Grimm's Fairy Tales (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

The name Grimm is forever linked with the strange and magical folktales two brothers labored to collect and preserve—stories peopled by characters like Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Grethel, Snow-White, and the Frog Prince. Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm and Wilhelm Carl Grimm were born in the German village of Hanau, Jacob in 1785 and Wilhelm a year later. Their father, Philipp, was a successful lawyer who fostered in his sons a strict sense of moral integrity and purpose. The brothers’ early education was both classical and Calvinist, and Jacob and Wilhelm were devoutly religious. The family’s prosperity turned to poverty when Philipp died suddenly in 1796. His widow, Dorothea (neée Zimmer) Grimm, with six children to care for, was forced to leave her large house and rely on the support of her family. With the aid of Dorothea’s sister Harriet, a lady-in-waiting to the princess of Hessia-Kassel, Jacob and Wilhelm were admitted to Kassel’s prestigious Lyzeum, where they received an excellent education.

Erudite, determined, and devoted to each other, the brothers enrolled at the University of Marburg, Jacob in 1802 and Wilhelm in 1803, both intending to study law. There they came under the influence of Professor Friedrich Karl von Savigny, the founder of historical jurisprudence, who taught that laws are correctly interpreted by tracing their historical and cultural origins. The brothers, shifting their interests away from law, adapted von Savigny’s methods to the study of linguistics and philology.

Jacob and Wilhelm were also deeply affected by the German Romantic movement, whose emphasis on folk culture would inspire their famous fairy-tale collection, Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Stories), first published in two volumes, in 1812 and 1815. Beginning this work as both a study of the German language and an attempt to document the customs of the German people, the brothers collected their folktales by mining a variety of sources, including peasants and lower-class people, nannies and servants, educated young women from upper-middle-class and aristocratic families, and accounts in books and magazines.

The Grimms worked as librarians, and both became professors of German literature at the University of Goöttingen. But in 1837 the brothers, renowned and respected scholars with many published works to their credit, were forced from their university posts for political reasons. Unemployed and in financial difficulty, they set to work on their most ambitious project, the Deutsches Wörterbuch (German Dictionary), a lexicographical history of the German language that would prove to be a colossal and important undertaking and serve as the prototype for the Oxford English Dictionary. In 1840 the Grimms received professorships at the University of Berlin, where they continued their work on the German Dictionary and other projects in philology, linguistics, and German literature.

After the German revolution of 1848, the Grimm brothers were elected to parliament, but their hopes for democratic reform and German unification were dashed, and they left politics disappointed. Jacob retired from teaching at the university to do research, and published an important philological study, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (History of the German Language), and Wilhelm retired from his university post a few years later. In their final years the brothers devoted their energies to completing the German Dictionary but died before reaching the letter G; finishing the work was left to twentieth-century scholars.

From 1815 onward Wilhelm was largely in charge of continuing work on successive editions of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen —what has come to be known as Grimm’s Fairy Tales—often editing the stories to emphasize moral lessons or to remove material deemed offensive to bourgeois audiences. Although not immediately successful, the Grimm collection has stood the test of time and today is arguably the world’s most famous and beloved book of folktales.