The Heroic Industry of the Brothers Grimm

In an 1846 letter to the Athenaeum, English writer William Thoms coined a term, “folklore.” He wondered whether some new scholar might do for British culture what Jacob Grimm had done for German. Jacob was the more prominent of the Grimms, but his life and work were inconceivable without the companionship and contributions of his younger brother, Wilhelm. The work for which they are most celebrated today, Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales), was a collaboration in which Wilhelm eventually played the dominant editorial role. The two brothers shared a bed when young, and lived side by side for most of their lives, pursuing some of the most prodigious scholarship imaginable. Since their deaths (Wilhelm in 1859, Jacob in 1863), so many legends have accrued about their lives and works that they almost seem fairy-tale figures themselves, quaint Hobbit-like creatures trawling the peasantry for stories. Nothing could be further from the truth, which is why Ann Schmiesing’s brief, eloquent and moving biography, The Brothers Grimm, is bound to prove enlightening to English-language readers.[1]   The Tales (first published in two volumes, 1812 and 1815) were famous in England before they were fully appreciated in the German kingdoms and electorates. Edgar Taylor’s selection and translation, entitled German Popular Stories, appeared in 1823, with twelve plates by George Cruikshank, later known for his illustrations of Dickens. That book was something of a bestseller, a status the Grimms never achieved in the German kingdoms during their lifetimes. More recently, editions of the Fairy Tales, as they are commonly known, have sold as well as the Bible. My own copy is entitled The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales—with a misplaced apostrophe, as if the brothers were a single figure—and illustrated by Arthur Rackham. An editorial note says it “uses as its source Margaret Hunt’s 1897 translation, which was originally commissioned by the publisher George Bell of London.” It’s a moneymaking scheme using a text in the public domain, and I do not know how many liberties might have been taken with the prose.   It is also an utterly charming book, clearly one of the treasures of world literature. In 2005, Schmiesing reports, Children’s and Household Tales was named “a UNESCO ‘Memory of the World’ heritage document.” I find it as hard to conceive of a life without these stories as I do a literature without the Iliad and the Odyssey. They are funny, so violent that one can easily imagine them being censored or banned, and profoundly true to human psychology, even when the world they depict contains talking animals and magic potions. The tales jolt us with cannibalism, beheadings galore, sexual innuendo, parents (and stepparents) who are evil or ineffectual, amoral heroes like Thumbling, and people who die of joy as well as grief. The world is unstable yet full of wonders and transformations, a place where natural piety can prevail or be easily crushed. The very first story in the book, “The Frog-King, or Iron Henry,” opens with “olden times when wishing still helped one.” In the second story, a cat and mouse form an unlikely food-seeking partnership that does not end well: “‘All gone’ was already on the poor mouse’s lips; scarcely had she spoken it before the cat sprang on her, seized her, and swallowed her down. Verily, that is the way of the world.” Life in the fairy tales is often nasty, brutish and short, and even happy endings are sometimes happy only for a time.   This “way of the world” includes evocations of class struggle and gender roles that are not always edifying, and at least one heartless example of anti-Semitism, “The Jew in the Thorn Bush”—but such details remind us how little our world differs from theirs.   While I am tempted to dwell on this one book (to which I will return in time), it comprises only a fraction of the Grimms’ scholarly output. The tale Professor Schmiesing tells in her biography is also one of a violent and unstable world, where illness, war and revolution might have prevented the Grimms from accomplishing anything at all. Their endurance and devoted labor, not to mention the general open-mindedness with which they proceeded and the family bonds and friendships they fostered, make them very much the heroes of their own story.

  They were complicated heroes, of course.   The nineteenth century saw the rise of nationalisms we now take for granted. Revolutions in the American colonies and France had exploded or reshaped old aristocracies, and the Napoleonic Wars only temporarily dismantled and restored them. Greece emerged first as an independent nation in about 1830. There were later independence movements in Norway, the Italian reorganization, and finally in 1871 the unification of Germany. Each of these movements posed questions of national identity, at their best emphasizing language and culture more than race and ethnicity. If we are a nation, what language do we speak? What stories do we tell? The scholarship of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm became foundational for German identity, which later made their work exploitable by the Nazis. Though Jacob had studied Hebrew among his many languages, there is no doubt, Schmiesing argues, “Jacob and Wilhelm would evince anti-Semitic prejudice both in the choice of texts in their various collections and in numerous comments in their correspondence and other writings.” Schmiesing acknowledges these flaws without letting them overwhelm the brothers’ accomplishments. On the whole, their loyalties were with liberty.   They grew up in the last years of the Holy Roman Empire, Schmiesing writes, “that patchwork quilt of polities that had long been ‘neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire,’ as Voltaire famously quipped.” Jacob was born in 1785, Wilhelm the following year, so they were Romantics by generation, just a few years older than Byron and Shelley. They were also Romantics by disposition, sceptical of monarchy, devoted to free speech, opposed to the censorship of literature and the arts. They lived in Hessen, the state that had supplied so many troops to the British fighting in America. Of their younger siblings, Ludwig became a significant artist, while the rest led less successful lives, sometimes financially dependent on the older brothers.   Their father, Philipp Wilhelm, served as Hanau town clerk, a post that gave the family trappings of prosperity. “The house’s exterior was light red with tan-colored doors,” Schmiesing writes, “and its ground-floor drawing room was wallpapered with images of huntsmen, some of whose visages the Grimm boys naughtily augmented with penciled-in beards.” They had servants and a garden, and their mother, Dorothea, “could often be found knitting or sewing in the upstairs sitting room. There, by the large German stove, Jacob recalled her washing him with warm water to which she added a splash of wine.”   Schmiesing, a professor and administrator at the University of Colorado Boulder, has researched her subject deeply and makes vivid use of original documents such as letters, diaries and memoirs left by the brothers. She portrays a family in which the older boys were given every advantage, but also charged with the responsibility to succeed in life. When their father was promoted to district magistrate in Steinau, their new home included a small farm, and this proximity to both nature and town life fostered the boys’ lifelong curiosity.   Then came the shock of their father’s death in 1796, followed by financial instability that made Jacob, as oldest son, a driven worker. The brothers went to school in the town of Kassel, which eventually became the happiest of their homes even when they struggled to earn a living there. Much of their livelihood was secured through friendships with patrons like Friedrich Carl von Savigny, a jurist and historian who benefitted from their scholarly assistance. As Napoleon rose to power in France, the brothers were studying at the University of Marburg. Their home, Hessen-Kassel, became an electorate, and then, in 1807, part of the Kingdom of Westphalia, ruled by Napoleon’s brother Jérôme. The Holy Roman Empire had been dissolved in 1806.   The Grimms began their scholarly careers working for other writers, like Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim. Jacob steeped himself in medieval studies, including law and literature, publishing an essay on the Nibelungenlied, a work that would later prove crucial for Richard Wagner. He made his living as librarian to King Jérôme. Wilhelm, too, pursued scholarship and translation work, slowed by a heart ailment that periodically sidelined him for the rest of his life.   Beholden as they were to the aristocracy, they were also part of the revolutionary ferment of their time. Romanticism fostered folkloric studies out of its broad critique of authority, its search for authenticity in sources deemed primitive, closer to nature and therefore truer than conventional beliefs. Collections of traditional English and Scottish ballads had influenced Romantic poets like Wordsworth and Coleridge, who were also searching for a new validity. Professor Schmiesing writes,

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