In Our Time - The Brothers Grimm

Episode Date: February 5, 2009

Melvyn Bragg discusses the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm with Juliette Wood, Marina Warner and Tony Phelan. The German siblings who in 1812 published a collection of fairy tales including Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella and Rumpelstiltskin. But the Grimm versions are surprisingly, sometimes shockingly, different. Cinderella has no fairy godmother, her ugly sisters are not ugly but they do have their eyes pecked out by pigeons. Sleeping Beauty does not have an evil stepmother, Rapunzel is pregnant and Frog Princes do not get kissed but thrown against walls. They may not be the fairy tales as we know them, but without the Brothers Grimm we might not know them at all. But why did two respectable German linguists go chasing after fairy stories, what do the stories tell us about German culture and romantic nationalism at the time and why do these ever-evolving tales of horror, wonder and fantasy continue to hold us in thrall?With Juliette Wood, Associate Lecturer in Folklore at Cardiff University; Marina Warner, Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex; Tony Phelan, Professor in German at Keble College, Oxford.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, Cinderella does not have a fairy godmother, sleeping beauty does not have an evil stepmother. Rapunzel is pregnant, and Frog princes do not get kissed but thrown against walls, and that's only the tip of the horror.

This is the world of her brother's grim, two German siblings who in 1812 published a collection of fairy tales, or rather wonder tales, including Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Brombo Stitskin, and Rapon. They may not be the fairy tales as we know them now, but without the Brothers Grimm, we might not know them at all, with all their horror, wonder and fantasy. But why did two respectable German linguists go chasing after such stories? What do the stories tell us about German culture and nationalism

at the time, in both of which they had a big say? With me to discuss the brothers' grim are Tony Fieland, Professor in German at Keeble College, Oxford. Marina Warner, professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex, and Julie Wood, Associate Lecturer in Folklore at Cardiff University. Julie Wood, can you tell us first about the Brothers Grimm? Yes. Beginning of Germany, or the beginning of the rise of a sense of Germany.

And they were very interested in their past, and they were very interested in finding an authentic German past. I'd rather start at the beginning, like born. Oh, boy. Well, they were born. They were born at the end of the 18th century and lived into the 19th century is about the best context for them. No, I'd like to know that. No, sorry, I don't mean to be rude, but it's interesting that people know where they were brought up and, you know, the social context and all that sort of stuff. They were born in Germany at the end of 1885. And they lived into the 19th century.

And they grew up in Germany. Only it wasn't Germany then. They grew up in southern Germany. They came from a middle-class family. They lived a fairly stable childhood, and then their father died, at which case things became quite difficult for them. Nevertheless, they got an education, a good education, and entered into a kind of patronage service,

and that they were sponsored by minor German aristocrats who were interested in the same things they were interested in. So they entered into a kind of civil service, and from there they were able to pursue their academic pursuits, which was interest in language, German language. They were essentially linguists and important linguists at that. And from there, from this sense of what language was to the German people, they became interested in what the heritage of this language was.

And that brought them into looking at manuscripts. They're very strongly manuscripts first, which were in the libraries of these German aristocrats. And then out into the sort of peasant world to collect the... stories they felt were behind the manuscripts. The context we're talking about is a small German town near Frankfurt and their father's a town clerk which would be a very respectable position in Germany.

That's quite an important position one imagines and there are two brothers born next to each other but there are also other members of them is Ludwig who does illustrations and there's a sister I believe. You said the father died young but they still managed to get or did get a very well educated. They were very well educated. They got a proper education. They did get a proper education

or a proper equivalent of a university education. And I think it was because they showed promise and they had been set on the right sort of path to start with. It's interesting, they look back on their life as a kind of idyllic childhood. They talk about sort of wandering in the countryside and meeting with these peasants. And in fact, as you said, they came from a kind of very stable middle-class German family.

following the ideals of work and education and betterment, which actually come out in their stories much, much later on. Let's just plunge in at this point to give listeners some idea of the difference of things, because everybody listening to this programme will know something about a great number of these, these what we now call fairy tales. But there's a big difference. So let's use Cinderella as an example of that, just the story itself, when we can talk about it.

It comes from all that sort of thing later. So we know Cinderella mainly in pantomime now, but what do they say, the brother's grim, in their Cinderella story? Well, their Cinderella is called Ashen Pottle, the girl in the ashes. And her mother dies, and the stepmother arrives with two beautiful daughters. They're beautiful of face but treacherous of heart. So there are no ugly step-sisters. And Cinderella becomes, goes among the ashes.

And they're very nasty to her, constantly throwing peas and beans in the ashes and forcing her to pick them up. So they're really sort of abusing her as well. And she's given a hazing. Pick them out of the ashes to eat. Pick them out of the ashes, yes. They don't say what happens to them. It's just a make-work.

I thought that was the way she got fed. I was just a make-work thing for her to do. And then she's given a branch, a hazel branch, which she plants on her mother's grave. And the hazel branch grows into a tree and beautiful birds sort of settle on the branches. And they grant her wishes. We're told they grant her wishes.

She grows up. The king has a party to find a wife, and she says she wants to go. And they tell her, no, you can't, unless you can pick the peas out of the ashes. And she calls the animals, and the animals help her. And she does go to the party. She goes to her mother's grave. She gets a beautiful dress, three nights running. She escapes from the prince.

He puts pitch on the road. She says her slipper gets caught. It's a gold slipper, not glass. He comes to the house. The sisters put the slipper on. and in order to fit into the slipper, they cut off their toes, and so their feet bleed, and this is how they're revealed. One cuts off a heel as well.

That's not sparingly details. Particularly not the bloody details. And the mother, it's the mother who tells them to do this, saying that when you are queen, you will never have to walk, and indeed hands them the knife to do it. So she is eventually sort of seen as the one who fits the slipper perfectly, and away she goes, and the sisters are struck blind for their unkindness. So that's where we are with the tales from the Brothers Grimm.

Their eyes are struck blind in the most disgrace, in the most, we probably better had and go into that. Well, it's a very off-hand sort of way. You know, the tale sort of ends. They lived happily ever after Cinderella and the Prince, but the sisters were struck blind for their unkindness. That's it. I think their eyes were pecked out by pigeons, actually.

The pigeons are pigeons who had helped Cinderella anyway. Marina Warner, these stories, they're called fairy tales. And in my introduction, I said fairer tales or wonder tales, taking from the notes that you, among others, have written. Can you tell us what they would be called then and why they were called what they were called? Well, actually, they called them Kinder and Hausmerschen,

which is children and household tales. And it's interesting that it shows the Grimm's brother's own anxiety about who the audience should be. Really, they're childish because they're full of wonders, they're full of magic, they're full of improbable situations, because the heroes and heroines are often

the children too, or young people. So their child, they're child-centered stories. But at the same time, they felt very uneasy about so much adult material in them. We heard that a little bit with this ashy pet story, that this is really not entirely the kind of cozy fairy tale story that we're used to being good for children. I mean, this goes deeper into the heart of conflicts in families of very dark motives between people and of great cruelties that perhaps children should be spared. Certainly in the 19th century, the Grim Brothers themselves felt that.

So they call them house merchant, two household stories. And they realized that they had come down really through an adult tradition. Now, they have a characteristic. I mean, they're also called, as Juliet was mentioning, they're called Wunder Merchant, so Wonder Tales as well. And of course, there's the other word, the hidden word, the important word, folk, the folk tale. These are very much connected to folklore.

And really the Grim brothers are, in that sense, folklorists. The fairy tale has certain characteristics which we would all recognise but I think I'd like to draw attention to the fact that it's the way it's told and this connects to its oral nature in some way very succinct, very deadpan if something supernatural happens

nobody remarks upon it everybody in the fairy tale finds everything completely normal So when the pigeons fly in to help Cinderella take the lentils out of the ashes more quickly that's that. Yes, when the severed head a horse in the beautiful story, the goose girl. Falaida, the horse, speaks prophetically to the king, telling him that the true bride is hidden,

that she's the goose girl and that he has a false bride. Nobody remarks upon a severed head of a horse speaking from the gate. And also a certain lack of affect, which has become, of course, very contemporary. There's no remark either, no wonder at all at these terrible denouementes, at these cruel resolutions. And then there's something about the dynamic of the story with the audience. What you get from fairy tales

through the happy ending is either consolation or delicious revenge. These are very often revenge stories. And then there's a whole group of other stories which give you consolation because the dumbling, the simpleton, the pathetic runt of the litter, etc.

The one who's always been despised makes good. There's an enormous group of these stories usually centred on a boy hero, not a girl hero. The girl heroes make good in a rather different ways, but maybe we'll come to that later. But the hero will have luck on his side and sometimes animals on his side. And girls too can have animals on their side.

And that world where animals speak, where the whole of nature is alive, when a tree can give you a boon, as in the Sinder Ashipert's story, shake down the dresses for the ball, where it's an animist world. And the Grims are interested in that. They were interested in the connection to religion. Yes, the particular stories are what interests people, though. What you're saying is still, I don't want to get away from this, that when the stories came out then in the 1820s, they were the grim with 1M stories that Juliet outlined in Cinderella.

Those were the stories that were being read at the time. The Cinderella has read then. The sanitising, the making, he's coming, it comes later. They came out with claws and all, didn't I? Well, actually, the first edition is 1812, and that one is a little bit less adorned. And then Wilhelm, William, that was the brother who got worried,

and he began not only elaborating a little bit in a literary style. He was a very fine writer, so he began adding repetition and verses and all kinds of decorations and nice little details, but he also tidied them up. I mean, for example, there's the Rapunzel story, which very famously, she, is first pregnant, by the prince and doesn't know what's happened to her

and then it's tidied up and she no longer that's no longer mentioned Tony Phelan why did brother start collecting these stories and who prompted them to do this because as Juliet said in her opening remarks they were in a sense for hire the lesser ability

they were patronised by these people in the sense of being looked up and so on why did they go after these stories well they were at the University of Marburg where they studied law. But it was also possible for them to come into contact with and hear lectures by Savigny, the great romantic historian.

And they also started to go to lectures by a man called Ludwig Vachla, who was a literary historian. So I think that's the beginnings in the intellectual background. But then Plymins Brintano and his friend Achim von Arnim, an aristocrat,

had been collecting folk songs. and folk poetry and that had been put together in the first volume appeared in 1805 called The Boy's Magical Horn and we know those songs many of them because Marl has still set them in Narno Vundercorn

and I think it was in 1806 Brentano wrote to Savigni to this historian and to ask him if he knew anybody who could start to collect on their behalf and it was Brentano and Arnim who had as a sort of second project

in mind to begin to collect folk tales because they thought they might begin to disappear. And it was the Grims who were then commissioned to begin to look. But I think they start, not so much going out into the peasant world, as Juliet said, but in the library because many of the stories that they put together, in fact, come from printed documents that go back to the 16th and 17. I'd like to leave that for a little while because they are librarians, so they've access to all this business. but they're joining in partly to collect the left,

but behind that, what we're involved in is a period of German romanticism and partly as in reaction to Napoleon's taking over so much German. We're calling, we're saying the word German, we mean lots of principalities and states and city states, or a lot of them still broken up in a tiny, what we've called tiny fragments now. But there we are,

German nationalism begins to stir, begins to move inside the dark forests and so on. And they are part of this. They're willingly, give their energies and talent to this? Yes. There are two waves of this. It starts earlier in the 18th century with Herder, Goethe's great friend. And Herda wrote a very famous essay on folk poetry,

and he's promoting the idea that it's possible to turn away from classical models and from French models, and we can find something instead, which is genuinely German. And interestingly, he mentioned that the songs in Shakespeare's plays, for instance, were genuine folk songs, and that was a model for what Germans might do. That's the first wave of it. So there's a kind of interest in around the 1770s. That disappears into classicism, but the arrival of Napoleon, and indeed the pressure of the declaration of across the Rhine, of the French as a nation that can celebrate its own identity, gives a bit of a shock to German intellectuals because they have nothing remotely to put against that or to set alongside it. Because, as you say, there is no Germany. There's a wonderful district by Goethe and Schiller, which goes roughly,

Germany, wherever is it. I cannot locate the country. Where its culture begins is exactly where its politics stops. So politics and culture seem to be separated. And what you've got, if you like, is a substitution of politics by culture. Culture takes over to do the jobs that political discourse might otherwise be doing. And when they start to collect, particularly Arnim and Brentano, they are perfectly well aware that in putting together the folks on it from all over this geographical area. They are literally putting together a Germany, and Arnhem says as much.

And they're switching. They're saying culture can be recognised in these folk tales, let's keep calling them folk tales, folk songs, but as being equally as important. They're making that statement, which in a different way, the Romantics in England, who are on a slightly different,

but similar tack, we're saying that this is just as important as the high culture. This is the second way. It can be found there. That's part of their drive, Yeah. Well, the collection of sagas that came subsequently makes this point explicit. That there are two meanings of folk, two meanings of the German word folk.

On the one hand, it means the nation, and on the other hand it means the common people. And the idea of a national culture, they say, because of invasions from classicism, particularly Italian opera gets it in the neck from Arnhem, all of these foreign things have driven the national culture away from its educated class, and it now survives only in the common people. very utopian view, a very sort of view of the folk as living in this kind of perfect, uncorrupt world, untouched by the corruptions of civilization, and still sort of holding on to a wisdom of the past. And that's what they were looking for. This is what they were looking

for in these tales. If I bought that first, if I bought it in 1812, what would I thought I was getting? What sort of book was I getting when I bought it done? Well, I think part of the problem is nobody quite knew what they were getting. I think these ideas were really very cutting edge at the time, and I think this is why it kind of didn't take off to start with. Romanticism was so new, and the brothers' grooms were really very important in shaping what was going on.

Now, what you would have got, as opposed to what you thought you would have got, were not actually folk tales collected from peasant mouths, but folk tales collected from really rather well-educated people, already slightly reworked by the Grims and there's a tendency, even now, to kind of suppress the particularities of a storyteller and make them sound more universal

because that's what they were looking for was the universal wisdom in the folk tale. But the interesting thing is, as I understand it, that from this first volume that you get, you get stories, but you get masses of footnotes, you get the vindication of the method and that's what I want to come on to now, if I could maybe turn to Tony.

The idea was these, were folk tales. These came out of the folk. These came out of the ground. These were spontaneous. These were the earth of Germany, reforming itself to be a nation to compete with France and goodness knows Britain. And that was deceitful. Now, did they know they were deceiving, Tony? Or did they, were they led by the nose? No, I don't think they were led by the nose at all. And they certainly kept some things quiet. I mean, the famous example is their fairy tale woman, Dorotia Fiemann. who they describe as a peasant. Well, in fact, she was the daughter of an innkeeper,

and she was married to a Taylor, and she came from a French-speaking Huguenot family. So it's perfectly possible that there is both an oral tradition and a printed tradition there that takes you back to French stories. It's perfectly possible that the story she was telling were stories that she had read in French. So she was just telling them in a German form. I think that's part of the story,

and this is still widely debated. but I think the other thing is... Now what is debated about? It's really... It fascinates me. I'm sorry if it's part of the audience, but these people turn out, they're impeccable scholars. We're going to talk about their language. I hope we've got time towards the end.

They're great linguists to do it language. But there they are, they're entering into a great deceit. All these footnotes and stuff, they're saying, these come from the peasants, these come to this old lady who brings her stuff to market. This comes from this soldier we happened to find. He heaved up one day and did all these stories. This comes from this old...

lady who lives? These are deep in our culture. We don't know where they come out on. And actually, some of them were nicked from France, Italy, all over the place. So, I just want to know, did they know they were trying to deceive people? And if so, how did they square it

with this impeccable middle-class conscience of that? I don't think that it was an attempt at deception. I think what they wanted to do was to... Some of these stories were told by people who had been told them. I think there is certainly a kind of oral transmission taking place. What they also knew is that some of the stories that existed out there somewhere in the world

had already been fixed in some sort of a literary form. Now, the interesting thing is that Brentano had given a pretty clear guideline about the kind of thing that they were supposed to be collecting, and their very first collection, and indeed much of what follows, is conformed to the kind of models that he got in mind, particularly Philip Wattle Runger's story about the fisherman and his wife. Marina. Yes, I mean, I think that this point,

that they had been told at some point, by someone can be illustrated by the juniper tree which is a very famous story in which the little boy gets eaten by his father baked in a pie but then comes back to life in the form of a magic bird and it has a happy ending a sort of happy ending. Now that story

when it was sent to the Grim Brothers by the painter Philip Otorunga in a nice beautifully written version that he Brentano had recognized it from a story his nanny had told him. So that kind of interplay, very important in the creation of fairy tales, interplay between the unlettered person who has told it at some point in an oral version,

and the more lettered transmitter, it constantly informs this and you can't really pin it down. You can't even. You can find a lot of these stories previously published in French and Italian. You can't pin it down. But that's because some of the most famous, perhaps because they're the most powerful Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, have. emerged more, but if you look at the whole collection of the Grims, there's an enormous amount of popular material in there. A lot of rather silly stuff, you know, lots of dirty jokes

and little parables and all kinds of very, very popular basic material, which the Grims just, you know, accumulate it and put in, and there are particularities to different collections of stories for different countries. But some of the greater stories

will travel, and many of them here in the Grims show traces of the Bible. They show traces of the 1009, They show traces of Greek myth and so forth. But I think one has to remember that the structure of the story to some extent is different from the realizations, the different kind of realizations. I mean, these are very powerful logical structures.

I mean, one of the reasons why the juniper tree is not a horror story about a little boy being eaten is because once you get into that story, you know that the story is going to end happily, because they have a dynamic that really can't be disrupted. If you disrupt that dynamic, it's no longer Cinderella. both tellers and particularly audience realize this. So, I mean, this is what folklore is called the type, the structure which informs the folk tale

and makes one tale Cinderella and another tale Rapunzel. And that exists, some of them exist, very, very old. There's one in ancient Egypt. I mean, there's one that is that old. Some of them seem to be later. So in this sense, it's literary and oral all the time, back and forth constantly. Can I just ask one little question, final question about them?

move on. There's no problem about them having these stories and pretend. But why did they want so insistently to pretend they all came out of the German vocet? I just would like to answer. Why did they lend themselves and give themselves to that deceit? It just is fascinating. Something else was going on. We're not talking about two deceitful men and then their brother joined in and illustrated it, which is when it took off, and so on. We're talking about them.

doing this for other reasons. And that's the interesting thing. It's a do with the birth of German nationalism. And that's what I'd like to get at for a minute. And then we'll move on and talk about the story. I think it's interesting what they set out as a kind of doctrine in the preface to the children's and domestic tales, which is the kind of thing that William Emerson will call pastoral,

where you declare that the relationship between a courtly chivalrous class. and the peasantry is actually one of identity because they share a common humanity. And there's actually quite a comic passage, I think, now in the preface, where they simply list the kind of people who turn up in fairy tales, it's kings and princes. And then immediately it jumps to charcoal burners and peasants and fishermen. And there isn't a middle class in between.

It's almost as though the national identity can be melded and rediscovered by going back to its roots, and that's what they're trying to do. And I think this is because, in reality, the middle court class, of course, has no path to power. I mean, it takes a long time. And Jacob Grimm, in the end, is elected to the 1848 Parliament, the Frankfurt Parliament, and takes part in that kind of political movement of the middle class, which otherwise has no way forward. I think that the thrust of your question, Melvin, really, is because of what happens afterwards, and that we're anxious now about the drive towards authenticity of the nationalisms of the 19th century,

in particular in the case of Germany because we see how this idea of the forest and the people and the authentic and the hermetically sealed, if you like, culture will be used later, will be travested later. And it is actually a great tragic irony for the Grims

who were themselves, I would say, politically heroic actually in many of their stands. They showed great integrity in resisting the return of despotism and the petty principalities of Germany. They were romantic heroes in that. but their work became used later to define a very spurious notion

of a sort of brave, heroic, you know, German identity and that was consciously used, I'm afraid, by the Third Reich. That was part of what I was thinking about, but my original thing is a stubborn, stumbling block, is they fill the book, they fiddled the books and scholars shouldn't. That's it, we can move on. These books were originally aimed at adults without much sense. success. As I understand it, it was when children got hold of them and the whole emergency of children's books, children as readers, children as an entity of a public

that could be appealed to. And I think the illustrations, when Ludwig their brother started, the third brother started to do illustration, can you take us through that, how they became then became very popular and more popular and more popular? They did. On one direction, they're going towards nationalism, just like any other folklore collectors. It was the role of the folklore collector to reveal this national identity. But the Brothers Grimm kind of went towards children's literature as well, and that's how we know them. And it's almost as if they're bifurcating at this point. And it was certainly the illustrations that did it. And also the Christmas market, something which is still with it, with us. The idea that they

produced these things at a time when a rising middle class, which as Tony said, didn't actually have, at that point, a real path to power, but they were getting there. I mean, they were really, really becoming important. A rising middle class was looking for things to instruct their children into the values that were important to the middle class. And I think this is where the Brothers Grims are both coming out of that, sort of what we call the Protestant work ethic, and this notion of scholarship.

And I really realized quite cleverly, although I think not in any sort of particular way, that this is how things were going. And of course, this is the invention of childhood, this is the middle class wanting to educate its children appropriately. And, of course, I mean, chivalry and peasantry were not appropriate for the middle class, and here you have it. And in particular, these stories began to be encapsulated in these beautiful illustrations. And I think even now, if you see fairy stories illustrated, they tend to be in a rural world.

I mean, you don't get a lot of fairy stories being illustrated sort of in urban environments. We still maintain this kind of urban picture. and this is when it starts and they're right at the beginning of this. Can Marina Wanda, can you tell us a bit about the level of violence in the early editions, the 18th album, and then how it diminished, how they sort of cleaned up their act? They had 17 revisions of this book, didn't I, these books?

So can you tell us about the level of violence and give us one or two instances without scaring the horses? Well, Wilhelm kept adjusting it and returning to them. I mean, I think that Snow White is a very good example. and Hansel and Gretel too. Hansen Gretel probably be better because in that one the first version very short the mother says look we're starving we have to abandon the children and the father says yes absolutely let's do that so they go off into the ban of the children in the forest Wilhelm had a lot of trouble with this you know should this really be a situation in a family

so the first change he makes stepmother so she's got a reason a motive which he has immediately assumed there would be this there's never an examination of that, you know, the stepmother would hate the children of the first mother. So that's the first rule. There are a lot of stepmother's in these stories. Yes, yes, because unfortunately, infant mortality and as well as the, sorry,

mother's mortality of very high rate, it's the third version. Wilhelm thinks, gosh, the father, you know, the father. So the father begins to object. And then by the end, when they come back, the two, the parents are both there and receive them rapturously. and have repented. The mother has returned, I think, the original mother or something.

Anyway, it's all totally tidied up. In Snow White, there's something similar goes on. She's the first version, it's her mother. Who's the furthest of all? Yes, it's the wicked queen. The rivalry is between mother and daughter. And again, there's a step change, and she's changed into the stepmother change. Yes, the stepmother change, that's right. So there's this, but the kind of thrust of these changes tends to very much exhaust.

honorate fathers. There's usually an anxiety around that. The great question in the Cinderella story is why does he not attempt, why does the father not attempt to protect his daughter? And some of the other versions in the world try and look at that. The grims really skate over that. They really don't notice this problem so much about the weakness of the father because they're very fixated on the powerful, we know her from Disney, of course,

the powerful idea of the wicked queen, the wicked stepmother, this amazing force in the stories. And it does she, that kind of figure, does give them some of their thrill. But just for one moment, just to stack on the actual vines that they were quite happy to put in these stories at any field. And at the end of Snow White, which Marianne has been talking about, the stepmother's then become, is invited, she is invited to the ball and given red, hot iron shoes to dance in,

and she's forced to dance in them until she dies. Now then. It seems to me actually that there's a difference between the brothers here. Jacob is the guy who really wants to do the scholarly job, and it's when the stories begin to become successful with this children's audience, and no doubt a parents and children's audience, that Wilhelm then begins to do the extra kind of work on them that we've been hearing about. And we were talking about Rapunzel's pregnancy before.

It seems to be one way that this all works is you turn down the sect, but you turn up the violence and that kind of balances. And it's part of the folk dimension. And they kick out the incest, don't they? Indeed. All those things have to be tidied up. But again, it's the question of authenticity that comes back, isn't it? Because you get rid of these things and then you're doing something else. Is this appealing to children, is this appealing to what they see as what children would like?

Because there have been studies since saying, actually, what children like is the violence? Perhaps it's in the context of a happy ending. You turn into a bird or something like that. Is it to do with that or is it to do with the growing appeal to the middle classes, which they wanted to do the grooms, the growing of the middle classes and the 19th century growth of the middle class grip on culture? And their urge for respectability and not, they didn't want to be the aristocratic, they didn't want to be this sort of Cinderella person, sweeping roads.

I think it was what they felt children ought to have. It was this aspiration of what children ought to be. And again, I think this is this Victorian middle class. Now, certainly modern studies feel that the violence in these tales is actually not particularly damaging, that it's a way of sort of exposing children to danger, but within the safety of a narrative, because narratives are very safe, and these narratives particularly, because they are so formulaized, not only do they begin and end, but by the time you're into episode two or three, you pretty well know what's going to happen.

They're not thrillers. There's no sort of tenseness about them. But I think certainly the market that they were aiming, at. And I think it wasn't necessarily even a commercial decision, was this notion of how young people should be raised. And in this case, it wasn't just young German people, because of course the stories became incredibly popular in Britain. And the Brothers Grimm, the reason the Brothers Grimm are so popular is because of the translation into the English language, into the English language world as well. So this isn't just German nationalism? Quite early on,

wasn't it? Quite very, very early. It was one of the earliest translations. But he Dickens Illustrator who did it? Crookshank. And then it was really, that Wilhelm got the idea to ask Ludwig to do their own. So the two, the kind of English language and the German language, are mixed up very early on. I mean, I feel it's a pathetic to Wilhelm's desire to rewrite and to try and accommodate them to his sort of aesthetics and his morality.

I mean, there's a very, very good test case, hard case. There's some sort of anti-Semitic stories as well. But the test case is the end of the witch in Hansel and Gretel, where cleverly she's tricked by Gretel into putting herself in her own oven and then the door of the oven is slammed shut and she burns to death and the children go home. Now, Eva Feigis in her excellent book,

beautiful little book she wrote about reading fairy tales to children, says that when she read this to her granddaughter, she who had come on the kindergarten transport from Germany and who has family who died in the camps, was very, very worried by this ghost that appeared as the witch was pushed into the oven. Of course not in the grim's mind or anything. So I think that there is a way in which we can.

Fair tales are open to rewriting, and this is what the later people do, and you need to do it. You need to think about the effect or the meanings, the reverberations that accrue to something. The interesting thing is why they change. That's what we're discussing. They're open to it, but why it does happen to them? Well, in the Grimm's case, they were very, very gendered. You know, the boys are treated quite differently from the girls. I was going to say another modern example of that is what Gunther-Gras then does with the story of that.

fisherman and his wife in the flounder, which takes up the story and shakes it, I mean, and says this is an incredibly misogynistic story. After all, it's the fisherman's wife who constantly bonds more and more things until in the futureman. This poor fisherman gets a flounder, and the flounder says, you can have three wishes. You can have three wishes. And he says, I'll go and ask my wife. She makes three wishes. He goes and catches it again. And then in the end, she says, I want to make the sunrise and set. And that's a little bit too much. And they finish up back in the pispot, which is where it started. Gundergrass takes hold of this and says, this is anti-family, so he makes it anti-masculine. And he turns it into an account of, well, what's presented in the novel, and it's in Guntagrass's view, what's presented in the novel as patriarchal dominance

through a whole long history from the Stone Age to the present day. And there's a tribunal where fish is put on trial for its collusion with male dominance in society. But the point about all of that, and I think the point about the violence, and this might take us on to slightly different territory is that the violence it seems to me is rather like the violence of myth

it's like the violence of an edipus who puts his eyes out the incest may have gone in the versions when they're tidied up but there's something kind of bubbling under in these stories which is why I think we keep going back to them and I'm not sure I know what it is it's very hard to put your finger on it.

Well what do you think it is? You must have some idea Well, it's true of a lot of romantic stories, including the ones which are modelled on the fairy tale, but which are art stories, as they were called, Kuntmashen, where they sort of touch a kind of psychological nerve. And like Hoffman's stories, do exactly that and can produce great, their dreamlike. It's the structure of the stories themselves that sort of drag us back. I mean, they're about such very, very basic things, people who have nothing and gain something. so they're aspirational. And because they're...

They actually led to that man, that Russian man, saying there are only a certain number of stories because he found, in the world, because he found only a certain number of stories in grid. There are only a certain number of stories. I mean, this is prop. And prop calls them logical structures, anything that leads from lack to marriage,

which is such a wonderfully ironic-sounding thing, but does actually make sense because you do have characters starting with nothing, being put in danger, and resolving them. And the way the structures work, it's not that the characters resolve, this danger because they're good or bad. It's more because they're lucky or they make the right choices. So they're wonderfully porous sort of stories, which means you can add all kinds of meaning.

And in no sense can you ever talk about what is the original. So although we say the Brothers Grimm got them out of literature and some of them, they heard from various, various people. And for a while, folklore has tried to find the er text and came up with really quite elaborate theories. But there are no such things as the real version of Cinderella. There is simply a structure which defines it as Cinderella. Without that structure, it is something else.

And with that structure, you can develop it. Marina? I think that the pleasure delivered by the violence depends on the pleasures that are delivered by other things in the stories. And we tend, when we're analysing in this, you know, discursive way, to forget the actual sheer entertainment value. And one of

the areas where when you think about the social and historical aspects of the stories, that we don't, is the absolute marvellousness of the plot changes. I mean, my favorite group of stories when I was a young girl and being socialized by the Grims are the group of stories

in which the heroine has to keep silent and she has to go through an ordeal to save her brothers. Her brothers are all been turned into birds and she has to knit a shirt of nettles or she has to do other terrible things. In one other story she cuts off her finger to give it to the suns. These are your favorite stories?

Yeah, I love them. I love the I was brought up to be self-immolating, to be self-sacrificing. And this isn't that sort of a programme. To be heroic. But what is absolutely true is that they deliver this marvellous pleasure. When the shirts are thrown over the brothers

and they're fly and they ceased and only one of them is left with a wing because she hasn't finished the last sleeve. Tony, can I ask you briefly, this style, the way they told these stories, we're going back to them actually beginning to typify, represent, and bring on, bring forward, shape what became German nationalism, romantic nationalism, and then nationalism. For many decades, not in its most terrible form. We're not talking about the 20th century. We're certainly not talking about the 1930s at the moment.

We talked about in the 19th century, but their style was influential, wasn't it, on many German writers? Their side is influential, and it's hard to work out which comes first, because it's not as though there were no fairy tales being written or told by romantic writers of a fictional kind. before the Grim started collecting. So there's an interaction there. I think what's very striking about this is a very famous example is the way they gradually build up a kind of patina of style over these stories. So they become more and more like what we think as fairy tales. So the first one about the Frog King originally begins in a very simple way.

There was a king's daughter. She would go out in the cool of the day. Her favourite play thing was a golden ball. But eventually in its fourth version, the story begins, it's hard to translate, but in ancient days when wishes still has legs, when it was still worth wishing for something.

There was a king's daughter with beautiful golden hair and the sun smiled at her every day, and so on, it just gets more and more elaborate. Now, I think we appreciate that and what they were getting at was not so much a matter of national style, but a genuine memory of what a certain kind of storytelling is like. This reminds me of Walter Benjamin's essay

on the storyteller where he says we've lost a certain kind of narrative experience. We can still see the faint glimmers of it by the middle of the 19th century, but after that it's gone and we have the novel instead, which is a different sort of experience. That's what we like about them.

Why do you think that they have spread so widely and are still played, as it were, again and again and again, all over the world? The stories themselves, but also we've tended to talk about the storytellers and forget there's an audience, and I think it's because they can appeal to so many different audiences. The Grimm's audience was a middle-class audiences.

You know, we have very modern audiences. We like the feminist message. We like to sort of undermine them. Marina talked about her favorite story, which is also mine, which I told to my nieces. And in this story, the woman is smeared with blood. Puppies are killed. Smeared with blood.

I finished this story. I forgot about the puppies. One of my nieces said, what happened to the puppies? And I had to go and bring them back to life. The audience also exerts an influence on how these stories are told and how these stories are developed. And the Brothers Grimm didn't make this up in a vacuum. They were appealing to a particular audience.

And what's nice about it, you can actually see the arc of the changes, as this audience made itself felt much more strongly. Well, unfortunately, we don't have time to talk about the Brothers Grimm's interest in language. In one departure, they praise the English language above all others. I'd like it about a minute or two on that, but we don't have time for that, but we had time for a great deal, so thank you all. Thank you, Judy Wood, Marina Warner and Tony Fieland. And next week we'll be discussing the destruction of Carthage.

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