Ann Schmiesing is the author of the new book The Brothers Grimm: A Biography. She also has written the book Disability, Deformity, and Disease in the Grimms' Fairy Tales. She is professor of German and Scandinavian studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Q: What inspired you to write a biography of the
Brothers Grimm?
A: Over many years of teaching and giving public
lectures on the Grimms, I’ve been inspired by students and audience members who
have shared memories related to when they first read or were told a particular
Brothers Grimm tale or tales.
For example, an elderly man told of boyhood nightmares
after reading the Grimm tale “The Goose Girl,” in which a dead horse’s severed
head starts talking of an evil character’s treachery.
A German woman described the cigarette-package
illustrations of Grimm tales she collected as a girl at the end of World War
II, when her mother suppressed her appetite with smoking so her daughter could
have their food rations.
Millennial and Gen Z students have spoken of Disney
films and Grimm-inspired manga, video games, and fan fiction.
The Brothers Grimm: A Biography was inspired by these
memories and the individuals sharing them, who have frequently asked me to
recommend a biography of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and translations of their
tales.
For years, I’ve pointed to Jack Zipes’s beautiful
translation of the Grimms’ collection, but I’ve had to caution against
decades-old English-language biographies, since they contain myths about the
Grimms that subsequent scholarship has dispelled.
Dispelling these myths opens a path to better
understanding the Grimms’ remarkable achievements and the social, cultural, and
political context from which these achievements arose.
I was thus inspired to write a biography that situates
the “once upon a time” of the fairy tales in the fullest context of the Grimms’
lives and their time.
Q: The Kirkus Review of the book begins with: “The
real Brothers Grimm are rescued from Disneyfication and myth.” What do you
think of that description, and what would you say are some of the most common
perceptions and misconceptions about the Grimms and their stories?
A: It’s true that misconceptions about the Brothers
Grimm and their famous fairy-tale collection abound. Some readers mistakenly
assume that the Grimms authored their tales themselves, when in fact they
collected tales and then frequently made alterations.
Contrary to a myth that arose already in the 19th
century, the Grimms did not venture out into fields, spinning parlors, or
peasants’ cottages to collect tales directly from the mouths of the rural
people.
Few of the storytellers they interacted with came from
the lower socioeconomic classes, and they actually received many of their tales
from middle and upper-class young women.
As for the edits they made, the Grimms often merged
two or more versions of a tale into one, and they also altered tales to make
them conform to 19th-century bourgeois norms.
For example, the mother in “Hansel and Gretel” was
originally the children’s biological parent, but the Grimms later changed this
to a stepmother, implicitly suggesting that a biological mother could not
possibly abandon her children.
The Grimms also expunged or softened sexual references
that went against social mores.
“Rapunzel” illustrates this well. In the first edition
of the Grimms’ tales, the sorceress learns that a man has been in the tower
when Rapunzel complains that her clothes have become too tight; in later
editions, this reference to pregnancy is removed, and Rapunzel instead blurts
out that the sorceress is so much heavier to hoist up into the tower than the
prince.
The Grimms also added or enhanced Christian references
in many tales and tried to make the tales folksier in tone by adding rhymes and
sayings. In several tales, female characters become more dependent on male
characters as a result of the Grimms’ edits.
In addition, the Grimms frequently added or
intensified violent punishments for bad behavior, as when doves peck out the
stepsisters’ eyes in “Cinderella.”
Indeed, some readers are shocked by the violence and
darkness in many Grimm tales, especially compared to Disney or other popular
retellings. Having heard of this violence, however, other readers are surprised
to find that not every Grimm tale is saturated with gruesomeness.
While the Grimms did not believe that such violence
made the tales inappropriate for children, it’s notable that they also did not
intend their collection to be solely for a young audience. On the contrary,
they maintained that their tales would appeal to all ages, and they also had
scholarly goals for the collection.
Moreover, at a time when Germany was still a patchwork
of principalities, they hoped that their fairy tales and other works might help
to bring about Germany’s political unification by giving Germans a greater
sense of their cultural heritage.
Today, the Brothers Grimm are known the world over for
their fairy-tale collection. Although the collection enjoyed seven complete and
10 abridged editions during their lifetimes, it was not the bestseller they
hoped it would be. Instead, it gained in popularity principally at the end of
the 19th century and in the first decades of the 20th century.
Q: How would you describe the dynamic between the
brothers?
A: The writer Clemens Brentano described his friends
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm as a double hook. This image of the Brothers Grimm as
two conjoined prongs aptly conveys how close they were throughout their lives.
Jacob (1785–1863) was born just over a year before
Wilhelm (1786–1859). They slept in the same bed as boys, shared the same room
as university students, and as adults either had two desks in the same study or
two studies next to each other under one roof.
Their personalities complemented each other well.
Wilhelm was outgoing, while Jacob tended to be more introverted. Wilhelm
married, but Jacob remained a lifelong bachelor and lived with Wilhelm, his
wife, and their children.
During the relatively few times in their lives when
travel separated them, they found being apart from each other disorienting.
For decades, Wilhelm experienced recurring bouts of
serious illness, during which Jacob was consumed with worry for his brother and
felt that his life would be destroyed if Wilhelm died.
They were both drawn to the study of language,
literature, and folklore, but they had somewhat different views and areas of
emphasis. Jacob was more scientific in his approach to editing texts and tales,
whereas Wilhelm was more attuned to making them appealing and accessible to a
nineteenth-century audience.
Wilhelm worked methodically, while Jacob tended to
produce scholarship at a breakneck pace. Jacob distinguished himself in
linguistics and is still known today for “Grimm’s Law,” his groundbreaking
detection of linguistic sound shift patterns. Wilhelm’s talents lay more in the
study of folklore and medieval literature.
Q: How did you research their lives, and what did you
learn that especially surprised you?
A: The Brothers Grimm not only collected the fairy
tales for which they are famous today, but also explored mythology and medieval
literature, embarked on a monumental German dictionary project, and broke
scholarly ground with Jacob’s linguistic discovery known as Grimm’s Law, among
other achievements.
Their correspondence with scholars in Germany and
abroad is vast. Researching the Grimms’ lives thus entailed studying their
voluminous publications, notes, and letters and delving into decades of Grimm
scholarship.
But to get a better sense of them as people, I also
needed to understand their familial relationships and the world in which they
lived.
To this end, in addition to poring over published and
digitized material available to me in the United States, I made several trips
to Germany to visit museums, archives, and historical sites in cities including
Hanau, Steinau, Marburg, Kassel, Göttingen, Hannover, Nuremberg, and Berlin.
In the small mountain town of Steinau, I visited the 16th-century
magistrate’s house where the Grimm family lived while their father was district
magistrate, as well as the church where their grandfather had served as pastor.
Walking the steep streets of the Grimms’ university
town of Marburg brought to mind Jacob’s observation that there were more
staircases out in the walkways and alleys in hilly Marburg than in the houses
themselves.
At the Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, I
viewed the Grimms’ mahogany desks and the fossils, shells, figurines, inkwells,
and feather pen holders that had adorned them.
In the Grimm archives in Berlin, I saw the pressed
flowers and other mementos that the Grimms used as bookmarks in their personal
copies of their works and also read the notes—messier in Jacob’s handwriting
than in Wilhelm’s—scribbled in the margins and on prefatory pages.
Viewing their personal objects, the places they lived,
and their handwritten notations helped me to understand them as people and to
visualize their world.
I also read 18th and 19th-century travel accounts to glimpse
the cities and regions where the Grimms lived through the eyes of their
contemporaries.
Last but not least, I delved into their relationships
with their younger brothers and with women including their mother, aunts,
sister, Wilhelm’s wife, and the female storytellers from whom they collected
tales.
There were many surprises along the way, but what repeatedly
astounded me is both the sheer magnitude of the Grimms’ achievements and the
formidable challenges they overcame. They were fairy-tale collectors,
linguists, librarians, and civil servants.
Their father died when they were boys, and they also
endured war and occupation, ill health, and dire financial circumstances. They
were fired from their university positions when they and five other professors
refused to take an oath of allegiance to the king of Hannover in protest over
the king’s revocation of the constitution.
The biography tells the story of how the collection of
fairy tales developed over several decades, and how it and the Grimms’ other
projects gave the brothers a sense of self‑preservation through the atrocities
of the Napoleonic Wars and a series of personal losses.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m working on a couple essays that I put aside
while finishing the biography. One pertains to the Grimms’ “Rumpelstiltskin,”
and another has to do with the 19th-century Norwegian author Bjørnstjerne
Bjørnson, on whom I’ve written before.
I’m also
engaged in research for a book project on the siblings Clemens Brentano and Bettina
von Arnim. The Brothers Grimm will appear in this book, too. The Grimms became
acquainted with Clemens Brentano as university students in Marburg, and they
contributed to The Boy’s Magic Horn, a collection of folk songs that Brentano published
with the writer Achim von Arnim.
Arnim married Bettina, herself a writer. Over several
decades, Bettina von Arnim was among the Grimms’ closest friends, as their
dedication of the fairy-tale collection to her shows.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I mention in the book that the Grimms chose to put
“The Golden Key” at the end of their fairy-tale collection. A mere one
paragraph long, it’s a tale in which a poor boy has to go outside in deep snow
to collect wood. Wanting to warm himself up, he clears some snow away so that
he can build a fire.
As he digs, he discovers a small golden key and then a
little iron casket. He begins to turn the key in the casket’s lock, at which
point the narrator tells us that we’ll have to wait until the boy opens the
casket to discover what marvelous things he finds in it. The tale ends there.
We’re left to wonder what’s in the casket.
By placing this tale at the end, the Grimms suggest
that their collection is just a small slice of a dazzling spectrum of folkloric
creativity, with always more to be opened and explored.
I think of the Grimms themselves in a similar light:
there is always more to discover about their lives, their works, and their
enduring legacy. I hope that readers will find in my book an opening to learn
more about the Brothers Grimm and their world.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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