1 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 Grimm fairy tales like Rapunzel, Snow White, Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin, Red Riding Hood, or Hansel and Gretel. 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 Wilhelm Grimm 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. 2 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.