The Brothers Grimm

Today (Dec. 20, 2012) is the 200th anniversary of the publication of "Kinder- und Hausmärchen" ("Children's and Household Tales") by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.   I'm a fan of fairy tales for several reasons.  And I'll be the first to admit that the original versions of "Children's and Household Tales" aren't appropriate for children, even though child-psychologist Bruno Bettelheim suggested that these fairy tales, with the darkness of abandonment, death, witches, and injuries, allowed children to grapple with their fears in remote, symbolic terms.  But when Libby Copeland pointed out in "Why I don't want to read fairy tales to my daughter", that birds pecked out the eyes of Cinderella’s evil stepsisters, an evil queen is forced to dance herself to death wearing red-hot iron shoes (Snow White); a prince falls in love with a dead girl and begs permission to take ownership of her lifeless body (same); a man abandons his children in a forest to starve at the behest of his wife (Hansel and Gretel), then I had to disagree with Dr. Bettelheim.

The brothers can be forgiven for publishing some of the depressing aspects of the stories, because they too (like Hänsel and Gretel) experienced hunger as a result of their poverty.

The brothers realized that the industrial revolution threatened the oral tradition of story telling, and so they began collecting traditional stories with the purpose of creating a scholarly treatise and of preserving the stories as they had
been handed down from generation to generation. Among the stories are "Cinderella" (Aschenputtel), "The Frog Prince" (Der Froschkönig), "Hansel and Gretel" (Hänsel und Gretel), "Rapunzel", "Rumpelstiltskin" (Rumpelstilzchen), and "Snow White" (Schneewittchen).

They used the stories to study the different dialects in German, and later to study the history of the Germanic languages (including English). They identified the Grimm's law (also known as the First Germanic Sound Shift), which is very helpful to me when learning German words, because the relationship between German and English words is sometimes obvious when you know, for example, that the p-sound and the f-sound can be exchanged, and so can the d-sound and t-sound (English: brother, West Frisian, Dutch: broeder, German: Bruder, Gothic: broþar, Icelandic, Faroese: bróðir, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian: broder).

One of my favorite aspects of fairy tales is the fragments of old religions and faiths reflected in the stories that the brothers thought continued to exist and survive through the telling of stories.  This is rich soil for scholars of comparative mythology, whether structural, linguistic, or psychological.  A good example is The Three Green Twigs: "Once upon a time there was a hermit who lived in the forest at the foot of a mountain, and he passed the time by praying and doing good deeds. To honor God he would carry several pails of water up the mountainside each evening. Since there was always a hard wind that dried out the air and soil in the mountain peak, many an animal was able to quench its thirst because of the water he carried, and many a plant was refreshed."  This story ends with a dried stick putting out new green shoots, which symbolizes God's forgiveness.  The same symbolism is found at the end of Wagner's "Tannhäuser", my favorite opera.