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An evil stepmother demands a beautiful
maiden’s lungs and liver;
a girl is ripped from a wolf’s stomach;
and sisters mutilate their feet
to squeeze into a solid gold slipper.
During the early 1800s,
brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
gathered these unflinchingly gory details
from stories circulating around
what’s now Germany.
But as the tales amassed widespread fame,
they morphed dramatically.
The Brothers Grimm
were born in Hanau in the 1780s.
At the time, Germanic lands
didn’t yet exist
as the unified nation-state of Germany,
but were instead divided
into small, independent princedoms.
And French forces exerted
significant control over the region
as a result of Napoleon's
expansionist aims.
Meanwhile, European Romanticism
was beginning to flourish,
accompanied by movements to preserve
national languages and traditions.
In their teens, the Brothers Grimm
enrolled to study law at university,
and soon became interested
in how local rules and customs
were embedded in folk stories.
It wasn’t long before they began
undertaking their own
Romantic-nationalist project,
soliciting all manner of German folklore,
striving, they said, “to penetrate into
the wild forests of [their] ancestors.”
Their aim was to foster a unifying sense
of German cultural identity.
They idolized the idea of stories
from the so-called “common man,”
which they viewed as evidence of
a national “unspoiled imagination”
and “inner purity.”
In practice, much of what they collected
came from middle and upper class sources,
and some stories had traceably
transnational origins.
But the Grimms received material spanning
songs, jokes, fables,
and magic fairy tales,
from books and educated young women,
as well as a painter and a former soldier,
though they probably collected
the most from the wife of a tailor.
They published their first volume,
“Children’s and Household Tales,” in 1812.
But from the stepmother who serves
her husband his own son for dinner,
to the man who murders his brother
in order to marry a princess
and then gets drowned in a sack,
these stories were far from cozy.
In fact, originally,
the stories were for adults,
and often dealt with difficult realities,
like parents abandoning their children
in the woods due to poverty
and weary soldiers deserting the army.
The happier turns were often escapist
fantasies from harsh circumstances,
like a princess who throws a frog
she's forced to marry against a wall,
only to reveal a dashing prince.
The first two volumes
the Brothers Grimm published
tended to reflect the horror
and strangeness of the tales
they originally collected.
But many readers found their content
disturbing, and they didn’t sell well.
However, an English version
that was shorter, heavily illustrated,
and geared towards children, did.
And as their financial
and family obligations grew,
the brothers began to edit more actively.
In 1825, the Brothers Grimm published
a “Small Edition”
that incorporated illustrations
and was intended to appeal
to newer, Romantic ideals of childhood
and more conservative, middle and upper
class Christian sensibilities.
A gory tale of kids “playing”
pig and butcher, for example,
didn’t make the cut.
Meanwhile, the original negligent
biological mothers
of “Snow White” and “Hansel and Gretel”
transformed into wicked stepmothers
in later editions,
helping reinforce
traditional gender roles
framing biological mothers as virtuous,
feminine, and nurturing.
And while at first Rapunzel was revealed
to have been entertaining
her princely visitor
when she becomes pregnant;
with revision, she simply let slip
about him—
no out-of-wedlock sex implied.
The brothers also accentuated
some retributive violence,
making for more cautionary tales.
For example, the Grimms’
earliest version of Cinderella
ends after she is whisked away
in her prince’s carriage,
while their last version concludes with
birds pecking out her stepsisters’ eyes.
Over their lifetimes, the brothers
published seven editions of the tales,
which became increasingly popular
as they deleted and added stories
while intensively editing them
to fit more puritanical tastes
and amplifying narrative
and descriptive details.
Additional adaptations by others
saw the stories evolve further.
No longer would Snow White be revived
by a stumbling pallbearer,
but a prince’s kiss,
and henceforth her witchy stepmother
wouldn’t dance herself to death
in iron shoes on a scorching bed of coals.
In other words, they'd grow
to be not quite so unconventional
or grim as their origins.
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