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1 February 2025

The brutal world of the Brothers Grimm

The folklorists’ fairy tales, in which moral laws are suspended and violence abounds, were no stranger than the progressive fantasies that replaced them.

By John Gray

The lives of the Grimm brothers were not especially eventful. Born in 1785 and 1786, Jacob and Wilhelm – the second and third eldest of nine siblings, three of whom died in infancy – were offspring of a lawyer, Philipp Grimm, and his wife Dorothea, who oversaw their early education by private tutors. Quite different personalities, Jacob tended to introversion while Wilhelm was more sociable. Jacob lived with his brother and his wife Dortchen, continuing to do so after Wilhelm’s death in 1859 until he himself died in 1863.

Throughout their lives, the brothers were united in their passionate devotion to the German language. In 1838 they began work on the Deutsches Wörterbuch, never finished but continued by scholars after they died and still the most comprehensive German dictionary. Together the Grimms helped remake the study of language. Through their work, they propagated the view that languages are not just tools through which we communicate with one another, but express specific forms of common life and distinctive world views. It was through language that human identities were formed, and the brothers spent much of their lives retrieving an “authentic” identity they believed had been lost in their native Hessen. A principality in the Holy Roman Empire, the territory was occupied by Napoleon’s forces when the empire was dissolved in 1806 and renamed the Kingdom of Westphalia.

The notion of an integral Germanic culture was not new. In an essay on “The Songs of Ancient Peoples” published in 1773, the philosopher, Lutheran pastor and key thinker in the European counter-Enlightenment, Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744-1803) coined the term Volkslied (folk song). Lying beneath the artifices of modern civilisation was the Volk – an organic, seamless, undivided people. Herder’s Volk had little basis in history – medieval Europe was a patchwork of cultures and communities riven by religious and dynastic conflicts – but it provided a conceptual foundation for a project of national unification.

Ann Schmiesing, professor of German and Scandinavian Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, has given us a definitive biography of the scholars who produced the most disturbing collection of fairy stories ever published. Rigorously and at times densely written, this is a book that aims to situate the Grimms and their studies of language in the larger historical context of the intellectual and political movements of their time, and in this it succeeds admirably. But it is also an implicit commentary on the constancy of the human mind. Grimms’ Fairy Tales plants a question mark over what it means to be a fully developed human being.

Like the nation-state, the Volk is a modern invention, and so are collections of “folklore”, a word that first appeared in 1846. Most of the Grimms’ tales were not gathered from illiterate peasants but educated middle-class women in their social circle, who likely absorbed them from their servants. In some cases, they were gleaned from books relating stories from other countries. The first edition, published in 1812 as Children’s and Household Tales, included stories adapted from the French writer Charles Perrault’s Tales and Stories of the Past with Morlas (1697). The orientalist Antoine Galland (1646-1715) translated a Syrian manuscript of The Thousand and One Nights into French, publishing the first volume in 1704. The term “fairy tale” is a translation of conte de fées. Ironically, the collection the Grimms produced as part of their project of reclaiming German culture from French domination was heavily indebted to French sources. Seeking to Germanify the collection, they removed some of the more obviously foreign-inspired stories. A version of “Beauty and the Beast” echoing a story in The Thousand and One Nights published in Children’s and Household Tales was deleted from subsequent editions.

The brothers never denied that many of their stories derived from previous collections. Where they were original was in presenting them without literary or moral embellishment. Defining their editorial philosophy, they wrote: “No circumstance has been poeticised, beautified, or altered.” Today, no one can read the tales without a strong sense of their weirdness. Supernatural elvish creatures figure in few of them, but cannibalism, child abuse, violent death, talking animals and miraculous transfigurations are everywhere. The core of the fairytale, as rendered by the Grimms, is that the causal and moral laws that govern the human world are suspended. The imagination runs free; life is enchanted.

In “The Juniper Tree”, a couple pray to God to give them a child. The woman gives birth to a baby boy and dies of happiness. The widower remarries, and his new wife has a daughter to whom she is devoted, but she loathes her stepson, decapitating, dismembering and cooking him into a stew for dinner. A magical bird alights on a juniper tree, singing of the woman’s crime, and drops a millstone on her, killing her. The bird is transmuted into the son who joins his joyful father and stepsister, they eat together and live happily ever after.

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The strangest feature of the story is how it is told. The style is light and terse. The uncanniest happenings are recounted in a drily matter-of-fact tone, and nothing is explained. Wilhelm moderated the goriness to make the collection attractive to wider audiences and palatable to Christian sensibilities. “Much of the reworking in the second and later editions,” Schmiesing writes, “made the tales more suitable for 19th-century bourgeois children.”

But the unsettling effect of the stories persists, and some have identified its source in political history. Under Hitler’s National Socialists, the Grimms’ tales were used in anti-Semitic propaganda, and banned by the Allies in schools for a time after the Nazis were defeated. Schmiesing is keen to rebut charges that the brothers provided a prototype for 20th-century ethnic nationalism. The idea of culture they promoted, she tells us, “should not be conflated with ethno-nationalism: to the Grimms, a people (or Volk) was principally defined by shared language, whereas later in the 19th century a more biological notion of Volk took hold that defined a people in racialised terms of ancestry and blood”. The Nazis, she concludes, “readily appropriated nineteenth century philology’s emphasis on language, history and nation to [their] focus on race and blood”.

Clearly, Romantic nationalism cannot be equated with Nazism. Herder believed every people was unique: he did not rank them in a hierarchy with the Germans at the top. It would be wrong, though, to regard the Grimms simply as industrious scholars. In stories such as “The Jew in the Thornbush” – in which a youth compels a Jew, finally hanged as a thief, to dance in a hedge where his coat is ripped and his flesh torn by thorns – they vented an anti-Semitism of which there is no trace in Herder. Authenticity is a slippery idea. In politics, it is easily conjoined with murky notions of the malignant influence of minorities.

It is a pity that Schmiesing does not discuss the changing patterns of fairytale literature in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Starting with the Scottish writer George MacDonald (1824-1905), a Congregationalist minister strongly drawn to the German Romantics, the wild savagery of the stories was suppressed. A more thoroughly Christianised variant emerged in which the absurdities and cruelty of life were no longer final.

In MacDonald’s Phantastes: Faerie Romance For Men and Women (1858), a young man receives the key to his late father’s desk on his 21st birthday. Unlocking the desk he finds a tiny fairy woman, who tells him he will enter Fairy Land tomorrow. He wakes up the next day to discover his room metamorphosing into a magical forest. Wandering into the wood, he meets a lady who shows him an Ash Tree inimical to everything good. After many struggles with evil, the young man is killed and buried, only to reawaken in his old room. His sisters tell him he has been away for 21 days, and he begins his life anew. This is recognisably a fairytale, but the genre has undergone a sea-change.

MacDonald’s work had a formative influence on CS Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, and to a lesser extent JRR Tolkien, the creator of the hobbit-and-monster-world of Middle Earth. The writers were devout Christians, Lewis a convert partly due to Tolkien’s example. The fairy story recast as redemptive drama continued in George Lucas’s Star Wars, avowedly modelled on Lord of the Rings without exhibiting any explicitly Christian content. The wars of Middle Earth are waged in a realm outside history and Lucas’s battles in a far-off future. If only because he wisely locates the fairy realm in another world, Tolkien is superior, but the authors are at one in telling of conflicts in which moral order is bound to prevail. In Tolkien, morality is underwritten by God, the Logos or divine reason; in Lucas, it inheres in evolving humankind, or life itself. In both, goodness and beauty are built into the nature of things. It is hard to imagine a vision more at odds with that which permeates Grimms’ Fairy Tales.

Early 21st-century Western political discourse was testimony to how difficult it is to accept disenchantment. In the progressive fairy story, history’s eternally recurring horrors were halted. Preternatural forces – “the international community”, “the rule-governed order” and the like – were conjuring peace and harmony from unending war and division. Magical thinking flourished unabated. Beasts might not speak or birds turn into people, but sooner or later the unruly human animal would be miraculously transformed. As this once-pervasive story fades from memory, the reality that is revealed is as wild and weird as anything in the Grimms’ disturbing tales.

John Gray’s most recent book is “The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism” (Allen Lane)

The Brothers Grimm: A Biography
Ann Schmiesing
Yale University Press, 360pp, £25

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This article appears in the 05 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The New Gods of AI