Grimms' Fairy Tales

About this book

Grimms’ Fairy Tales is the common English title for the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, the collection of German folk tales gathered and published by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. The first volume appeared in 1812 and the second in 1815. The brothers kept revising, adding and removing tales for the rest of their lives, and the seventh edition of 1857 contains more than two hundred stories. English translations began within a few years of the German originals, and selections under the title Grimms’ Fairy Tales have been in print ever since.

The collection has lasted because it is the main written source for most of the fairy tales that Western readers know: Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, Snow White, Cinderella (as Aschenputtel), Little Red Riding Hood, The Frog Prince, The Bremen Town Musicians. Later retellings, including the animated films, have softened many of them. Reading the Grimm versions shows how much was changed.

The story

There is no single story. The collection consists of short tales, most of them a few pages long, in which ordinary people, often the youngest child or the poorest sibling, meet enchantment and have to be clever, kind or patient to come through it. Kings set impossible tasks, animals speak, stepmothers scheme, and punishments at the end tend to be exact and severe. Some tales are comic, some are religious legends, and a few are barely more than jokes.

The Project Gutenberg edition is a selection of around sixty tales in English, which is typical of the popular editions that circulated in Britain and America.

Themes and historical context

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were scholars, not children’s authors. They collected the tales as part of a broader Romantic and nationalist project to recover a German folk culture, and they published them at first with learned notes. Their informants were mostly educated middle-class acquaintances rather than peasants, and several of the tales turned out to have French literary sources. Over successive editions, Wilhelm in particular reshaped the language, removed sexual content, and increased both the Christian framing and the violence of punishments, so that the collection became more suitable for middle-class family reading.

The tales became the model for folklore collecting across Europe and the foundation of the academic study of the folk tale. They also influenced writers from Hans Christian Andersen onward. In the twentieth century they were read through psychoanalysis, feminism and the history of childhood, and they have been both praised for their directness and criticized for their cruelty and their treatment of women and stepmothers.

Readers coming from the films should expect bleaker outcomes, less explanation and a flatter narrative voice. The tales do not describe feelings or motives at length; things simply happen.

Who should read it

The tales are short and the English is plain, so this is one of the easiest classics to pick up and put down. Children have always been the main audience, though some tales are grim enough that parents may want to read ahead. Adults interested in the history of storytelling, or in the sources behind modern fantasy, will find the collection repays close reading. The whole Gutenberg selection runs to roughly 100,000 words, but each tale stands alone.

Edition notes

This Gutenberg text is a selection in English. The catalog record does not name a translator, and this page does not guess at one. The tale titles and selection differ from edition to edition, so readers looking for a particular story not present here may need a fuller translation of the 1857 edition.