Preface to the Prince Ton Classics Edition

PREFACE TO THE PRINCE TON CLASSICS EDITION Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm had just the right surname for collectors of fairy tales. Unlike Giambattista Basile in Italy, Charles Perrault in France, or Alexander Afanas’ev in Rus sia, all of whom contributed much to what has become the modern fairy - tale canon, the brothers’ winning last name compactly captured the dark side of their Nursery and House hold Tales, published in two volumes in 1812 and 1815. In the German Dictionary launched by the Brothers Grimm and completed in 1961 with the publication of the thirty- second volume, the rage, wrath, fury, and terror associated with the word “grimm” call for nearly twelve pages of citations and explanation.1 Two hundred years later, an NBC tele vi sion crime series inspired by a phantasmagoria of fairy - tale tropes is called Grimm, plain and simple. Tapping into and feeding off the primal energy of the tales, the series, like many fairy- tale spin- offs circulating in our culture today, reminds us that stories from times past have something dark and difficult at their core. “That’s just a myth.” “It’s nothing but a fairy tale.” “Pure folklore.” These are insulting catchphrases we hear almost daily. They remind us of how the symbolic stories we tell—no matter how much they help us navigate the real— are dismissed as trivial or disdained as lies. But these seeming trifles can transmit higher truths, in part because they conceal as much as they reveal, challenging us to unpack the wisdom that drives their plots. Why else would Friedrich Schiller, the German phi los o pher who was still alive when the Grimm brothers were stu- dents, describe the fairy tales told to him in his youth as having a “deeper meaning” than anything learned later in life?2 Albert Einstein is reported to have once said that if you want intel- ligent children, you should read them fairy tales; if you want more in- telligent children, read them more fairy tales. He understood, at a deep level, how these stories get us thinking more and thinking harder about [xiii] xiv Preface to the Prince ton who we are and how we navigate the perils and possibilities of the real world. These are the stories that stage worst- case scenarios and let us face down the terrors of the great “What if?” “ Little Red Riding Hood” takes up the relationship between predator and prey and shades into a story about innocence and seduction. “Bluebeard” reminds us that marriage, the most intimate, tender, and loving of unions, is haunted by the threat of murder. And what else is “Snow White” about but a collision between innocence, tenderness, and magnetic beauty on the one hand, and envy, cruelty, and emotional abandonment on the other? The Grimms’ two volumes of fairy tales became the gold standard to which other collectors aspired, and by which other collections came to be mea sured. The brothers themselves were reluctant to use the term Deutsch (German) for this collection, although they had not hesitated to emphasize the “Germanness” of their other anthologies by using such titles as Deutsche Mythen (German Myths) and Altdeutsche Wälder (Old German Woodlands). It slowly dawned on the Grimms that this collection, in which they had intended to capture “genuinely Hessian” fairy tales, did not know national bound aries: in their com- mentary on the stories, they pointed to cognate forms in places ranging from the Amer i cas to the Far East. In 2005, UNESCO was moved to honor the Grimms’ collection by including it in the Memory of the World Register with the following inscription: The “Kinder- und Hausmärchen” ( Children’s and House- hold Tales) of the Brothers Grimm are, next to the Luther Bible, the most well- known and most widely distributed book worldwide of Ger- man cultural history. They are at the same time the first systematic compilation and the first scientific documentation of the entire Eu- ro pean and Oriental fairy tale tradition. Translations exist in over 160 languages and cultural dialects from all continents.”3 Systematic? Scientific? More than likely not, but the tales did pick up bits and pieces of other traditions (though not just Eu ro pean and “Oriental”), and there is no doubt that they migrated into other cultures with un- paralleled swiftness. classics edition xv The Grimms’ stories also enshrined a standard literary version, or Buchmärchen, that turned variants of traditional folktales into devia- tions from the norm. The oral storytelling tradition— unstable and ephemeral but also often vulgar and offensive— was replaced by “au- thoritative” tales that could be framed as sacrosanct cultural property that affirmed enlightened social values. We often forget that the many non- Grimm narrative incarnations of Cinderella’s story, or for that matter the tale of Jack and the Beanstalk, are unique inventions of their own, sui generis, to be sure, yet also connected, like the Grimms’ versions, to an ancient web of storytelling.4 That there is an “original” or canonical version is nothing more than a fiction propping up our faith in defunct archetypes. Take the case of “Snow White,” a story that has come to be seen as quintessentially German and Grimm. Go to Greece and you will hear the story of Maroula, a girl despised by Venus and rescued from a cata- tonic trance by her brothers. In the southern part of the United States, King Peacock finds a girl floating on thewaters in a gold coffin and brings her back to life by removing a seed from her mouth. If you travel to Switzerland, you might hear a story about seven dwarfs who offer shelter to a girl and are then murdered by robbers, all because the girl refused to help an old woman. Samoans tell a story about ten albino sisters who are jealous of the eleventh child born to their par- ents, a beautiful non- albino girl whom the sisters try to do in. In an Armenian tale, Nourie Hadig’s mother orders her husband to slay his daughter because the moon has declared the girl to be “the most beautiful of all.” The canonical Grimm version turns out to be nothing more than another kaleidoscopic twist to the “Snow White” tale (also known as “The Beautiful Girl” in cultures where there is no snow and where skin color is on a different chromatic spectrum. Today, we have multiple portals to the fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm. Disney Studios reinvented the folkloric genre with feature films that recycle and reimagine “Snow White,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and “The Little Mermaid.” That same dream factory also corralled fairy - tale characters into the ABC xvi Preface to the Prince ton tele vi sion series Once Upon a Time, which, like the filmShrek and the Broadway musical Into the Woods, constructs a magical paracosm filled with characters both literary and folkloric. These productions often nod to the authority of the written word, opening with a se- quence in which a disembodied voice reads out loud from a book. With the current revival of interest in those who collected and wrote fairy tales before Disney— not just the Brothers Grimm but also Giambattista Basile, Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, and others— many of today’s viewers will be able to identify the textual source for reworked tales from times past. They will also be equipped to retrace the paths taken by stories as they moved from oral traditions to print texts to mass- media productions. Once told in agrarian socie ties, often to the rhythms of labor that included spinning, sewing, weaving, cooking, and mending, fairy tales migrated into books and print culture, and from there they have shown an extraordinary resilience, becoming the commercial property of corporate entities. Still, there is plenty of competition at the grassroots level, and the sheer number of creative adaptations, mash- ups, parodies, and remixes demonstrates how the stories represent col- lective cultural property. These are the stories that migrated, in the course of the nineteenth century, into the nursery, but that have re- tained a cross- generational appeal, with fairy - tale characters, plot structures, and tropes showing up in places likely and unlikely. Who would imagine, for example, that Quentin Tarantino had Sleeping Beauty in mind when he made the filmDjango Unchained (2012), or that David Slade’s filmHard Candy (2005) was inspired by “ Little Red Riding Hood”? And why does “Snow White” continue to haunt us in novels ranging from Helen Oyeyemi’s Boy Snow Bird (2014) to Cathe- rine Valente’s Six- Gun Snow White (2013)? “Make it new” was never a piece of advice you had to give storytellers spinning yarns at communal gatherings. They were always making it new— shamelessly cutting and pasting but always improvising as well— so that their stories would move along just as smoothly as the ones told the night before. The most skillful raconteurs were the iconoclasts. classics edition xvii They were able to preserve the tales and keep them alive precisely because they were constantly trying to undo them or blow them up. Fairy tales seem to have a built-in refresh button, inviting us to adapt and repurpose as they make their way into new scenes of story - telling and find themselves at home in new media. In the 1940s the Bluebeard story had a brief but intense revival in Hollywood with such films as George Cukor’sGaslight (1944), Alfred Hitch- cock’s Notorious (1946), and Fritz Lang’s Secret Beyond the Door (1947) among the most prominent examples.5 Screenwriters dropped sub- tle hints about their folkloric point of reference with oversized house keys, forbidden chambers, and marriages haunted by the threat of murder.

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