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 , 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 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 .” “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 ’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 noth- ing 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,” “,” “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 film Shrek 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 tradi- tions 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 prop- erty 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 film Hard 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’s Gaslight (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. How do we make it new today? What is the secret to successful fairy- tale adaptations? A mischievous impulse often steals into fairy - tale territory to animate radically inventive adaptations. Snow White lux- uriates in her coffin and becomes a vampiristic ghoul in Neil Gaiman’s story “Snow Glass Apples” (1999); Sleeping Beauty becomes a willing sex slave in Anne Rice’s quartet of Sleeping Beauty novels (1999); Rum- pelstiltskin is ready for a killing spree in John Katzenbach’s suspense novel The Analyst (2003). Our adult entertainments demand fictions larger than life and twice as unnatural, and fairy - tale plots and tropes deliver by offering stories with what Bronislaw Malinowski calls a “high coefficient of weirdness” that can make for riveting stories.6 , forced to leave home, face down a demon who embodies warmth and hospitality— offering the children comfort food and a soft bed— but turns murderously hostile, fattening them up for a feast. Beauty is turned over to Beast in a story that tests the limits of compassion and empathy in the face of monstrosity. By confronting civilization with brute nature, that fairy tale also helps us work through the paradox of hostility and hospitality, taking up our fears about the other and how we respond to alterity. Briar Rose invites riskless voyeurism in scenes that feed our desire for beauty’s protection against mortality, corruption, and decay. The constant in these stories is less character xviii Preface to the Prince ton than abstract concepts, always reshuffled and reinvigorated by the val- ues of the next generation of tellers. Fairy tales deliver not only the shock of beauty, as Max Lüthi puts it, but also jolts of horror, rewiring our brains and also charging them up, challenging us, as noted earlier, to think more and think harder about the harsh realities exposed in them. The pleasures of the genre arouse curiosity about the world around us and provide social, cultural, and intellectual capital for navigating its perils. For that reason, fairy tales have been credited with an insurrectionary and emancipatory poten- tial that goes against the grain of conventional wisdom about fairy tales as trivial pursuits. Jack Zipes tells us that fairy tales are “informed by a human disposition to action—to transform the world and make it more adaptable to human needs, while we try to change and make ourselves fit for the world.”7 As the phi los o pher Ernst Bloch puts it, fairy tales hold forth the utopian promise of “something better” or a “more colorful and easier somewhere else,” over the rainbow, east o’ the sun and west o’ the moon, in the “land of milk and honey.”8 There is something monumental and momentous to these stories, despite their humble beginnings and modest aspirations. In his essay “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nicolai Leskov,” Walter Benjamin tells us about how history came to be encoded in stories from times past, and how folktales, through the steady accretion of layers of cultural memory, acquired their beauty. Storytellers, like the artisans of old, and like nature itself, understand the value of “pa- tience” in the creative pro cess. Benjamin describes the protracted pro cess of layering required to produce beautiful man- made objects that are then handed down from one generation to the next: “Minia- tures, ivory carvings elaborated to the point of perfection, stones that are perfect in polish and engraving, lacquer work or paintings in which a series of thin, transparent layers are placed one on top of the other— all these products of sustained, sacrificing effort are vanishing, and the time is past in which time did not matter.”9 What Benjamin mourns in the modern “short story” is its lack of connection to oral traditions, with the consequent loss of the layer- classics edition xix ing effect achieved from the fact that a story has been repeated and retold by successive generations of storytellers. The finest stories emerge as part of a collective pro cess, with each teller adding some- thing new until a sufficient number of layers have accumulated to give the story texture and depth. Benjamin captures what modern critics have called palimpsestic memory, a vibrant pro cess of building and demolishing, all the while leaving traces of the stories antecedent to the new telling. Stories are forever being rewritten while the traces of previous versions are par- tially erased but also preserved, destroyed but also restored. And what is produced, in the end, but a palimpsestic narrative with traces of heterogeneous tellings of a story? What quickly becomes evident is how the palimpsest metaphor cap- tures, in ways that other metaphors for storytelling (cauldron, tapes- try, yarn, web) do not, the diachronic dimension of folk narratives, how they transform and evolve over time, always preserving traces of their history. The synchronic axis, by contrast, enables us to focus on how folktales use variegated building blocks we call tropes, mythemes, archetypes, motifs, or memes— self- contained particles more than anything else. Claude Lévi- Strauss viewed such ele ments of myth as something akin to the fragments of glass in a kaleidoscope that func- tion as building blocks for larger patterns, structures, and designs. What ever name we use, the concept and validation of synchronicity itself is impor tant in helping us recognize how ele ments from tales migrate into new versions and are repurposed to renew their cultural energy. The Grimms’ Cinderella loses a slipper, which turns up a couple of centuries later when Carrie Bradshaw loses her stilettos in an episode of Sex and the City.10 The folktales recorded by the Brothers Grimm preserve the old and the cultural memory of the past even as the stories engage, in their afterlife, in a form of repetition compulsion that is transformative, always making something new, as Ezra Pound put it in another context. “It would seem that mythological worlds have been built up only to be shattered again, and that new worlds were built from the fragments”: xx Preface to the Prince ton Lévi- Strauss began his famous essay “The Structural Study of Myth” with those words from Franz Boas.11 The Grimms worked hard to PREFACE TO THE EXPANDED make a collection that was “the fairest of them all,” and poets and SECOND EDITION phi los o phers continue to use their creative intelligence to compete with those two brothers from Germany, with a name that, so far, re- mains unrivaled in the domain of wonderlore. Few books have enjoyed the extraordinary popular success of the Grimms’ Nursery and Household Tales. With the Bible and Shake- speare, this collection ranks among the best-selling books of the notes Western world. Not long after the Grimms published their tales, the 1. Jack Zipes, Grimm Legacies: The Magic Spell of the Grimms’ Folk and Fairy legendary soldier, adventurer, and raconteur Baron von M¨unch- Tales (Prince ton: Prince ton University Press, 2015), p. 154. hausen asserted that the two volumes published by the brothers oc- 2. Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller, Piccolomini, act 3, scene 4. cupied a position “right in between the cookbook and the hymnal.” 3. http:// www . unesco . org / new / en / communication - and -information/ If the hymnal has been replaced by the latest self-help manual, the mem ory - of - the - world / register / full - list - of - registered - heritage / registe stories themselves continue to combine the practical magic of a red - heritage - page - 4 / kinder - und - hausmaerchen - childrens - and - house good recipe with the spiritual uplift of a devotional song. Since their hold - tales / . publication in two volumes in 1812 and 1815, the Grimms’ tales 4. Tolkien writes about the cauldron of story in “On Fairy- Stories” in The have entertained, inspired, influenced, and instructed. Even when Tolkien Reader, and Salman Rushdie refers to the “ocean of the stream of the Allies were locked in combat with Germany, the British poet stories” in Haroun and the Sea of Stories. 5. For the cinematic variations, see Maria Tatar, Secrets beyond the Door: The W. H. Auden decreed the Nursery and Household Tales to be “among Story of Bluebeard and His Wives (Prince ton: Prince ton University Press, the few indispensable, common-property books upon which Western 1 2004). culture can be founded.” 6. Bronislaw Malinowski, Coral Gardens and Their Magic (New York: Dover, The rise to canonical status for the Grimms’ fairy tales was not at 1935), vol. 2, p. 220. all rapid. While it is tempting to imagine that the collection found 7. Jack Zipes, The Irresistible Fairy Tale: The Cultural and Social History of a its way effortlessly into German households because of innate aes- Genre (Prince ton: Prince ton University Press, 2012), p. 2. thetic, ethical, or spiritual merits, the history of its reception was 8. Ernst Bloch, “The Fairy tale Moves on Its Own Time,” in The Utopian marked by disapproval, hostility, and contempt. It took the Grimms, Function of Art and Lit er a ture: Selected Essays (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, who were active in government and diplomatic service while they 1988), p. 125. carried out their scholarly ventures, several years to realize that the 9. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller: Reflections on the Work of Nikolai Leskow,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1935–1938 (Cambridge, reception of their work had taken a surprising turn. The two vol- MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), vol. 3, p. 150. umes—published as the first installments in a scholarly resource 10. Season 6, episode 9, 2003. designed to preserve the “poetry of the people”—were being appro- 11. Claude Lévi- Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth,” Journal of American priated by parents as bedtime reading for children. While parents Folklore 68 (1955): 428–44. appreciated the narrative hiss and crackle of the stories in the collec- tion, they were less enthusiastic about the Grimms’ efforts to capture the authentic language of the German Volk, a roughhewn idiom that often took a vulgar, burlesque turn. As John Updike reminds us, [ xiii ]