The Grimm Reader Read online

  Copyright © 2010, 2004 by Maria Tatar

  Introduction copyright © 2004 by A. S. Byatt

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Kinder- und Hausmärchen. English.

  The Grimm reader : the classic tales of the Brothers Grimm / translated and edited by Maria Tatar ; introduction by A. S. Byatt.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-393-33856-0 (pbk.)

  1. Fairy tales—Germany.

  I. Grimm, Jacob, 1785–1863. II. Grimm, Wilhelm, 1786–1859.

  III. Tatar, Maria, 1945– IV. Byatt, A. S. (Antonia Susan), 1936– V. Title.

  GR166.K532 2010

  398.20943—dc22

  2010019475

  W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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  Contents

  Introduction by A. S. Byatt

  Reading the Brothers Grimm

  PART I—THE TALES

  1.The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich

  2.The Poor Miller’s Boy and the Cat

  3.The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats

  4.The Twelve Brothers

  5.Little Brother and Little Sister

  6.Rapunzel

  7.The Three Little Men in the Woods

  8.Hansel and Gretel

  9.The Fisherman and His Wife

  10.The Brave Little Tailor

  11.Cinderella

  12.Mother Holle

  13.The Seven Ravens

  14.Little Red Riding Hood

  15.The Bremen Town Musicians

  16.The Devil and His Three Golden Hairs

  17.The Magic Table, the Gold Donkey, and the Club in the Sack

  18.The Elves

  19.The Robber Bridegroom

  20.Godfather Death

  21.Fitcher’s Bird

  22.The Juniper Tree

  23.The Six Swans

  24.Briar Rose

  25.Snow White

  26.Rumpelstiltskin

  27.The Golden Bird

  28.The Three Feathers

  29.The Golden Goose

  30.Furrypelts

  31.The Singing, Soaring Lark

  32.The Goose Girl

  33.A Fairy Tale about a Boy Who Left Home to Learn about Fear

  34.The Worn-out Dancing Shoes

  35.The Star Talers

  36.Snow White and Rose Red

  37.The Golden Key

  PART II—TALES FOR ADULTS

  1.The Jew in the Bramble

  2.Mother Trudy

  3.The Hand with the Knife

  4.How Children Played Butcher with Each Other

  5.Hans Dumm

  6.The Evil Mother-in-Law

  7.The Children Living in a Time of Famine

  8.The Stubborn Child

  9.The Rose

  Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

  Preface to Volume 1 of the First Edition of Children’s Stories and Household Tales

  The Magic of Fairy Tales

  INTRODUCTION

  by A. S. Byatt

  his is the book I wanted as a child and didn’t have, the book I’d have liked both to give to my children and keep for myself, the book I shall give my grandchildren. It took me some time to see that what I thought of as a “real” fairy tale was almost always one collected by the Grimms. But as a child—and even more as an adult—I had an instinct for the power and the—somewhat dangerous—delight of their collection.

  I acquired a hunger for fairy tales in the dark days of blackout and blitz in the Second World War. I read early and voraciously and indiscriminately—Andrew Lang’s colored Fairy Books, Hans Andersen, King Arthur, Robin Hood, and my very favorite book, Asgard and the Gods, a German scholarly text, with engravings, about Norse mythology, which my mother had used as a crib in her studies of Ancient Norse. I never really liked stories about children doing what children do—quarreling and cooking and camping. I liked magic, the unreal, the more than real. I learned from the Asgard book that even the gods can be defeated by evil. I knew nothing about the Wagnerian Nordic pageantry of the Third Reich. Nor did I have any inkling that the British occupying forces in Germany after the war were going to ban the Grimms because they fed a supposedly bloodthirsty German imagination. Indeed, I retreated into them from wartime anxieties.

  I didn’t have a book at that stage that was specifically the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. But I learned to distinguish between them and the authored tales of Hans Andersen (and de la Mare and Thack-eray). My developing idea of the “real” (authentic) fairy tale centered on the Brothers Grimm. It included also some of the Nordic stories collected by Asbjørnsen, some Perrault, and some English tales—“Jack and the Beanstalk,” for instance. These tales might be funny or horrible or weird or abrupt, but they were never disturbing, they never twisted your spirit with sick terror as Andersen so easily did. They had a discrete, salutary flatness.

  It is interesting how impossible it is to remember a time when my head was not full of these unreal people, things, and events. When I ask friends and colleagues what is their first precise memory of a fairy tale, they almost all come up with some shock administered by that psychological terrorist, Andersen—the little mermaid walking on knives, Kai in the icy palace of the Snow Queen. But these shocks happen to people and children who already know and inhabit the other world which gets into our heads and becomes necessary—a world of suns and moons and forests, of princesses and goose girls, old men and women, benign and malign, talking birds and flying horses, magic roses and magic puddings, turnips and pigs, impenetrable castles and petrification, glass mountains and glass coffins, poisonous apples and blinding thorns, ogres and imps, spindles and spun gold, tasks and prohibitions, danger and comfort (for the good people) after it. The tales collected by the Grimms are older, simpler, and deeper than the individual imagination.

  It is very odd—when you come to think of it—that human beings in all sorts of societies, ancient and modern, have needed these untrue stories. It is much odder than the need for religious stories (myths) or semihistorical stories (legends) or history, national or personal. Even as a little girl I perceived its oddity. These “flat” stories appear to be there because stories are a pervasive and perpetual human characteristic, like language, like play.

  What are fairy stories for? Freud gave an answer—they were related to daydreams and wish-fulfillment fantasies, in which the questing self meets helpers and enemies, and in which the ending is always happy. He wondered if myths were the “secular dreams of youthful humanity” but distinguished myths from fairy tales by claiming
that myth is “related to disaster.” It can also be argued that myth is related to the human need to know what was before, and what will be after, the individual life, the living society. Myths are concerned with origins, the fear of death, and the hope for the overcoming of death in another world. The universe of Asgard and Valhalla, of Olympus and Hades, is not the fairy-tale unreal world with its visiting suns and moons, castles, and undifferentiated forests. We don’t put it together in our imaginations in the same way. There is neither explanation nor teaching in the true wonder tale.

  Other things which are not essentially part of true fairy tales are character, psychological causation, or real morality. Princesses are virtually interchangeable—they are either kind and modest and housewifely, or vain and stupid and inconsiderate. They are called “princesses,” but peasants and merchants’ daughters have the same limited and recognizable natures. Simpletons and gallant princes have the same chance of solving riddles, obtaining magic feathers, or keys, the same insect or fishy helpers. Lazy girls are caught out by boasts that they can spin flax into gold, and are helped by strange brownies or dwarves or other creatures. The best single description I know of the world of the fairy tale is that of Max Lüthi who describes it as an abstract world, full of discrete, interchangeable people, objects, and incidents, all of which are isolated and are nevertheless interconnected, in a kind of web or network of two-dimensional meaning. Everything in the tales appears to happen entirely by chance—and this has the strange effect of making it appear that nothing happens by chance, that everything is fated.

  Lüthi even points out that folktales have certain colors—red, white, black, and the metallic colors of gold and silver and steel. The fairy tale world is called up for me by the half-abstract patternings of Paul Klee, or the mosaic definition of Kandinsky’s early “Russian” paintings of horses and forests. Lüthi makes the point that green, the color of nature, is almost never specifically mentioned in folktales. It is interesting in that context that the Grimms’ preface to volume II of the first edition of the Children’s Stories and Household Tales, praising their “genuinely Hessian” Low German narrator, Viehmann, and the precision of her oral narrative, remarks that “The epic basis of folk poetry resembles the colour green as one finds it throughout nature in various shades: each satisfies and soothes without becoming too tiresome.”

  This is an image derived from Romantic nature poetry and is called up in support of the Grimms’ claims for the German-ness of the tales. German perception of German folklore is bound up with the Germanic sense of the all-importance of the surrounding Wald, the forest. As a child, and now, I respond instinctively more powerfully to this mysterious wood than to the courtly manners and ladylike godmothers of French writers like Madame d’Aulnoy. But I think it can be argued that the Grimms, however they romanticized and fantasized the oral and Germanic purity of their sources, understood, as tellers, the peculiarly flat, unadorned nature of the true tale.

  An all-important part of our response to the world of the tales is our instinctive sense that they have rules. There are things that can and can’t happen, will and won’t happen—a prohibition is there to be broken, two of three brothers or sisters are there to fail, the incestuous king will almost always dance at his daughter’s wedding to the prince in whose court she has found refuge as a kitchen slave or a goose girl. Lüthi brilliantly compares the glittering mosaic of fairy tales to Hermann Hesse’s Glass Bead Game. As a little girl I compared it in my mind to the pleasures of Ludo and Snakes and Ladders and Solitaire played with cards, in which certain moves only are possible and the restrictions are part of the pleasure. As an adult writer I think that my infant synapses grew like a maze of bramble shoots into a grammar of narrative, part of the form of my neuronal web as linguistic grammars are, and mathematical forms. Vladimir Propp’s analysis of the structural forms of the folktale is exciting because it makes precise and complex something we had already intuited—that the people and events are both finite and infinitely variable. Another thing Lüthi finely says is that these are forms of hope. We fill our heads with improbable happy endings, and are able to live—in daydream—in a world in which they are not only possible but inevitable.

  Italo Calvino, in “Cybernetics and Ghosts,” makes the inevitable connection between storytelling and myth. He describes the storyteller of the tribe telling about the younger son getting lost in the forest—“he sees a light in the distance, he walks and walks; the fable unwinds from sentence to sentence, and where is it leading?” To a new apprehension which “suddenly appears and tears us to pieces, like the fangs of a man-eating witch. Through the forest of fairy-tale the vibrancy of myth passes like a shudder of wind.” Calvino himself knew a great deal about the workings of the stopped-off, rule-constructed tale, but he also knew that it is haunted by the unmanageable, the vast, and the dangerous. The Grimms too were interested in the borders between Germanic myths and folktales. They liked to draw connections between fairy-tale trees and the World-Ash, between Briar Rose in her thorn-surrounded sleep and Brunnhilde in her wall of fire. They included Christian legends at the edge of their world—the Virgin Mary finds strawberries in the snow of the forest.

  The opposite experience, perhaps, from coming across the whiff of real danger, terror, or mystery that is myth, is the precise experience of meeting real individuated characters in a tale, people one begins to imagine in three dimensions. Looking back on my own experience, it seems to me that I inhabited stories with characters in a way I never inhabited the true fairy tales. I fell in love with Sir Lancelot and held long conversations with Robin Hood and his men. I went on new quests with them, rescued them and was rescued. I even ventured into the Asgard tales—I brought water secretly to the disguised Odin suspended between two fires, I fell in love with the ironic Loki. But I never loved or was loved in the context of a fairy tale. Dickens claimed that he wanted to marry Little Red Riding Hood, which to me is a category error. Either he had seen a pretty actress in a red hood in a pantomime, or his hugely animating imagination could even insinuate itself into the closed box of finite gestures. Character feels wrong in folktales.

  In this context Lüthi gives a fine example of how the Grimms’ narrative style moves from the impersonal oral to the “authored” story with psychology. In Wilhelm Grimm’s “Rapunzel,” he says, “The prince became overwhelmed with grief and in despair he jumped from the tower.” Whereas in oral tellings derived from Grimm, a schoolchild from Danzig said “When the witch saw that it was a prince there, she threw him down,” and a Swabian narrator said: “She gouged out his eyes and threw him down”—in both cases replacing psychological suffering by a physical blow.

  The point is clear, but it is a long step from there to Andersen telling us the suffering of his mermaid, or Hoffmann frightening us with the Sandman. As Maria Tatar observes, the Grimms’ revisions of “The Frog King” simply make the tale more flowing—they may take away the stark flatness of the oral “and then . . . and then . . . ,” but they preserve more of the flat quality of the tales than the French courtly ladies, who exclaim and moralize in every paragraph. Most interesting of all in this context is “The Juniper Tree” which is an authored tale by Philipp Otto Runge, a work of art which entirely understands the arbitrary nature of the shape of the tale, and the repetitive form of its events, and yet inserts both psychological terror and pity, and as the Grimms feel able to suggest, is aware that the magic juniper tree is related to the Tree of Life. Narrators are free to vary or extemporize on the elements of the tales, which nevertheless constantly reassert themselves. Anyone who has looked at the 345 variants of the Cinderella stories collected by the redoubtable Marian Roalfe Cox in 1893 will know how the mosaic pieces slip, slide, and recombine.

  What use do we make of fairy tales? The Grimms, as we see, thought, among other things, that they were recovering a German mythology and a German attitude to life. They saw themselves as asserting what was German against the
French occupying forces of the Napoleonic Empire. The Allied occupying forces in Germany after the Second World War briefly tried to ban the Grimms because it was felt that their bloodthirstiness, gleeful violence, heartlessness, and brutality had helped to form the violent nature of the Third Reich. Some of the tales are unpleasant—very unpleasant—and it is good that Maria Tatar has collected one or two of the more heartless ones here, including one that is certainly anti-Semitic. There are places where a collection of folktales shades off into those other narrative forms, gossip and communal scapegoating anecdotes. But it is important to distinguish between the effects of tales of bludgeoned outsiders or gleefully tormented Jews and the folktale machinery of swallowed and regurgitated children, severed limbs miraculously restored, and even the dreadful punishments of the wicked stepmother or sisters, in barrels of nails or red-hot iron shoes. A modern child—or adult reader—needs both to remember the more brutal world of public hangings and public burnings of earlier times, and to understand that much of this suffering and restoration—not all—is the same as the endless hammering, drowning, flaying, flattening, stretching, snipping, and boiling of Tom by Jerry in the cartoons. There are moods in which—as child and woman—I could not bear to see these cartoons. And moods in which I laugh cheerfully. In a real fairy tale the eyes will usually be restored, the hands grow onto the stumps, the sleeper will awaken.

  The most terrifying tale I have ever read in the Grimms is the one-paragraph tale about the obstinate child, in German das eigensinnige Kind, which means literally “the child with its own mind.” In German a child is neuter in gender. All we are told about this one is that it would not do what its mother wanted, that God had therefore no goodwill toward it, and it died. When it was buried, it kept pushing its arm up through the earth—until its mother came and knocked its arm down with a stick. After that it was for the first time peaceful under the earth. The real terror of that is implicit in its bleak little form and the complete absence of character (we do not know if the child was boy or girl). It doesn’t feel like a warning to naughty infants. It feels like a glimpse of the dreadful side of the nature of things.