During the Christmas season of 1812-1813 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published a book of tales entitled Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales). By 1815 the brothers had gathered enough additional tales for a second volume, an enlarging process that continued until the Seventh Large Edition of 1857. Wilhelm edited the tales continuously, to achieve what he considered a complete and authentic content in the spoken language of the German folk. It subsequently became a model known as the Grimm genre (“Gattung Grimm”) for fairy-tale scholars, collectors, and theoreticians.
Sales figures indicate that Ludwig Bechstein’s Deutsche Märchen (German Tales, 1845 et seq.) outsold the Children’s and Household Tales until 1893. In the twentieth century, after their copyright lapsed, the Grimm tales came into their own, reprinted as a whole and as selections, as books and as broadsheets, while filmmakers expanded the plots of individual tales like “Snow White” and “Cinderella,” and twentieth- and twenty-first-century writers gave iconic stories new meanings. By then, German educators adopted the now iconic tales as a medium for classroom exercises (until 1945), and some American educators had used them in translation exercises for university placement exams. Subsequently, psychologists began referring to the Grimms’ tales as models of and for human behavior, while in the world of commerce admen exploited the public’s general familiarity with tale characters to sell everything from toiletries to tires.
Grimm Legacies comprises talks Jack Zipes gave during commemorations of the 200th anniversary of the tales’ first publication. Its content, already well known to most Grimm scholars, and its treatment of some of the social processes outlined above, seem to be directed at a general rather than a scholarly readership. In chapter 1 Zipes calls Edgar Taylor’s 1823 free translation of fifty tales a “Revolutionary Book,” citing the 1823 preface declaring that the Grimms’ tales were German, peasant-generated, and child-oriented. Taylor’s views, as Zipes states, were at the beginning of a continuing but incorrect belief about their nature. But Zipes omits the many additional voices it took to concretize this view among a public still skeptical of “folk poetry,” stung by the memory of having been duped by the Ossian fraud in the 1760s. The more important voice in propagating folk origins for fairy tales was Jacob Grimm’s in his foreword to an 1845 translation of Giambattista Basile’s tales, after which came John Ruskin’s essays on folktales, and pulling the myth together and presenting it to a credulous public, Andrew Lang’s forewords to each of the volumes in his color fairy book series (Bottigheimer 2014).
In chapter 2, “Hyping the Grimms’ Fairy Tales,” Zipes states that Taylor’s success not only induced the brothers to create a small, illustrated edition for children, but also that Taylor also induced an alteration in their collecting mode. Zipes’s musing on paratexts recalls literary excitement a generation ago when French book historians first introduced the subject, but Zipes takes the more recent Show Sold Separately (2010) by Jonathan Gray as his methodological and intellectual guide. In this chapter Zipes also inveighs against “hyping” as a form of commodification in and for cultures of consumption (60), although he forgives the Grimms for doing the same (63).
Chapter 3, “Americanization of the Grimms’ Folk and Fairy Tales,” describes Disney films as continuators of the tale-embellishing process begun by the Grimms themselves. As Zipes explains in chapter 4, “Two Hundred Years after Once Upon a Time: The Legacy of the Brothers Grimm and Their Tales in Germany,” the fact that Nazi functionaries appropriated the tales to promote their political ideology in the 1930s and 40s soured post-war German reception of the Grimms’ tales and continues to condition German film productions as well as scholarly inquiry to the present day.
In chapter 5, “How Superheroes Made Their Way into the World of Fairy Tales: The Appeal of Cooperation and Collective Action from the Greek Myths to the Grimms’ Tales and Beyond,” Zipes links Grimm superheroes back to the ancient world and out into the world as a whole. He explores questions of process and legitimacy raised by contemporary adaptations of the Grimms’ tales in chapter 6, “The Grimmness of Contemporary Fairy Tales: Exploring the Legacy of the Brothers Grimm in the Twenty-First Century.” An epilogue, “Ernst Bloch’s Enlightened View of the Fairy Tale and Utopian Longing,” provides reasons “Why the Grimms’ Tales Will Always Be Relevant.” This essay, originally published in 1988, is a filler before an English translation of Giovanni Sercambi’s (1348-1424) “About Pincaruolo’s Good Feat” (197-204), which tells of the superhuman capacities of a peasant boy’s companions. Undated, unannotated, and undiscussed, it was presumably inserted to substantiate Zipes’s expressed conviction about the universality of tales of cooperation.
Zipes’s style, familiar from his books of the last ten to fifteen years, routinely elides requirements for evidence and logic. In setting out to define “cultural legacy and memory,” he excludes the very people from whose memories so many of the Grimms’ tales initially came, namely, the bourgeois girls and women of the Grimms’ circle of friends in Kassel. Instead, he equates “cultural memory” with a set of assumptions that the Grimms formed early in their scholarly lives, before they learned about the cheaply printed fairy tales circulating during their childhoods in Hesse and in other parts of Germany. The Grimms eventually became acquainted with these publications, and in my view it is significant that neither Jacob nor Wilhelm allowed their new knowledge—of 1790s Leipzig imprints of (fairy and folk) tales translated from French into German and distributed throughout German-speaking Central Europe—to modify their convictions that Germany’s folk had generated or had carried on an orally transmitted knowledge of the tales they were then in the process of collecting from friends and acquaintances. Seen in this light, the Grimms’ concept of “cultural memory” might better be termed “cultural amnesia” or “willful cultural ignorance.” However, for Zipes, the Grimms had simply “bound themselves ... to the German people” (2).
The same privileging of assumption over fact extends to other areas, as surmise and error are made to look like facts by Zipes’s manipulation of grammar and vocabulary. In the following excerpt, error is in brackets and imputation in parens:
[It is unclear whether] Charles Perrault [knew a definite oral tale] like “Red Riding Hood” when he published the (first literary version) in 1697. [But it is clear that he must have known some version like this and transformed it] into a tale in which [a naïve bourgeois girl] pays for her stupidity and is violated in the end. (70)
By writing “it is unclear,” Zipes acknowledges that “Red Riding Hood” is undocumented prior to Perrault’s composition, but calling Perrault’s publication “the first literary version” imputes a Perrauldian access to a pre-existing oral version, which he didn’t have. Nothing in Perrault’s well-documented life reveals personal contact with France’s folk; hence the error of assuming that Perrault “must have known some version like this” or even whether it is “unclear” that he did so. It is equally false to depict Perrault’s Red Riding Hood as “bourgeois.” In truth, the heroine is a country lass, about whose fate Perrault created an urban moralité that warns against two-legged wolves who follow girls into city society dwellings (maisons with boudoirs large enough to accommodate visitors in their ruelles). There is much more of this kind of slippery prose in Grimm Legacies.
Grimm Legacies reads like a motivational speaker’s advocacy of unassailable values. At its best, it affirms Zipes’s long engagement with the Grimms themselves; at its worst, it displays his own cultural assumptions, often to the exclusion of the cultural memory he claims to be investigating. In contrast, Zipes’s recent translation of the First Edition of 1812/13, 1815, entitled Complete Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, is a useful addition to the scholar’s shelf: it extends English-speaking readers’ ability to work with the Tales’ editorial history.
Works Cited
Bottigheimer, Ruth B. 2014. “Skeptics and Enthusiasts: Nineteenth-Century Prefaces to the Grimms’ Tales in English Translation.” In Grimms’ Tales Around the Globe: The Dynamics of Their International Reception, edited by Vanessa Joosen and Gillian Lathey, 199-218. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.
Zipes, Jack. 2014. Complete Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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[Review length: 1382 words • Review posted on October 20, 2015]