The Grimm brothers’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Household Tales) is a body of literarily adulterated folktale derived in an only rather piecemeal and attenuated manner from German oral narrative tradition in the early 19th century. Imperfect though it certainly is, it nevertheless results from the world’s first organized, sustained aspiration comprehensively to capture in writing the oral story-telling tradition of any nation anywhere on earth, and the example it has set for subsequent like-minded activity elsewhere worldwide has given rise to a broader, many-handed endeavor during the following two centuries to collect, publish and study ‘folklore’ in all its numerous forms all around the globe.
In fact, folktale (Märchen) as represented by the content of their published volumes of Kinder- und Hausmärchen was neither the largest or most important of the Grimm brothers’ interests, which were much farther-reaching and yet from their point of view still quite unified in principle. Simply stated, the Grimms’ guiding purpose was in all its manifold aspects exactly to understand and document their own and their German people’s essential Germanity as they believed it to be discoverable in native German traditions of every kind. The Grimms’ collection of German oral traditional narrative was thus not the sole nor necessarily the most valuable of their multi-facetted collecting and documenting of German traditions, but the character and response of the world around them as they worked lifelong at their broader shared purpose determined that the Kinder- und Hausmärchen would become a symbolic achievement around which others of like intentions rallied both in their own and in other nations worldwide.
Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm, the initiator of the Grimms’ collection of German folktales, was born at Hanau in the German Electorate of Hesse (Kurfürstentum Hessen) on 4 January 1785. That state or province of late 18th-century Germany was the one from which the Hessian mercenaries went to fight for the British against the revolutionary colonials in North America. Jacob’s younger brother Wilhelm was born just one year and twenty days after Jacob, also at Hanau, on 24 February 1786. Affectionately disposed toward one another and dwelling together as interdependent members of a single household throughout their long lives, in their early adulthood Jacob and Wilhelm collaborated in gathering and publishing their famous folktale collection, the first in Europe (or anywhere else) derived principally from contemporary oral tradition, and in implicit recognition of that unique accomplishment the two of them have been referred to ever after as die Gebrüder Grimm, although they were in fact only two of their parents’ five sons and a daughter who survived infancy. A third, younger brother, Ludwig Emil, became a highly regarded pictorial artist of his time, so that the family achieved an unusual collective success in their generation; the appellation Gebrüder Grimm comprises reference however only to the pair of folktale-collecting brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm. There were two more brothers, Carl and Ferdinand, and a sister Lotte (Charlotte Amalie), who was youngest of the six children.
The family name Grimm (Grym) was an old one in Hesse; the earliest known mention of it is dated 1508 in a document found in the city of Frankfurt. The father of Jacob, Wilhelm, Ludwig, and their three other siblings was a lawyer, Philipp Wilhelm Grimm. Philipp’s grandfather, Friedrich [b. 1672, d. 1748], had been a Protestant chaplain and later an Inspector of Churches, and Friedrich’s son, Philipp’s own father, followed in Friedrich’s footsteps as a man of the church, so that Philipp Grimm was the descendent of two generations of Protestant clergymen, and his two sons Jacob and Wilhelm were thus preceded by three generations of agnatic ancestors whose positions in the world depended largely upon reading and writing.
Philipp Grimm began his legal career in Hanau as a (court) clerk, then in 1791 became Amtmann—District Magistrate—in the nearby larger town of Steinau. He died only five years later, on 10 January 1796, of pneumonia, when Jacob and Wilhelm were 11 and 10 years of age respectively. The family lived in stringent financial circumstances from that time onward; the penury brought on by their father’s untimely decease was however eventually to prove a positive factor favoring Jacob’s and Wilhelm’s undertaking to collect folktale and the focus of their time and energies on that activity.
In that same year of Philipp Grimm’s death, a French revolutionary army defeated by Archduke Charles of Austria marched through the vicinity of Steinau, retreating across the Rhine into France; the epoch of French imperial ambition personified by Napoleon was about to begin, and no issue in the public life of the German states would become more uncertain than whether the various theretofore independent political entities such as Hesse might remain independent and distinctively German, or be forced to forfeit their political and cultural identity entirely to the expansionist ambitions of France. Possession of a distinctive written and artistic culture was in that era commonly accepted as good reason prima facie why such states as Hesse should not be be altogether deprived of their sovereignty even when otherwise subjugated to one or another of Europe’s contending imperial polities, and that element in the ‘spirit of the age’ also worked to encourage the two Grimm brothers’ eventual collecting of folktales in their own and neighboring provinces of Germany.
In September of 1798, nearly three years after their father’s death, with the help of their maternal aunt Henriette Philippine Zimmer, Jacob and Wilhelm left Steinau and went first to Frankfurt-am-Main, then onward to their aunt Zimmer’s home city of Cassel, where they first underwent preparatory tutoring, and then entered the Lyceum Fridericianum. Persons of their caste in the principality of Hesse did not ordinarily seek or attain university educations at that time, and when he finished the lyceum Jacob had to obtain a special dispensation from the civil authorities to enroll in the Hessian university at Marburg-an-der-Lahn, where he matriculated in April 1802 at the age of 17. His brother Wilhelm joined him there the following year, 1803.
At the university, the studious Jacob was soon noticed by a young professor of law who was only five years older than Jacob, Friedrich Karl von Savigny, who in 1803—Jacob’s second year at Marburg—published what was to become a very famous book, Das Recht des Besitzes [The Law of Property]. In fact it is still a very renowned work; Savigny held that effective and just law and legal procedures must rise out of immemorial traditions and precedential practices of the people who are subject to them, and not from merely abstract conceptions of justice. Savigny came from the great Hessian city of Frankfurt-am-Main, and as his name indicates, his family was not originally German but French, one of the numerous enlightened, progressive, and culturally lively families in a community of prosperous émigrés from other nations of Europe who had settled in the exceptionally cosmopolitan Frankfurt. Were it not for Savigny’s influence on the Grimm brothers, and on Jacob in particular, it is hardly imaginable that they would have later undertaken any such project as the collection and publishing of contemporary German folktales. Jacob and Wilhelm remained on the friendliest of terms with Savigny lifelong, and over the years benefited greatly from that association not only intellectually but also socially and politically as Savigny himself rose to become ultimately Prussian Minister of Justice in Berlin.
At Marburg Savigny opened his personal library to the two young Grimm brothers, a gesture of particular favor. He advocated ‘scientific method’ in analyzing any cultural institution, and thought one needed to know the history of anything in order properly to understand its present significance; he strongly urged this ‘historicising’ approach to everything in German culture on his young protégé Jacob Grimm. Jacob’s concurrent discovery of Ludwig Tieck’s book of old German balladry Minnelieder aus dem schwäbischen Zeitalter and Johann Jakob Bodmer’s editions of mediaeval German Minnesingers was also especially formative; it was in conscious extention of their tendencies and purpose that he and Wilhelm began collecting and publishing folktales a few years later.
From both sources of influence—the living influence of their teacher Savigny, and the influence of seminal books—Jacob and Wilhelm at Marburg came to believe that it would be possible to distill (as in their limited ways both Tieck and Bodmer had done) from the neglected legacy of mediaeval manuscripts scattered in libraries all across Germany, France, and Austria an all-inclusive portrayal of pure, primitive Germanity as it must have once existed in an imagined former age unadulterated by alien intrusions (such as those of Semitic religions, classicism, or 18th-century French rationalism). As corollary to that supposition, they conjectured also that German oral traditions of their own time must ascend in similar fashion to that same earlier era of pure Germanity, and so be very usefully supplemental to the legacy surviving in largely neglected and forgotten manuscripts. Accordingly, it must behoove Jacob and Wilhelm with equal energy to gather and refine what they sought from both sources alike, written and oral. Pursuant to Savigny’s teaching, to grasp the true character of Germanic culture in their own time, the brothers must comprehend the whole sum of traditions inherited from the past. Jacob and Wilhelm made this pursuit and the propagation of its results their life work.
Philipp Friedrich Weis, a neighbour and good friend of Savigny in Marburg, socialized greatly with several members of the Brentano family, who were descended from Italian merchant ancestry in the same cosmopolitan city of Frankfurt from which Savigny sprang. Among these were a rising young literary personage, Clemens Brentano, and Kunigunda (Gunda) Brentano, whom Savigny soon married. Sponsored socially by Savigny, Jacob and Wilhelm became acquainted first with Clemens, and then through him also with another rising young literary luminary of the time, Ludwig Achim von Arnim. Brentano and Arnim both strongly encouraged the Grimm brothers’ interest in German traditions, and only a few years later they became channels through which the Grimms first began to publish what they collected. Arnim’s sister Bettina (Elisabeth) married Clemens Brentano, and particularly in the Grimm brothers’ elder years her patronage also was in several ways invaluable to them.
Savigny liked young Jacob Grimm so well, and had found him such a diligent and careful student, that in 1805, when Jacob had completed his studies in the university and Savigny took a year off from teaching to go and consult documents of legal history in the great National Library in Paris, he engaged Jacob as a scrivener or copyist, whose job was to excerpt from or duplicate by hand items that Savigny wanted for later reference and study at home in Marburg. As always, money was a serious problem for the fatherless Grimm boys, and the paid trip to Paris for the better part of a year, funded entirely by Savigny, was a godsend to Jacob. So there in Paris, on mornings when the Bibliothèque nationale (the National Library) was open, Jacob copied legal documents for his mentor, and then in the afternoon would do the same thing for himself in a particular field of his own intense interest, namely mediaeval romance literature. Besides familiarizing himself with Paris, Jacob also became fluent in French, which was to be crucial for his and his family’s livelihood in coming years. This somewhat abbreviated ‘year abroad’ following his university studies began in January of 1805, and while Jacob was in Paris, with the help of her sister Henriette Zimmer the widowed Frau Grimm removed from Steinau to the Hessian capital city Cassel, so it was to the family’s new home in Cassel that Jacob returned from France in the autumn of 1805. He remained at home there in Cassel throughout the several subsequent years of his engagement in first-hand collection of folktales from personally encountered traditional conteurs and conteuses. Wilhelm completed his final year of university studies at Marburg while Jacob as away with Savigny in Paris, then he too rejoined the family in Cassel.
A general economic depression affected all the German principalities in the first decade of the 19th century, and with their formal educations completed Jacob and Wilhelm remained at home in Cassel with the rest of the family without any paid employment until in early 1806 Jacob obtained a small salary as clerk—essentially as just a scrivener—in the Hessian War Office; Wilhelm had no employment. In October of 1806 however, ignoring Hessian neutrality in the Napoleonic wars, two French armies marched on Cassel, one from Frankfurt and the other from Paderborn, and upon their occupation of Cassel converted the Hessian War Office into a French military commissariat. Jacob’s fluency in French made him eligible for continued employment under the new French régime, but he soon resigned the position, and Jacob and Wilhelm alike then had no employment at all throughout the year 1807. To make matters worse for the Grimms, their benevolent aunt Henriette Zimmer’s employer, the Electress of Hesse, had fled Cassel at the approach of the French in 1806, taking the Grimms’ aunt Zimmer with her into exile at Gotha in the Duchy of Sachsen-Gotha, a constituent of the Napoleonic Rheinbund (États confédérés du Rhin. It was precisely in this period of their pecuniary privation and lack of any meaningful position in the world, 1806-1807, that the two brothers began seriously to collect oral traditions, particularly at that time folksong lyrics and folktale.
Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim had jointly edited and in 1806 published a volume of partly literary and partly redacted oral traditional lyric poetry—Lieder—with the title Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Lad’s Magic Horn). The book was meant to be the first of a series, and in a postscript to it Arnim called upon its readers to collect other material too from oral tradition; Jacob and Wilhelm collected and contributed traditional folksong lyrics that were published in the second and third volumes of the Wunderhorn (both issued in 1808). Clemens Brentano visited the Grimms in Cassel in 1807, was shown the first Volksmärchen—folktales—that they had by that time collected, and reported his favorable opinion of them to his editorial collaborator and ideological ally von Arnim.
Wilhelm recalled later in life that (with the help of only their own family and neighbours in Cassel) he and Jacob had done all their collecting of Volksmärchen by themselves during the seven years 1806-1812, but that other persons elsewhere had supplied to them much of what they assembled thereafter. (Two notable exceptions were communicated to the brothers as early as 1808 and 1809 by Achim von Arnim, namely the two tales ultimately numbered 19 and 47 in the Grimms’ manuscript compilation, both stemming ultimately from one Otto Runge, who died in 1810 and who identified the original narrators of both texts only vaguely as certain unnamed North Sea fishermen, who were persons otherwise completely unknown to Jacob and Wilhelm.) The Grimms’ immediate inspiration to begin collecting folktale personally in their otherwise largely idle years 1806 and 1807 sprang from their considerable reading theretofore of mediaeval German and French balladry, romances, and fables; they hoped to find still in oral traditions of their own provincial vicinity some pieces or residue of the same kinds of narrative that might valuably supplement the fragmentary legacy in scattered manuscripts from earlier centuries. What they discovered in local oral tradition proved to be of a quite different character however, which rather disappointed Jacob, but intrigued Wilhelm.
At the end of May 1808, the widowed Frau Dorothea Grimm née Zimmer died, rendering Jacob head of the surviving Grimm family and imposing on him responsibility and duties toward his five younger siblings which he accepted and continued conscientiously to discharge all his life. It was a difficult rôle for him without income at the onset of summer in 1808, but his French and his bookishness soon brought relief. Having occupied the Electorate of Hesse in the autumn of 1806, in 1807 Napoleon formed from it and contiguous territories a new Kingdom of Westphalia and installed his youngest brother Jérôme Bonaparte as its King, who chose to reside in Cassel. Recommended for the position by an influential friend, Jacob entered Jérôme’s service as royal librarian in July of 1808, and so began to draw a salary again after more than a year without emolument from any source. His librarianship allowed Jacob free time enough for his own intellectual pursuits, and he put some of it to use forming a consolidated manuscript of the German oral traditional narratives that he and Wilhelm were gathering.
In the late summer of 1808 Wilhelm left Cassel to visit aunt Zimmer in Gotha and to prospect in that city’s library for materials of the kind he and Jacob needed for their self-assigned joint mission to reconstruct primitive Germanity; from there he returned home to Cassel for the winter of 1808-1809.
Though being in fact rather less sturdily healthy than his brother Jacob, Wilhelm also evinced lifelong a certain tendency to hypochondria, and an early manifestation of that tendency occurred in the spring of 1809, when, worrying uselessly about the condition of his heart, Wilhelm went for medical consultation to the city of Halle in the erstwhile (pre-Napoleonic) Electorate of Saxony (Kurfürstentum Sachsen). Halle was the seat of an important university and library, and Wilhelm’s friends the Reichardts introduced him to one of the students in the university, Werner von Haxthausen, among numerous other students, writers, artists, and musicians who also frequented the Reichardts’ salon in Halle. Always decidedly more sociable that Jacob, Wilhelm readily turned such acquaintances as the one with Haxthausen to good effect for his and his brother’s shared interests if there was any capacity and willingness in them to be helpful in that way; the Haxthausen connection was to be productive of numerous new folktale texts in coming years.
Clemens Brentano happened also to visit Halle while Wilhelm Grimm was there using its library and socializing, and entirely at his own expense Brentano in September took Wilhelm away with him to his home in Berlin, where Wilhelm remained as guest through the month of October. Brentano’s ideas about how Volksmärchen should be edited for publication made an impression on Wilhelm that is palpable in the successive editions of the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen after 1815. Brentano regarded texts recorded from oral tradition as nothing necessarily more than mere sources of inspiration for his own transformative creativity. Wilhelm ultimately chose a middle way between that attitude and his brother Jacob’s opposite desire that oral traditions be recorded and reported in print verbatim, with no editorial tampering, much less any kind of substantive alteration such as Clemens Brentano practiced.
In November of 1809 Wilhelm returned to Halle, and then proceeded onward toward Cassel with stops along the way to visit Johann Wolfgang von Goethe at his home in Weimar, to consult libraries in Weimar and Jena, and finally once more to visit aunt Henriette Zimmer in Gotha. He rejoined the Grimm household in Cassel at the very end of 1809, having spent most of that year making new friends, cultivating old ones, and exploring libraries beyond the confines of his native Hesse. During his sojourns that year Wilhelm wrote home frequently to Jacob describing his many social contacts, and he talked volubly everywhere about his and his brother Jacob’s burgeoning work with folktales. His experiences in 1809 lifted the young Wilhelm’s horizons in a manner similar to the effect on Jacob of extended travel abroad in 1805.
In 1809 Clemens Brentano asked the Grimm brothers to lend him the manuscript of their still unpublished folktale collection, and in 1810 they sent it to him, having however taken the precaution of making and keeping a copy for themselves, which was providentially foresightful, for Brentano never returned the original. The copy became the base to which they continued to add through the remainder of 1810, all of 1811, and right through to the autumn of 1812.
In the summer of 1811 Wilhelm, always a personable and engaging guest, paid a visit to Paul Wigand, an old friend from his and Jacob’s student days in the lyceum in Cassel and at the University of Marburg, who in 1811 resided in the little town of Höxter north of Cassel. While there, and acting on an open invitation from Werner von Haxthausen, whom he had met in Halle in 1809, Wilhelm hiked west to visit also the Haxthausen family in their manor house Bökerhof at Bökendorf in rural Westphalia, where he found several members of the family able and ready both to tell him traditional tales themselves and to collect from other narrators of Volksmärchen in both their nearby surroundings and in the larger region around the city of Paderborn with which the Haxthausens were associated as hereditary landed gentry. Thus did Wilhelm begin to solicit and obtain contributions to his and his brother’s growing collection from surrogate collectors in places well beyond the immediate vicinity of Cassel.
In January of 1812 Achim von Arnim visited the Grimms in Cassel, read the manuscript containing their folktale collection to date, declared that he thought it ought to be published forthwith, and personally undertook to find a publisher for it. Finally, sometime about midyear 1812, Georg Andreas Reimer in Berlin agreed to accept the Grimms’ manuscript sight unseen, and they sent it off to him in the autumn, having continued to enlarge it all the while Arnim was prospecting for its publisher. As an author and editor himself of commercially successful books of similar content, Arnim had been decisively persuasive despite economically stressful conditions for publishers in general at that time in French-occupied Germany.
The printed book was ready for sale in time for Christmas, 1812. The publisher Reimer advertised the book as an instructive gift for children at Christmas time (to help them with learning to read), and this simple commercial characterization for the purpose of selling books at Christmas became the basis for the mistaken idea that has clung to the book ever since that the Grimms’ folktales were somehow specially suitable or meant for children. The Grimms themselves never intended that idea, and did not think their collection of native German folk stories was any more—or, for that matter, any less—suited to the particular educational or literary needs of children than was the Holy Bible. It was Georg Reimer, not the brothers Grimm, who gave the book its title in German: Kinder- und Hausmärchen [Children’s and Household Tales]. Reimer took other liberties too with the Grimms’ manuscript; thinking the Low German dialect of the two tales numbered 19 and 47 too barbarously off-putting, he rewrote them himself in such a fashion as to make them linguistically unrecognizable as true products of oral tradition from anywhere in Germany.
Publication of the book was immediately appreciated as a significant literary event, if only because the Grimm brothers had by that time acquired so many educated friends and acquaintances. Reviews of the book published by their friends were generally full of praise for it; but of course, as always in free human discourse evaluating anything, what some think good, others will surely dislike if only to distinguish themselves by holding a different opinion. So some criticized the Kinder- und Hausmärchen for being “contrary to true religion,” and for encouraging “dangerous superstition.” Some cited actual biblical authority for a religious duty to discourage such reading, namely the famous passage in St. Paul’s First Letter to Timothy about ‘Church Order:’ (4:7) “Have nothing to do with godless myths and old wives’ tales.” This unfortunate passage is of course one of the prime reasons for the relative poverty of Western culture in this aspect of traditional culture; not until die Gebrüder Grimm did so in 1812 had anyone anywhere in Europe ever published a book of true oral traditional folktales. Notice however that St. Paul’s injunction speaks not against all myths and tales, but only against ‘godless ones’ and those of ‘old wives.’ So the battle lines were drawn too in the case of the Grimm collection of 1812; what really was, and what conversely was not, either ‘godless’ or ‘old wive-ish’ about its contents?
An important early source of tales published in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen of 1812 was Jacob’s and Wilhelm’s sister Lotte. Lotte found numerous stories for her brothers among her female friends in Cassel, especially the Wild family, the Grimms’ nearby neighbours. Although she was only 16 years of age, Lotte’s coeval Dortchen (Dorothea) Wild in particular was a good storyteller, ably retailing folktales she had heard from the Wild family’s nanny Marie (see for example no. 65 in the canonical edition of 1857). Also, with the help of the Grimms’ landlord’s daughter Karoline Engelhard, a pair of good storytellers was discovered in Münsterland, another German province northwest of Hesse. These were the sisters Jeannette and Amalie Hassenpflug (whose brother Hans Lotte Grimm married in 1822).
Some storytellers came to the Grimm brothers’ attention quite by accident. Such was the case, for example, of an old soldier, a retired army sargeant, Johann Friedrich Krause, who told stories in exchange for a pair of the Grimms’ worn-out trousers, from which he presumably got some further use. In the economically bad years of 1806 and following, Jacob and Wilhelm themselves sometimes had to plan carefully which one of them could leave the house at a time, since they had only one presentable pair of trousers between them, and had to share it according to need. Clothing was scarce and expensive.
Sometime after they had submitted the manuscript for the volume of 1812 to Reimer in Berlin, the Grimms discovered the best of all their personally recorded folktale sources. Again the agency of female society in Cassel was crucial; two sisters, Charlotte and Julie Ramus, habitually bought butter and eggs from a mature woman who brought them to market in Cassel from her home in the village of Zwehrn (or more exactly, Nether Zwehrn, i.e., Niederzwehren bei Kassel). This was Frau Katherina Dorothea Viehmann, née Pierson, an innkeeper’s daughter from the city of Moselle in France (called Metz in German) who had married a tailor and moved to Hessian Zwehrn with him. She told some of her tales to the Ramus sisters, who, knowing of the Grimms’ interest in such things, prevailed upon her to introduce herself to the Grimm household. Jacob and Wilhelm obtained a number of fine tales from her, so much better indeed than anything in the book printed at the end of 1812, that they too obviously needed to be published somehow. Frau Viehmann did not enjoy strong health, and did not live very long after the Grimms discovered her. She died on 17 November 1815.
Early in 1813 Wilhelm wrote to the Haxthausens acknowledging texts of folktales received from them, and that summer he again visited them at Bökerhof, where he met two other visitors, Jenny and Annette Droste-Hülshoff. Jenny and Annette were Haxthausen nieces, daughters of the eldest Haxthausen daughter who had had married into Münsterland, a district northeast of Cassel even more remotely rural than Bökendorf. The 18-year-old Jenny and younger Annette both undertook to supply Wilhelm with Volksmärchen from Münsterland, and both did so, but Jenny more voluminously that her sister, for Jenny and Wilhelm formed a romantic attachment to each other as well as sharing a concern with folktale. There were sadly insurmountable obstacles to a more fulfilling relationship: Jenny Droste-Hülshoff was Roman Catholic, and Wilhelm was Protestant; she was a member of the hereditary gentry, and he was bourgeois. They could love each other all they wanted, but marriage was unthinkable. For twenty years Wilhelm pined for Jenny and she for him, and they had a fine romantic correspondence, 1814-1834. They both loved nature, especially flowers and birds, and wrote to each other abundantly about such things. She kept swans, and had 200 potted plants, about which Wilhelm got detailed letters from her. She also loved Sir Walter Scott’s Scottish romances, and her star-crossed (but so far as is known, perfectly chaste) love affair with Wilhelm Grimm was spun into a sort of living romance in its own right by these two thoroughgoing romantics. It was all quite hopeless, but Wilhelm did get some interesting tales from Jenny for his and his brother’s ever-growing folktale collection. In the spring of 1825 Wilhelm married the devoted folktale-telling and collecting girl-next-door, Dorothea Wild, and in 1834 Jenny von Droste-Hülshoff married Freiherr Josef von Lassberg, a prosperous Bavarian gentryman of Jacob’s acquaintance. Jacob never married.
By the end of 1813 Jacob and Wilhelm were keenly aware that the best folktales they had discovered in German oral tradition were not in the book published at the end of 1812, having accrued to them from various new sources only since then. With the successful serialization of Des Knaben Wunderhorn as an encouraging precedent moreover, and given the amount of favorable public notice their own 1812 volume of Kinder- und Hausmärchen had received, there was reason to hope Georg Reimer might be persuaded to risk issuing a second volume, which in the upshot he agreed to do when the manuscript for it was complete. But it was Wilhelm who finished that work alone in the autumn of 1814; Jacob’s window of opportunity to contribute, which had been open since submission of the manuscript for the volume of 1812, closed abruptly in December of 1813.
Following the Grande Armée’s disaster in Russia late in 1812, in 1813 the French-imposed Kingdom of Westphalia collapsed, its king Jérôme Bonaparte fled, and the Elector and Electress of Hesse returned to Cassel with the Grimms’ aunt Zimmer in their retinue. Jacob re-entered Hessian service, and in December left Cassel to follow the advancing Allied invasion of France as secretary to the Hessian ambassador. By January of 1814 he was using the library in Karlsruhe, then moved on to Basle, Troyes, and in April to Dijon, at which time Napoleon abdicated and departed for Elba. The Hessian ambassadorial mission then passed on expeditiously to Paris, and Jacob to the Bibliothèque nationale after an absence of almost nine years.
In June of 1814 Jacob returned from Paris to Cassel, where however he was able to remain only briefly in late summer. The triumphant reactionary political powers of Europe after the defeat of Napoleon summoned delegations from all states that had been embroiled in the Napoleonic Wars to congregate in Vienna for the purpose of establishing a new European political and social order. As secretary to the Hessian legation, Jacob travelled in September to Vienna, where he remained till the dissolution of the Congress of Vienna in mid-1815. There he found time and opportunity apart from his secretarial duties to explore the Hofbibliothek (Austrian Imperial Library) and to meet its librarian, the Slovene Jernej Kopitar, who was as enthusiastically interested in Slavic oral traditional culture as the Grimm brothers were in its German counterparts, and for comparable reasons.
Kopitar gave Jacob a copy of a little book in the Serbian language that had just been published there in Vienna in January by a young Serb, Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, Мала простонародньа славено-сербска песнарица (A Little Slaveno-Serbian Book of Songs of the Common Folk), containing mostly texts of oral traditional lyric songs highly reminiscent of those in German that the Grimms had contributed to Arnim’s and Brentano’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn; but tacked on diffidently at the end of that little volume, spread upon a mere 29 small pages, were also a few hundred lines of exactly the kind of long oral traditional narrative poetry that Jacob Grimm had fruitlessly hoped through his and his brother’s collecting to unearth somewhere in Germany. Moreover, as Kopitar explained to Jacob, there was an abundant store of further suchlike oral traditional narrative poetry waiting in the Slavic balkans to be recorded and presented to the world in print. Kopitar assured Grimm that his protégé Karadžić was the right man to take on that task, which in subsequent years he indeed did, though in 1814 it was still unclear to the 27-year-old Vuk Karadžić why, apart from whatever faith he might have in Kopitar’s guiding wisdom, he should be obedient to Kopitar’s urging to do that work.
The Serbian instance explained to him by Jernej Kopitar in Vienna constituted as nearly perfect an inversion of the German as could be imagined. Whereas in Germany manuscript fragments of a unique bygone culture survived in various libraries, in Serbia there were no such reliques nor libraries to preserve them; and yet in the minds and mouths of living Serbs there still persisted a vigorous oral tradition perpetuating memory and values of a Serbian heyday, a poetic tradition—as Jacob’s own collecting efforts had shown him—of a kind utterly vanished from latter-day Germany.
His encounter in Vienna with Kopitar and with the first-fruit and promise of Vuk Karadžić’s activity made Jacob Grimm realize that only other, culturally more isolated nations than his own could still retain oral traditions of long poetic storytelling (rather than just the short, prosaic kind of oral traditional narration still to be found here and there in Germany as Volksmärchen). If Germans could be helped at all to understand the scope of what had once existed but disappeared from German oral traditional culture, leaving only fragments of itself in manuscripts from the Middle Ages, it might only be by analogy with similar traditions of other peoples still in a purer state of nature—an altogether less corrupted, urbanized condition—than Germans in the 19th century. The best that Jacob could do for his fellow Germans’ benefit in this regard would be in some fashion to facilitate their access to such other traditions as the balkan Slavic when and as such native cognoscenti as Vuk Karadžić might get substantial parts of them into print.
Karadžić’s initial hesitation to fall in with Jernej Kopitar’s destination of him as collector and editor of long oral traditional narrative poetry in South Slavic resulted mostly from his being already entangled willy-nilly in a difficult project to devise a rational standard for written Serbian. Balkan Slavic peoples were at that time preponderantly illiterate, and written use of their languages lacked anything like the degree of standarization inculcated by schools and universities in Germany, for in the balkans south of the Sava and Danube rivers there were no such educational systems. Written Serbian in particular was chaotic; not even the fundamental inventory of characters in the Serbian alphabet was settled, not to mention other issues of orthography, grammatical desinence, usage, lexicon, or accidence. Thus perforce purely linguistic matters were Vuk’s first concern. How, for example, could any such extensive acervation as Kopitar envisaged of texts collected from oral poetic traditions be suitably written or read without practical systemization of how spoken words were to be tranformed into written words?
Accordingly Vuk Karadžić published in August of 1814 his first attempt to formulate elementary orthographic and grammatical standards for written Serbian, Писменица серпскога іезика (A Booklet of Rules for Writing the Serbian Language). In the same vein, in October of 1818 he further published Српска Граматика (Serbian Grammar), an enlarged revision of the earlier Писменица, and Српски Рјечник (Serbian Dictionary). Only after that foundation of language standardization was in place did Karadžić turn to large-scale publication of Serbian oral poetry such as Jernej Kopitar had anticipated. All in the same year of 1823 three big volumes of Karadžić’s Народне Српске Пјесме (Songs of the Serbian People) were printed in Leipzig between July and December, volumes 2 and 3 containing heroic poems, and volume 1 lyric pieces in prosodic forms usually sung be women.
Here in volumes 2 and 3 were oral traditional poems of the very kind Jacob Grimm had vainly sought in German, and he was quick to do what he could to assist fellow Germans’ reading of them: expressly for that particular purpose he translated Karadžić’s Serbian grammar book into German and published it in 1824 under the title Wuk’s Stephanowitsch Kleine Serbische Grammatik, verdeutscht mit einer Vorrede von Jacob Grimm; nebst Bemerkungen über die neueste Auffassung langer Heldenlieder aus dem Munde des Serbischen Volks... (Vuk Stefanović’s Concise Serbian Grammar, translated into German with a foreword by Jacob Grimm; together with Remarks on the latest Intelligence Regarding Long Heroic Songs from the Mouths of the Serbian People...).
While Jacob Grimm was in Vienna the Grimms’ ever benevolent and generous aunt Zimmer died, and Napoleon returned to France from Elba, precipitating dispersal of the Congress of Vienna and Jacob’s return briefly to Cassel. He had however hardly arrived home when Prussian authorities required him to travel to Paris as their agent for recovery of manuscript properties taken from Prussia by the French during the years of Napoleonic hegemony east of the Rhine. Not until December of 1815 was Jacob able to return to his position as the Hessian Elector’s librarian in Cassel. Thus for two years, from the end of 1813 to the end of 1815, Jacob’s presence and energies were absorbed by official travel and affairs of state, years during which Wilhelm alone was at liberty to continue expansion of the folktale collection and preparation of the post-1812 accessions for printing.
In 1814 Wilhelm obtained the first gainful employment of his life, as the Hessian Elector’s Bibliothekssekretär, a position of small remuneration, but also of little distraction from his work with the folktale collection. By the end of September he had completed the manuscript for the second volume of Kinder- und Hausmärchen with his own preface to it and incorporating Katherina Viehmann’s tales, together with a number of others from the provinces of Westfalen (Westphalia) and Münsterland. Marketed the same way the first volume had been, as a potential Christmas present, the second book was issued just before Christmas of 1814 (although the date on its title page is 1815). Jacob received 20 copies of the new book in Vienna in January of 1815, and was dissatisfied with it.
Jacob’s discontent ran deeper however than mere displeasure with Wilhelm’s construction of volume two. What Jacob had from the outset hoped to find in his investigation of oral traditional storytelling in his own time in Germany was at least some trace, even some substantial survival perhaps, of the kind of text he had found in Ludwig Tieck’s Minnelieder and in the mediaeval French chansons de geste. But it had gradually became apparent to Jacob as he and his brother pursued that search together during the years 1806-1812 that it was not going to be productive of any such thing; there was to be found in 19th-century German lands a living oral narrative tradition only of folktales—Volksmärchen—without any element of old balladry or of heroic epos like the chansons de geste (or the Nibelungenlied). And in a certain sense, what Jacob had learned from Jernej Kopitar in Vienna made that lack immaterial; the moral equivalent of what he could not find in Germany he now knew existed plentifully in a neighboring land; he need only wait upon the fruit of others’ labor to meet with it. So Jacob Grimm simply lost interest in further collecting of his own from German oral tradition, and quit it in favor of other activities.
For his part, as he encountered after 1812 more and more pieces of the German oral tradition from farther and farther afield, Wilhelm was troubled by the literarily unkempt character of so many of the texts, including those already published in both volumes of Kinder- und Hausmärchen, and he came to believe that he understood the ‘correct’ diction and content of Märchen much better than the formally uneducated, mostly obscure and socio-economically negligible persons who were commonly the ultimate sources of raw Volksmärchen. So after 1814 he increasingly undertook not merely to edit but substantially to reword texts and reform their narratives into what he conceived to be perfected, i.e., literarily creditable style and content. In the process, he conflated many originally separate tales and fragments of tales that he considered ought to be united with each other, whether or not there was any actual evidence from the oral tradition of their ever having been so; and he interpolated many passages entirely of his own composition, especially amplification of descriptions.
Progressively modifying the folktale texts in these ways, Wilhelm published a new, second edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen in 1819; a third edition in 1837; a fourth edition in 1840; a fifth edition in 1843; a sixth edition in 1850; and a final, seventh edition in 1857—each of these successive editions consisting of two volumes. Some of the tales in these compendious editions became well known among the reading public, while others garnered only abundant disregard. Wilhelm’s and his publisher’s response was to issue a single-volume popular illustrated edition of selected, best-liked tales first in 1825, then again nine times more in 1833, 1836, 1839, 1841, 1844, 1847, 1850, 1853, and 1858.
Rather than be at odds with his brother about the latter’s editorial practices, after 1815 Jacob tacitly consigned further work with folktale texts to Wilhelm, who went on through all his many further editions of Kinder- und Hausmärchen to make a name for himself among the literati of his age as preëminent codifier of German folktale. Carrying as it did throughout their lifetimes a greater weight of respected scholarly authority than Wilhelm’s, and as an expression of profound fraternal allegiance and cordiality, Jacob’s name continued to appear as his younger brother’s coadjutor on the title pages of all editions of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, but in reality the entire project had become Wilhelm’s creature after publication of the first edition’s second volume in 1814, and the peculiar textuality of the tales as published thereafter was imposed on them by Wilhelm. Consequently the Kinder- und Hausmärchen in its ultimate form (1857) is a thoroughly adulterated and stylistically homogenized distortion of the actual German oral folktale tradition it purported to represent. Due moreover to the infamous authority of printed words, to a large extent Wilhelm’s reworked texts and conflations re-entered the oral tradition and displaced much of what had been original in it.
Jacob Grimm’s energies were meanwhile absorbed by a variety of other projects, all stemming no less than his youthful interest in Volksmärchen from his original ambition comprehensively to ascertain the exact nature of Germanity. Apart from a plethora of lesser publications, Jacob’s labours after he separated himself from the collection and publication of Volksmärchen yielded a number of major monuments in the fields of German language, literature, and law, among them the four volumes of Deutsche Grammatik (German Grammar) 1819-1837; Deutsche Rechtsaltertümer (German Legal Antiquities) 1828, second edition 1854; Deutsche Mythologie (Germanic Mythology) 1835, second enlarged edition 1843; Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (History of the German Language) 2 volumes, 1848; and Weistümer (Early [German] Legal Practices) 4 volumes, 1840-1862 [continued by others posthumously]. There were also later genuine collaborations with Wilhelm on other projects apart from Volksmärchen, notably in compilation of Deutsche Sagen (German Legends) volume one [legends relating to particular localities] 1816, and volume two [legends about particular historical events] 1818; and finally, collaboration from the autumn of 1838 to 1854 on compilation of the initial volume of Deutsches Wörterbuch, a projected multi-volume historical dictionary of the German language.
Wilhelm Grimm predeceased Jacob on 16 December 1859; Jacob died 20 September 1863.
