Grimm's Fairy Tales

In the fragmented Germany of the early nineteenth century, two philologist brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, set out in search of the stories lying dormant in the memory of the people. They travel across Hesse, knock on cottage doors, and listen to old women recount what their grandmothers had passed down to them. Dorothea Viehmann, whom they present as a peasant woman but who is in reality a cultivated seamstress of Huguenot descent, opens the doors to a treasure trove: dozens of tales where animals speak, where the poor become rich, and where virtue invariably triumphs. The brothers take notes, compile, and rewrite. Their first volume is published on December 20, 1812, with a print run of merely nine hundred copies. The reception is mixed: these stories are deemed too cruel for children. Thus, Wilhelm returns to the workbench, edition after edition, for forty-five years. He softens, he moralizes, he transforms cruel mothers into stepmothers so as not to offend the bourgeois sensibilities of the era. Seven editions follow one another until 1857, and the collection expands to encompass two hundred and eleven tales. Within its pages, Snow White slumbers in her glass coffin, Hansel scatters his breadcrumbs, Little Red Riding Hood ventures through the forest, and Cinderella loses her slipper. The narratives travel across Europe—translated, illustrated, and endlessly reinvented. What began as an erudite collection of folklore becomes the bedside companion of millions of children. The brothers intended to salvage the remnants of a mythical Germany; unwittingly, they forged a universal heritage from which every generation draws its first literary emotions, its earliest delicious terrors, and its first enchantments.