Who is grimm fairy tale

The Grimms, however, had curated the collection as an academic anthology for scholars of German culture, not as a collection of bedtime stories for young readers.

Amid the political and social turbulence of the Napoleonic Wars , as France conquered Germanic lands, Jacob and Wilhelm were driven by nationalism to highlight their homeland and heritage.

They were inspired by German Romantic authors and philosophers who believed that the purest forms of culture, those that bonded a community, could be found in stories shared from generation to generation. Storytelling expressed the essence of German culture and recalled the spirit and basic values of its people.

Like Cinderella and many of the characters in their folktales, the story of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm is a rags-to-riches one. In , just a few days after Jacob, the eldest, turned 11, their father died suddenly of pneumonia, plunging the once middle-class family of six children into poverty. The inseparable pair shared the same diligent work habits, studying for up to 12 hours a day.

After graduating, Jacob moved to Marburg in to study law at the university; Wilhelm followed a year later. But this setback later proved fortuitous. Jacob and Wilhelm were prolific letter-writers during their rare times apart, and while in Paris, Jacob wrote to Wilhelm in Marburg of his desire to devote his life to the study of German literary history.

Arnim and Brentano had published a collection of old German folk songs, and Brentano, wanting to continue his philological pursuits, asked the Grimms for their help in combing library shelves for folktales. The brothers found some texts in books, but they also focused on oral traditions, seeking out storytellers in friends and acquaintances. Most of them were women, one of whom, Dorothea Wild, would later marry Wilhelm.

She shared the many tales that travellers had told to her. She shared the many tales that travelers had told to her. Brentano did not use the 54 tales that Jacob and Wilhelm sent him in , but Arnim urged them to publish their collection nonetheless. Over a year span, seven editions of the folktale collection were published.

The final edition, published in , is the best known and is notably different from the first in both style and content. In later editions, Wilhelm expanded the originally shorter, sparser prose and modified plots to make parts of the dark, tragic stories more accessible to children. See also: T en things you didn't know about Aladdin. Beginning in , illustrations were added to the books.

The Grimms had not intended to publish a book of folktales. They wanted to resurrect the German oral tradition, but in the process, they ultimately curated a culturally encompassing collection of tales. As philologists, collectors, researchers, and editors, the brothers helped establish the methodology of collecting and documenting folklore. Their pioneering, scientific approach changed the course of historical linguistics, setting a standard worthy of imitation.

All rights reserved. History Magazine. Brothers Grimm fairy tales were never meant for kids The world's most famous collection of children's stories began as an academic study for adults, when Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm collected German folklore in the s. The brothers in later life. Jacob standing and Wilhelm Grimm in a daguerreotype from circa Share Tweet Email.

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Go Further. Why should we care about such tales? The impetus that led the Grimms to their twin passions of language and folklore probably stems from that universal urge: the longing for home. Even as a schoolboy, Jacob Grimm was well acquainted with how language can be used to make one feel at home, or an outsider. As the country mouse at school, one of his teachers would always address him in the third person er rather than the more respectful Sie used for all his city classmates.

He never forgot it. He missed the walks to nearby villages with his father, and seeing the country folk go about their lives, from work to play, through a haze of tobacco smoke and bright sunshine, before everything changed.

At university, the Grimms luckily met the Romantic poet Clemens Brentano, who asked for their help collecting folk songs and poetry. That began directing their love of family, of homeland and heritage, towards a study of native German oral tradition. The brothers were particularly interested in stories, sorting through the cultural rubble and debris that, up until then, no one had really cared about to write down.

The Napoleonic Wars made this a time of great political and social turbulence. The German-speaking realm was fractured, and many German scholars, Jacob and Wilhelm among them, were driven by nationalism to preserve a quickly disappearing German heritage. At the heart of this was the German Romantic movement, with its emotional longing for authenticity. The Romantics believed this truth could be found in the simpler words and wisdom of the common people, by hearkening back to a nostalgic, glorified past.

For the Romantics, this purity was expressed in Naturpoesie or folk poetry. As ethnologist Regina Bendix points out, it was hard for the cultural curators of Naturpoesie—the proto-hipster intellectuals of the day—to reconcile what they thought was the truest kind of poetry with the lower classes, especially the urban poor. So the good folk that created and shared this oral tradition in their own words, isolated and preserved by scholars, severed from their social context, were really idealized, imaginary folk somewhere in the misty, even medieval past, not unlike in a fairytale, full of terror and beauty that was far removed from the present day.

To reach the authenticity of German folklore and language meant reaching as far back as you could to discover its essential origins. This is what the Brothers Grimm did as they set about collecting as many tales as they could, in the vernacular, all over the country, no matter how violent, offensive, or grim. In those days, the fairytales that were fashionable in upper class social circles were written to be literary or moral teaching moments, such as the tales of Charles Perrault.

The Grimm brothers thought this kind of sanitized French style to be more fakelore than folklore, with the language, artificially literary, clearly written to be read by the educated classes. Their novel approach was to include folktales as a kind of Naturpoesie, and to write them down not just for literature, but for science.

Privacy Policy Contact Us You may unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the provided link on any marketing message. Instead, they were among the first to set down a rigorous methodology of the collection and research of oral tradition , in which copious notes were kept of the speakers, the places and times.

Careful comparisons were made between different versions of tales the Grimms were told. We have added nothing of our own, have embellished no incident or feature of the story, but have given its substance just as we ourselves received it.

This really was pioneering work in folkloristics. And as he compared tales, attempting to reconstruct the distant beginning of German culture, Jacob Grimm grew more interested in language. Language was a vehicle that could reach even further back to the authentic and original German past.

How and why did words change from different Germanic languages or dialects to other Indo-European languages? And just like that, Germanic historical linguistics was born out of a desire to understand the origins of German folktales better, and historical phonology developed as a new field of study.