The Brothers Grimm didn't create their own fairy tales.
The cultural impact of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, originally published in 1812 as “Kinder- und Hausmärchen,” or “Nursery and Household Tales,” is hard to overstate. Two centuries after its publication, the tales have been the creative backbone for hundreds (perhaps thousands) of films, TV shows, plays, and works of art — whether as direct adaptations or loose inspirations. But although you’re probably familiar with stories like “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Rumplestiltskin,” and “Sleeping Beauty,” you may not know that German linguists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm didn’t actually create the narratives themselves. Instead, they compiled tales that had been passed down through the oral tradition, some for perhaps thousands of years. The two brothers began interviewing family and friends to collect the tales while they were still teenagers studying at the University of Marburg. After publishing their first collection of 86 tales, the brothers delivered a second edition three years later with an additional 70 tales. The seventh and final edition in 1857 featured 211 tales.
Originally, the stories weren’t meant for children — many were violent, sexual, or otherwise R-rated. Instead, the Grimms intended for the tales to be an excavation of cultural heritage, and they first introduced them as scholarly work. But as literacy rates climbed in the 19th century, subsequent editions edited out a lot of the original tales’ brutality in order to appeal to wider audiences, especially children. Today, many kids become acquainted with the Grimms’ fairy tales through Walt Disney, who used the tales as far back as 1922 for some of his earliest animations. But Disney is far from the only one inspired by the Grimms — more recently, their work has provided the narrative fuel for Stephen Sondheim’s musical Into the Woods, Shelley Duvall’s Faerie Tale Theatre TV series, 2020’s fantasy-horror film Gretel & Hansel, and NBC’s aptly named television show Grimm, to name just a few folklore-filled examples.
While history remembers them as saviors of the folktale, in their own time the Brothers Grimm were widely respected medievalist scholars and German linguists. In fact, they were so respected that the predictable patterns of phonetic changes from Proto-Indo-European language (the theorized common ancestor of all modern languages) to Germanic tongues are now known as “Grimm’s Law.” But their most ambitious work was creating Deutsches Wörterbuch (“The German Dictionary”), which they began working on in 1838. Originally estimating that it’d only be four volumes long, Jacob eventually revised that number to seven and thought they’d need about 10 years to complete it. Instead, it took more than a century for all 32 volumes to finally appear in print — the last in 1961. Of course, the Brothers Grimm didn’t live to see the end of their ambitious project. When Jacob Grimm died in 1863, four years after his brother Wilhelm, he had only finished up to the letter “F.” His final word was “frucht,” meaning “fruit.”
