Imaginary Worlds - This Ain't No Fairy Tale

Episode Date: February 18, 2021

The story of the brothers Grimm and how they came to publish a book of fairy tales has become something of a folk legend in itself. The conventional wisdom is that the Grimms collected their tales from village peasants, and the brothers always embraced the darkest elements of the tales. But as fairy tale scholars Jack Zipes and Ruth Bottigheimer explain, the real story of how the Grimms came across these tales -- and altered them -- is much more complicated and interesting. The Grimms were writing for a particular audience in their time, and the values they embedded in these tales have influenced us in ways we may not realize. Featuring readings by actor Jochen Werner. Today's episode is brought to you by Serial Box, BetterHelp and Sygnyl. Want to advertise/sponsor our show? We have partnered with AdvertiseCast to handle our advertising/sponsorship requests. They’re great to work with and will help you advertise on our show. Please email [e-mail] or click the link below to get started. Imaginary Worlds AdvertiseCast Listing Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Crypto trading involves risk of loss. See Kraken.com slash legal slash ca dash pru dash disclaimer for info on Kraken's undertaking to register in Canada. Today's episode is brought to you by Signal, an interactive podcast and arts project that invites you into a hidden world and dares you to complete challenges in the real world. We'll hear a trailer for Signal later on during the break. You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief. I'm Eric Malinsky. So much of modern fantasy is built upon the grim fairy tales. And you know these stories. Rapunzel, Snow White, Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin, Little Red

Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel. The one thing I always knew about the Grimm tales is that they were very dark. Because back then, life was harsh, and people were not afraid to tell their children scary fairy tales. I also heard the Grimm brothers had gone into the villages to get these tales directly from the people who had told these tales to each other for generations. It was like a 19th century version of a WPA project. Because the Grimms were pure folklorists. They didn't have to deal with modern concerns like selling books.

But that's what I thought I knew about the Grimms. It's not really true. In fact, some of it was PR spin told by publishing companies long after the Grimms had died. The real story of how the Brothers Grimm ended up writing a book of fairy tales is more complicated and interesting. And when you break down the misconceptions that a lot of people have about the Grimms, you can discover how these stories have been influencing us in ways that we may not have realized.

Let's start at the beginning. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were were german they were born in the late 1700s and the two brothers were incredibly close for their entire lives jack zipes has written numerous books on the grimm's and their fairy tales the father was sort of like he was a lawyer but also sort of a mayor of this little village or town. They were fairly well off. Unfortunately, when their father was, when Willem was 11 and Jacob was 12, the father died. So the family status sunk. They suffered real social discrimination. Ruth Boddickheimer teaches fairy tales at Stony Brook University.

Ruth Boddickheimer teaches fairy tales at Stony Brook University. They fell into pretty deep poverty from which they were only, the two boys were only saved by being taken in by their aunt. To get out of poverty, the brothers bury their noses in books. And they grew up to become respected scholars. The grooms produced an enormous body of scholarship. Their dictionary is, to this day, a wonder of German usage, historical usage, from Luther to the present, which meant to the 19th century. They got into fairy tales by accident.

It was originally a side gig. A professor, who was a famous folklorist at the time, offered them a job collecting fairy tales. Although they didn't call them fairy tales, that's the English translation. In German, they're called children's and household tales. The Grimm's were really excited about this project. The professor was not as interested. And after they handed him their manuscript, he didn't do anything with it for years. So in 1812, the brothers took back the manuscript and got it published themselves. The first common misconception about the Grimm brothers is that they only cared about preserving folk tales for academic reasons. In fact, their motivations were more political. You might

remember from your high school history class, Germany was not like other European countries. In fact, it wasn't even a country back then. During the lifetime of the Grimms, what we called Germany was actually hundreds of little kingdoms that all spoke different versions of German. The Grimms were very proud of their German heritage, and Ruth says they saw this folklore project as a way to prove that there is a single German folk that should be part of a unified German nation. And this was a lifelong mission because Germany was not unified until 1871

after the Grimms had died. They were trying to extract a set of values that would serve as what they called an Erziehungsbuch, not child-rearing, but nation-rearing, folk-rearing book that would have values that they could all unify around. Which brings me to the second misconception, that the Grimms went into the villages to get these stories directly from the common folk. I mean, they did try to do that, but they didn't get very far. So instead, Wilhelm went to his next-door neighbor, a banker, and he talked with the banker's daughters about the books that they were reading. There was nothing like the pictures of the Grimms out in the countryside surrounded by chickens listening to an old lady telling tales. That was a complete fabrication that was made after they died.

Their efforts to get stories from the folk didn't work. And in part, it's because the folk didn't have those stories. The young, well-brought-up bourgeois girls had these stories. And they had these stories because they had read them in a lot of books that had been published in the 1790s, when there had been something called the Blue Library of All Nations that had brought together fairy tales, magic tales, mainly from France, translated them into German, and they were eagerly read. It's ironic that the Grimms were trying to find authentically German stories and ended up translating and rewriting a lot of French stories. And they did do a lot of research at the library,

going through old books to find the earliest versions of these tales. And Jack Zipe says the brothers did get some of their stories through what we call the oral tradition, but they went to very specific people that they thought were good storytellers. A soldier, an old soldier who had served in the army, and he exchanged tales for them if they gave him new trousers that he didn't have. And then there was a woman who was extremely brilliant and had worked in a tavern on the border between Germany and Holland. And she gave them at least 15 or 20 tales that they recorded. They would hear the tales and they'd run home and write down, or they would write them down as they heard them. Now, from the beginning, the Grimms were trying to figure out how to make their book appeal to a mass market. But it took them a long time to figure that out. In fact, it didn't even occur to them to have illustrations in the book until 12 years after the first edition was published.

12 years after the first edition was published. They received an English translation with the illustrations by a very famous painter in Great Britain at that time. His name was George Cruikshank. And these illustrations were brilliant. And the book became in England a bestseller. When Wilhelm and Jakob saw that, they said, oh my God, we're missing out on something. And also the publisher said, you know, why don't you do an edition only for the people? And you can also do a scholarly edition at the same time. The third misconception about the Grimm's is that they never sanitize these dark stories. That's not true either. Some of the early editions of the book didn't sell very well because the stories were considered too grim, no pun intended. They eventually published seven editions of the fairy tales,

and mostly they were focused on improving the language and their storytelling abilities. But some of the changes were made in response to criticism. In fact, a lot of people were unhappy with the first version of Rapunzel because they clearly stated that the prince had impregnated Rapunzel. Here is the actor Johann Werner reading from the first version of Rapunzel. This scene was cut from later editions. At first, Rapunzel was frightened. But soon she came to like the young king so well that she arranged for him to come every day and be pulled up.

Thus, they lived in joy and pleasure for a long time. The fairy did not discover what was happening until one day Rapunzel said to her, Frau Göttl, tell me why it is that my clothes are all too tight. They no longer fit me. You godless child, said the fairy. What am I hearing from you? She immediately saw how she'd been deceived and was terribly angry. Jack says sometimes the Brothers Grimm would drop stories altogether

if people complained they were too dark or morally ambiguous. For instance, in the first edition of 1812-1815, there was a tale called How Children Played with Slaughtering. We tell it to you very briefly. Once a butcher was slaughtering a pig in his shop, the four children were playing together and they saw the butcher doing this. And one of the boys said, I'm going to be like the butcher. And the other one said, I'm going to be like a pig. And the two girls said, and we'll collect the pig's blood. And so the older boy took a knife, slit the throat of his friend.

The two girls started gathering the blood in pots. A man walked by. He was a councilman, horrified that this was going on. Graham told of the boy who had slaughtered his friend and took him to the council. And there the mayor said to the rest of the council, what should we do with this boy? And one man said, well, we'll put an apple in one hand and a knife in the other, and if he takes the apple, we'll let him go free. And so the boy looked at them, took the apple, ran off, and that's the end of the tale. And the moral of the story is I have no idea,

which is probably why that story did not make it into the second edition. Now, in terms of their editorial judgment, the Grimm's were actually considered very progressive in their values for the time. They wanted the peasants to have a role, to be able to speak truth to absolute kings, absolutist kings and queens. But that sense of enlightenment did not extend to the Jews. In fact, there are several tales that have been widely criticized as being anti-Semitic, or at least have been criticized in our lifetime, not theirs. For instance, Ruth says, look at the tale, The Jew and the Thorns. It was a tale for which the Grimm's bear a real moral responsibility for having changed, because they like to get a tale in its oldest form.

Well, they had that tale in the oldest form from the 1500s, where it was called The Monk in the Thorn Bush. In that story, a virtuous young German apprentice meets someone who exploits him, who tricks him, and that person is a monk. And so when this good young German gets hold of a magic violin that makes everybody who hears it dance. He lures the monk into the thorn bush, makes him dance, and he's dreadfully, dreadfully injured. The Grimms took that tale from the 1500s and modernized it by making the monk into a Jew, having the same thing happen, except that the Jew is executed at the end. It was terrible, really terrible. Jack thinks the depiction of Jews in Grimm fairy tales

is mixed. Some stories aren't as bad as others. Jack is Jewish, but he wants these stories to be preserved as they are. In fact, he once got a call from the Anti-Defamation League asking him to remove The Jew and the Thorns from an edition of Grimm fairy tales that Jack had translated. They called me up and said, you should take this story, you should take it out. And I said, by no means will I take it out. This tale is part of the 19th century

and I'm not hiding anything. They never bothered me after that. The fourth misconception is that the Grimms were always the definitive book on fairy tales. But do you know who gave them a run for their money? Ludwig Bechstein. I never heard of him either, probably because he wasn't published in the U.S. But in the 19th century, in the German provinces, Bechstein's fairy tales were actually more popular than the Grimm's. And it's interesting to compare Bechstein to the Grimm's because there are so many

aspects of Grimm fairy tales that we tend to think of as being just the way fairy tales are, but they're actually specific to the Grimm's. For instance, Rue thinks that Beckstein had a more modern outlook and having characters that didn't accept their fate in life. He wrote tales in which heroes and heroines actually made an effort to do something and their efforts led to good results. For instance, a girl wants to rescue somebody who's on top of a glass mountain. And she says to herself, if I only had wings, I could fly to the top of the glass mountain.

She grabs a passing bird, tears off its wings, and flies to the top of the mountain, whereupon she rescues the person. whereupon she rescues the person. That's not a great story for the bird, but it is a surprisingly proactive female protagonist for a 19th century children's story. In a grim tale, you would have a girl at the bottom of a glass mountain saying, if only I could get to the top of the glass mountain. And then a good supernatural creature would come and say, oh, you are a good virtuous girl, I will help you.

And then that person would get her to the top of the mountain. Also, you know the trope of the wicked stepmother? Well, this was a time when a lot of women died in childbirth, so stepmothers were common. And in the preface to his fairy tales, Ludwig Beckstein said, I'm not going to have stepmothers in this collection of stories. They have a hard enough time. I'm not going to make them the villainesses of one story after another. That was a subtle critique of the Grimms, because in many stories like Cinderella or Snow White, in the earlier versions of the tales that the Grimm's

had found, the villains were originally the heroine's biological mothers. But the Grimm's thought that the sanctity of motherhood was essential to the German values that they wanted to promote. And they were very fond of their mother, so they changed all the evil mothers to evil stepmothers. And in some stories, they actually added extra punishment to the stepmothers. Like they added a new ending to Snow White, where the wicked queen, Snow White's stepmother, goes to Snow White's wedding, even though she knows it's probably a trap. At first, she didn't want to go to the wedding, but she found no peace. She had to go and see the young queen. When she arrived, she recognized Snow White and terrorized she could only stand there

without moving. Then they put a pair of iron shoes into burning coals. They were brought forth with tongs and placed before her. She was forced to step into the red-hot shoes and dance until she fell down dead. Ruth says that Ludwig Beckstein had plenty of wicked witches in his stories, but... When you count up the number of witches and bad witches and bad sorcerers, they're exactly equal in Bechstein's collection of tales. But in Grimm's tales, it's female witches who are in the great majority. So if Bechstein was more popular with the public, why did the Grimms become more famous?

Around the turn of the century, after the German provinces had been unified, there was a renewed interest in German nationalism and German values, which were topics that the Grimms were passionate about. Unfortunately, you can probably guess where this is going. By the 1930s, the Nazis had adopted and perverted Grimm fairy tales, making them an essential part of their propaganda. They highlighted the anti-Semitic stories, and they turned other villains into Jews who had not been Jewish in the Grimm tales.

In fact, the Nazis used Grimm fairy tales so much in their propaganda. After the war, the Allied occupational forces banned Grimm fairy tales from German nurseries. But at this point, the Grimms were long gone. The final edition of their book had been published way back in 1857, and a part of me feels like we should just leave them and their values in their time and place. But it's hard to do that when Grimm fairy tales are with us more than ever. We'll get to that chapter after the attention. We're down here all day with no odor protection. Wait, what's that?

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Find Secret at your nearest Walmart or Shoppers Drug Mart today. Signal is an interactive arts podcast that launched this month, and the show invites you into a hidden world that exists all around us. In each episode, you'll hear a soothing voice, it's very ASMR, that dares you to complete challenges and small collaborative acts in the real world. It's a magical realism podcast where Signal becomes a vessel for ancient wisdom and medicine for many of the troubles that are ailing our world. Here is a sample. Do not become attached to the signal, for the signal belongs to no one. Three days from now, you will have an important revelation.

Knowing this, there is something I need you to do for me. Will you choose to follow the instructions? Visit Signal.com, that's S-Y-G-N-Y-L.com to check it out. Now, Grimm fairy tales are beautifully told, and their popularity is earned in terms of the quality of their work. But Ruth Bodeheimer says there were other factors that gave the Grimms the corner market on fairy tales in the U.S. Grimm's The Corner Market on fairy tales in the U.S. At the turn of the century, when Grimm fairy tales were being celebrated in Germany as the epitome of German values, many Americans saw Germany as the height of Western civilization, and the Grimms were considered uber-German.

In fact, at Princeton University, commenting on a Grimm's tale that you read in German was part of the entrance exam in the 19th century, if you can believe that. And after World War II, there was a cottage industry of psychologists who liked to analyze Grimm fairy tales because they thought these tales were like ancient folklore, which could tell us deep truths about ourselves. But many of these psychologists were German Jews that had escaped from Germany, and they were raised on the misconception that the Grimms had gone into the villages to get these tales directly from the common folk. But that's why it's important to look at how the Grimms found these tales and change them according to their own values. For instance,

Ruth says, keep in mind when the Grimms began their career in the early 19th century, the French were the main publishers of fairy tales. France was mostly Catholic. The Grimms were Protestant, as were many Germans at the time. There's a difference in the way Protestant fairy tales in the early 1800s treated beauty. In the Grimm's Tales, beauty was an outward sign of your inner condition. If you were virtuous and good, you were beautiful. In Catholic fairy tales at the same time, there was a guy named George Schmeller in the mountains of Bavaria who was collecting fairy tales from Catholic storytellers. And interestingly enough, their fairy tales didn't require good girls to be beautiful.

That was also true in the fairy tales of a French storyteller named Madame d'Aulnoy, one of whose heroines was very ugly. That was her name, Les Drenettes. She was ugly, but she was noble of heart. So for the Grimm's, beauty and virtue become absolutely synonymous. And that got reinforced by Disney films based on Grimm fairy tales. In fact, it's interesting to note the first Disney film to

explicitly not equate beauty as a sign of goodness was Beauty and the Beast, which was adapted from a French fairy tale. And it was also a repudiation of decades of Disney films that had come before. And Jack Zipe says, if we want to look at another tale that's influenced our culture in ways we may not realize, look no further than Little Red Riding Hood, which is actually problematic in French and German. Before the Grimms, the most famous version of that story was written by a French writer named Charles Perrault. In the Perrault version, it ends with a wolf eating Little Red Riding Hood, and then there's a poem, a short moral,

in which he says little girls who invite wolves into polis deserve what they get. The Grimms dropped the direct moralizing, and they gave the story a happy ending, where the woodsman shows up to save Red Riding Hood and her grandmother. And the Grimms added an epilogue, where Red Riding Hood meets another wolf in the woods. Little Red Riding Hood, however, was on her guard and went straight forward on her way, and told her grandmother that she had met the wolf, and that he had said good morning to her, but with such a wicked look in his eyes that if they had not been on the public road, she was certain he would have eaten her up. Well, said the grandmother, we'll shut the

door that he may not come in. So again, here are the Grimm's taking a tale and making it less dark than the original and more popular. But Jack thinks that both versions of the story reinforce a mentality of blaming the victim. Now, this is an ideology that is common up through today. I mean, I remember my father saying when my sister was almost raped, what were you wearing? How did you bring him on? Now, overall, grim fairy tales are still darker and more violent than most fairy tales being published today. That's been a concern for parents. Which brings me to a question that doesn't have a clear answer because it's something people have been debating forever.

Is it better to shield children from the bad parts of the world for as long as possible, or should we expose them to dark stories early on so they can be prepared to face unexpected challenges in life, especially if their parents won't be around to protect them? Jack is a big proponent of grim fairy tales because, despite their problems, he doesn't think the darkness in the stories is gratuitous. These tales still mirror issues like the violation of women, rapes, child abandonment throughout the world. So when you have conditions that are similar, you're also going to get tales that resonate. Through these tales, we can gain distance because these tales are metaphors or they are analogs of what we're

doing in our world. And he thinks we often underestimate the sophistication of children. I read all of these stories to my daughter when she was three, four, five, six. She's turned out pretty well. She's turned out as a therapist. I've worked with kids and the age groups were six to ten. And they love these stories because they expose, they reveal how frightening the world is. And these tales, they don't always end necessarily happily. They end with a resolution of a conflict. with the resolution of a conflict. Generally speaking, Ruth is more critical of the Grimm brothers than Jack is. But she also felt very comfortable telling these stories to her children when they were growing up.

Children are the ultimate skeptics and they want to know why. Well, why was that? Why was that? And you can help them along to understand tales by asking them then, well, why do you think? What's going to happen next? And I think as with all children's literature, what children's readings are an amazing opportunity for parents and children to think together in forming their worldviews. Children are not going to form their worldviews according to their parents, but according to the world they experience. Yeah. I mean, you can't take the Grimm's out of their context and you can't read the Grimm's now without reading them in our context.

That's right. That's right. And it's amazing how contexts tend to vary even within the same time period. If your kid is in school in the second grade and has a wonderfully open, experienced teacher who knows a lot about kids and how they interact with one another and sees problems coming and gets ahead of the curve, that means kids in that class are going to have a very different experience of the world for seven hours every day than a kid who might be in second grade class next door, whose teacher is oblivious, who lets things happen, where kids get bullied.

A kid under those circumstances is going to have a very different worldview. Right. And then each of those children reads grim fairy tales and will start to come away with different lessons. Very, very much the worldview. Right. And then each of those children reads grim fairy tales and will start to come away with different lessons. Very, very much the case. Yes. As I've been working on this episode, I keep thinking about the musical

Into the Woods. I mean, I love any Stephen Sontag musical, but that is one of my favorites. It takes place in a fairy tale world where all of these different characters are bumping into each other. And at the end of the first act, they all get the happy endings that we're familiar with.

Act two is about what happens next. Like Little Red Riding Hood has PTSD from her run-in with a wolf, so she's hypervigilant with a knife. The princes that married Cinderella and Rapunzel cheat on them with Snow White and Sleeping Beauty because it turns out the princes are more interested in chasing love than settling down. Into the Woods embraces the darkness of Grimm fairy tales. It actually has a lot of fun with those elements. But the show presents the lighter aspects of fairy tales as being a bigger problem.

In fact, the main message of Into the Woods is that if we're raised on stories where our wishes can come true if we want them enough, and we will get the happy ending that we think we deserve, those messages can be even more damaging because they give children unrealistic expectations of how their lives will turn out. But what kid's going to want to hear that story? Careful the things you do Children will see That is it for this week. Thank you for listening.

Special thanks to Jack Zipes and Ruth Boddickheimer. And thanks to Johan Werner who did the readings. My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. You can like the show on Facebook. My tweet at eMilinski

and Imagine Worlds Pod. If you really like the show, please leave a review wherever you get your podcasts or do a shout out on social media. That always helps people discover imaginary worlds. The best way to support the show is to donate on Patreon. At different levels, you get either free imaginary world stickers, a mug, a T-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account, which has the full-length interviews of every guest in every episode. You can learn more at imaginaryworldspodcast.org. Careful the spell you cast Not just on children Sometimes the spell may last

Cast what you can see And turn against you Careful the tale you tell That is the spell Children will listen