man said, well, we'll put an apple in, in one hand and a knife or the other. And if he takes the apple, we'll let him go free. And so, the boy looked at them, took the apple, ran off, and that's the end of the tale.

And the moral of the story is --- I have no idea. Which is probably why it didn’t make it into the second edition.

In terms of editorial judgment, the Grimms were considered quite enlightened in their values for the time.

JACK: They wanted fair justice. Uh, they wanted to the peasants to have a role, to be able to speak truth to absolute Kings, absolutist Kings and Queens.

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But that sense of enlightenment did not extend to the Jews. In fact, there are several tales that have been widely criticized for being anti-Semitic, or at least they’ve been widely criticized in our lifetime, not theirs. For example, Ruth says look at the tale The Jew in the Thorns.

RUTH: It was a tale for which the Grimm has bear a real moral responsibility for having changed because they like to get a tale and its oldest form. Well, they had that tale in the oldest form from the 1500s where it was called The Monk in The Thorn Bush. In that story, a virtuous young German apprentice meets someone who exploits him, who tricks him. And that person is a monk. And so, when this good young German gets hold of a magic violin, that makes everybody who hears it dance. He lures the monk into the thornbush, makes him dance and he's dreadfully injured. The Grimms took that tale from the 1500s and modernized it by making the monk into a Jew. Having the same thing happened except the Jew was executed at the end. It was terrible, really terrible.

Jack Zipes thinks the depiction of Jews in the is a mixed bag – some stories aren’t as bad as others. But he wants them to be preserved, and Jack is Jewish. In fact, he once got a call from the Anti-Defamation League, asking him to remove The Jew in the Thorns from an edition of Grimm fairy tales Jack had translated.

JACK: They are me called me up and said, you should take the story -- you should take it out. And I said, by no means, will I take it out? This tale is part of the 19th century, and I'm not hiding, anything. They never bothered me after that.

The fourth misconception is that the Grimm were always considered the definite book on fairy tales. You know who gave them a run for their money? Ludwig Bechstein. I never heard of him either, probably because he was never published in the U.S. But in the 19th century, Bechstein’s fairy tales were more popular than the Grimms in the German provinces.

It’s interesting to compare Bechstein to the Grimms because there are so many aspects of the Grimm tales that we think of being just the way fairy tales are – but they’re actually specific to the Grimms. For instance, Ruth thinks Ludwig Bechstein had a more modern outlook in having characters that didn’t accept their fate in life.

RUTH: He wrote tales in which heroes and heroines actually made an effort to do something. And their efforts led to good results. For instance, a girl wants to rescue somebody who's on top of the glass mountain. And she says to herself, if I only had 6 wings, I could fly to the top of the glass mountain. She grabs a passing bird, tears off its wings and flies to the top of a mountain where upon she rescues the person.

That’s not a great story for the bird, but it is a surprisingly proactive female protagonist for the 19th century.

RUTH: In a Grimm tale, you would have a girl at the bottom of the glass mountain saying if only I could get to the top of the glass mountain and then a good supernatural creature would come and say, oh, you are a good virtuous girl. I will help you. And then that person would get her to the top of the mountain.

Also, you know the trope of the wicked stepmother? Well, this was a time when a lot of women died in childbirth, so stepmothers were common. But Ludwig Bechstein said in the preface to his fairy tales:

RUTH: I’m not going to have, uh, stepmothers in this collection of stories, they have a hard enough time. I'm not going to make them the villainesses of one story after another.

That was a subtle critique of the Grimms because in many stories like Cinderella or Snow White, in the older versions of the tale, the villains were originally the heroine’s biological mothers. But Grimms saw the sanctity of motherhood as being essential to German values. And they were very fond of their mother, so, they changed all the evil mothers to wicked stepmothers.

And in some stories, they added extra punishment to the stepmothers. Like they added a new ending to Snow White where the queen goes to Snow White’s wedding, even though she thinks it’s a trap.

READING: At first, she did not want to go to the wedding, but she found no peace. She had to go and see the young queen. When she arrived, she recognized Snow-White, and terrorized, she could only stand there without moving.

Then they put a pair of iron shoes into burning coals. They were brought forth with tongs and placed before her. She was forced to step into the red-hot shoes and dance until she fell down dead.

Ludwig Bechstein had plenty of wicked witches in his stories, but Ruth says:

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RUTH: When you count up the number of witches and bad witches and bad sorcerers, they're exactly equal in Bechstein’s collection of tales, but in Grimm tales, it's, female witches who are in the great majority.

So, if Bechstein was more popular with the public – why did the Grimms become more famous? At the turn of the century – after Germany had been united -- there was a renewed interest in German nationalism and German values, which were topics the Grimms were passionate about.

Unfortunately, you can probably guess where this is going.

The Nazis eventually adopted and perverted Grimm fairy tales – making them an essential part of their propaganda. Not only did they highlight the anti-Semitic stories, but they turned other villains into Jews that hadn’t been Jewish before. In fact, the Nazis used Grimm fairy tales so much, after the war, the Allied occupational forces banned Grimm fairy tales from German nurseries.

But at that point, the Grimms were long gone. A part of me feels like we should just leave them, and their values, in their time and place.

But we can’t do that – not when the Grimm fairy tales are with us more than ever. We’ll get to that chapter after the break.

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Now, Grimm fairy tales are beautifully told, and their popularity is earned in terms of the quality of their work. But Ruth says there were other factors that gave the Grimms the corner market on fairy tales in the U.S.

Around the turn of the century, when Grimm fairy tales were being celebrated in Germany as the epitome of German values, many Americans saw Germany as the height of Western civilization and the Grimms were considered uber-German.

RUTH: In fact, at Princeton university commenting on a Grimm this tale that you read in German was part of the entrance exam in the 19th century, if you can believe that.

Also, after World War II, there was a cottage industry of psychologists who analyzed Grimm fairy tales because they thought the tales were like ancient folklore which could tell us deep truths about ourselves. But many of these psychologists were German Jews that escaped from Germany and they were also 8 raised on the misconception that the Grimms had gone into the villages to get these tales directly from the common folk.

But that’s why we need to look at how the Grimms shaped these tales and imbued them with their own values.

And Ruth says keep in mind, when the Grimms began their career in the early 19th century, the French were the main publishers of fairy tales. France was mostly Catholic. The Grimms were Protestant, as were many Germans at the time.

RUTH: There's a difference in the way Protestant fairytales in the early 1800s treated beauty. In the Grimm tales, beauty was an outward sign of your inner condition. If you were virtuous and good, you were beautiful. In Catholic fairy tales at the same time, there's a guy named George Schneller in the mountains of Bavaria who was collecting very tales from Catholic storytellers. And interestingly enough, their fairytales didn't require good girls to be beautiful. That was also true in the fairytales of, uh, of a French storyteller named Madame D'aulnoy. One of whose heroines was very ugly. That was her name later on that she was ugly, but she was noble of heart. So, for the Grimm's beauty and virtue become absolutely synonymous.

And that got reinforced by Disney films based on the Grimm fairy tales – and of course we all grew up on those films as well. In fact, it’s interesting to note the first Disney film to explicitly not equate beauty as a sign of goodness was Beauty in the Beast – which was adapted from a French tale, and it was a repudiation of decades of Disney films that had come before.

Jack Zipes says if we want to look at another tale that’s influenced our culture in ways we may not realize, look no further than – which is actually problematic in French and German. Before the Grimms, the most famous version of that story was written by a French author named Charles Perrault.

JACK: And the Perrault version, it ends with the Wolf eating Little Red Riding Hood. And then there's a poem, a short moral in which he says little girls who invite wolves into parlors, deserve what they get.

The Grimms dropped the direct moralizing and gave it a happy ending where the woodsman shows up to save Red Riding Hood and her grandmother. And the Grimms added an epilogue where our heroine meets another wolf in the woods.

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READING: Little Red Riding Hood, however, was on her guard, and went straight forward on her way, and told her grandmother that she had met the wolf, and that he had said good morning to her, but with such a wicked look in his eyes, that if they had not been on the public road, she was certain he would have eaten her up. "Well," said the grandmother, "we will shut the door, that he may not come in."

So again, here are the Grimms creating a more popular version of a tale that’s less dark than the original. But Jack thinks both versions of story reinforce a mentality of blaming the victim.

JACK: Now, this is an ideology that is common up through today. I mean, I remember my father saying when, when my sister was almost raped, you, what were you wearing? What, how did you bring him on?

Overall, Grimm fairy tales are still darker and more violent than most fairy tales being published today.

That brings me to a question which doesn’t have an answer because it’s something people have been debating forever. Is it better to shield children from the bad parts in the world for as long as possible, or should we expose them to dark stories early on, so they can be prepared to face unexpected challenges in life, especially when their parents won’t be around to protect them?

Jack is a big proponent of Grimm fairy tales because despite all their problems he doesn’t think the darkness or violence is gratuitous.

JACK: These tales still mirror issues like, uh, the violation of women, rapes, child abandonment throughout the world. So, when you have conditions that are similar, you're also going to get tales that resonate. Through these tales we can gain distance, because these tales are metaphors, or they are analogs of what we're doing in our world.

And he thinks we often underestimate the sophistication of children.

JACK: I read all of these stories to my, my daughter when she was three, four, five, six, she's turned out pretty well. She's turned that as a therapist, I've worked with kids and the age groups were 6 to 10, and they love these stories because they expose the, they reveal how frightening the world is. And they, and these tales, they don't always necessarily happily. They end with a resolution of a conflict.

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Generally speaking, Ruth is more critical of the Grimms than Jack. But she felt very comfortable telling these tales to her kids when they were growing up.

RUTH: Children are the ultimate skeptics, and they wonder why, well, why was that? well, why do you think what's going to happen next? And I think as with all children's literature, what children's readings are an amazing opportunity for parents and children to think together in forming their worldviews, children are not going to form their worldviews according to their parents. But according to the world they experience. Yeah. You can't take the Grimms out of their context and you can't read the Grimms now without reading them in our context. RUTH: That's right. That's right. And it’s amazing how contexts tend to vary even within the same time period. If your kid is in school in the second grade and has a wonderfully open experienced teacher who knows a lot about kids and how they interact with one another and sees problems coming and gets ahead of the, of the curve. That means kids in that class are going to have a very different experience of the world for seven hours every day, that a kid who might be in second grade class next door, whose teacher is oblivious, who lets things happen, where kids get bullied, a kid under those circumstances is going to have a very different worldview. Right. And then each of those children reads Grimm fairytales and will start to come away with different lessons. RUTH: Very, very much the case. Yes.

As I’ve been working on this episode, I keep thinking about the musical, Into the Woods. I love any Stephen Sondheim musical but that is one of my favorites.

It takes place in a world where all the different characters are bumping each other. At the end of the first act, they get the happy endings we’re familiar with. Act II is about what happens next – like Little Red Riding Hood has PTSD from her run-in with the wolf so she’s hypervalent with a knife. The princes that married Cinderella and Rapunzel cheat on them with Snow White and because it turns out the princes were more interested in chasing love than settling down.

Into the Woods embraces the darkness of Grimm fairy tales. It actually has a lot of fun with those elements. But the show presents the lighter aspects of fairy tales as being a bigger problem. In fact, the main message of the show is that if we’re raised on stories where our wishes come true if we want them enough, or we deserve to live happily ever after, those messages can be even more damaging to children because they fill them with unrealistic expectations of how their lives will turn out. 11

But what kid is going to want to hear that story?

CLIP: CHILDREN WILL LISTEN

That’s it for this week, thank you for listening. Special thanks to Jack Zipes and Ruth Bottigheimer. And thanks to Jochen Werner who did the readings.

My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. I tweet at emolinsky and imagine worlds pod. If you like the show, please leave a review wherever you get podcasts or do a shout out on social media. That always helps people discover Imaginary Worlds.

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