Tatar - The Hard Facts of the Grimms Fairy Tales

THE HARD FACTS OF
THE GRIMMS FAIRY TALES

MARIA TATAR

The Hard Facts of the Grimms Fairy Tales

Expanded Edition
With a new preface by the author

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD

COPYRIGHT 1987, 2003 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PREFACE TO THE PRINCETON CLASSICS PAPERBACK EDITION,

COPYRIGHT 2019 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PUBLISHED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 41 WILLIAM STREET,

PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 08540

IN THE UNITED KINGDOM:

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 6 OXFORD STREET,

WOODSTOCK, OXFORDSHIRE OX20 1TR

PRESS.PRINCETON.EDU

COVER ART COURTESY OF ISTOCK

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

FIRST EDITION, 1987

EXPANDED SECOND EDITION, 2003

FIRST PRINCETON CLASSICS PAPERBACK PRINTING,

WITH A NEW PREFACE BY THE AUTHOR, 2019

PAPER ISBN 9780691182995

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER 2018961824

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA IS AVAILABLE

PRINTED ON ACID-FREE PAPER.

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For Daniel & Lauren

CONTENTS

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

During the whole time consumed in the slow growth of this family tree, the house of Smallweed, always early to go out and late to marry, has strengthened itself in its practical character, has discarded all amusements, discountenanced all story-books, fairy tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities whatsoever. Hence the gratifying fact, that it has had no child born to it, and that the complete little men and women whom it has produced, have been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something depressing on their minds.

CHARLES DICKENS, Bleak House

PREFACE TO THE PRINCETON 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 Afanasev in Russia, 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 Household 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. Two hundred years later, an NBC television 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 fairytale spin-offs circulating in our culture today, reminds us that stories from times past have something dark and difficult at their core.

Thats just a myth. Its nothing but a fairy tale. Pure folklore. These are insulting catchphrases we hear almost daily. They remind us of how the symbolic stories we tellno matter how much they help us navigate the realare 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 philosopher who was still alive when the Grimm brothers were students, describe the fairy tales told to him in his youth as having a deeper meaning than anything learned later in life?

Albert Einstein is reported to have once said that if you want intelligent children, you should read them fairy tales; if you want more intelligent children, read them more fairy tales. He understood, at a deep level, how these stories get us thinking more and thinking harder about 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 measured. 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 Wlder (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 boundaries: in their commentary on the stories, they pointed to cognate forms in places ranging from the Americas 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 Hausmrchen (Childrens and Household Tales) of the Brothers Grimm are, next to the Luther Bible, the most well-known and most widely distributed book worldwide of German cultural history. They are at the same time the first systematic compilation and the first scientific documentation of the entire European and Oriental fairy tale tradition. Translations exist in over 160 languages and cultural dialects from all continents. Systematic? Scientific? More than likely not, but the tales did pick up bits and pieces of other traditions (though not just European and Oriental), and there is no doubt that they migrated into other cultures with unparalleled swiftness.

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 catatonic trance by her brothers. In the southern part of the United States, King Peacock finds a girl floating on the waters 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 parents, a beautiful non-albino girl whom the sisters try to do in. In an Armenian tale, Nourie Hadigs 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.