In her Arts and SciencesHonors Program Distinguished Lecture, CU Boulder Professor Ann Schmiesing offers a detailed look at the famous fairy tales and their collectors

Best known for their fairy tale collection that history has either sanitized and Disney-fied or reframed as a violent bloodbath, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm—known collectively as the Brothers Grimm—are misunderstood, at least in the popular imagination, a CU Boulder expert notes.

More than just collectors of German folk tales, the Brothers Grimm were also passionate scholars, linguists, librarians, supporters of the arts and intellectuals who strongly opposed censorship. They also made jabs in their collected fairy tales at those who had wronged them, fudged the truth about the sources of those tales and rewrote some of them to make them morally acceptable.

The depths and contradictions of the Brothers Grimm make them much more fascinating than mere collectors of tales, Professor of German and Vice Chancellor for Academic Resource Management Ann Schmiesing noted in her Arts and Sciences Honors Program Distinguished Lecture Thursday evening.

In her lecture, titled “Misunderstood Ever After? The Brothers Grimm and Their Legacy,” Schmiesing explained the parts of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s lives that are unknown outside of certain scholarly circles, explored the brothers’ contributions to literature and linguistics, and detailed their legacy beyond the fairy tale collections for which they are famed.

Unfamiliar origins

The Brothers Grimm are best known for the German folk tales they collected and preserved in writing: classic stories about Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel and Rapunzel. They’re so well known for these fairy tales, in fact, that UNESCO cites them as the two most frequently translated German authors of all time. “Not only that,” Schmiesing said, “they are in tenth and 11th place respectively on UNESCO’s list of the top 50 most translated authors in the world,” underscoring the global popularity of their fairytales.

Even though the stories in the brothers’ collection of fairy tales are well known, the tales’ origins, original contents, and editorial history are unfamiliar to most readers, Schmiesing said, especially since audiences worldwide have become used to sanitized 20th and 21st century retellings like those created by Disney.

One prominent example is the story of Cinderella: In the Brothers Grimm version, the stepmother instructs her daughters to cut off their big toe and heel, respectively, so that the shoe will fit, and the prince notices the blood.

“Some readers are shocked by the violence and darkness in many Grimm tales,” Schmiesing explained, “but others, having heard of this violence, wrongly assume that each and every Grimm tale is saturated with blood-curdling gruesomeness.”

There are also misconceptions about the origins of the stories that the Brothers Grimm collected, she said. “Some readers erroneously believe that the Grimms authored their tales from whole cloth, but the more prevalent misconception is that the Grimms journeyed into the fields and spinning parlors to interview peasants firsthand and record their tales word for word. In fact, scholars have established decades ago that the vast majority of the Grimms’ tales came from educated young townswomen, and then the Grimms significantly edited many of those tales.

“To my mind, dispelling these and other misconceptions opens a path to better understanding the Grimms’ remarkable achievements and the social, cultural, and political context from which these achievements arose,” she said.

More than just stories

However, fairy tales weren’t the sole focus of the brothers’ careers. They also pursued groundbreaking work in linguistics, literary history, mythography, runology (the study of runes), folklore, medieval literature, lexicography and more, Schmiesing said.

Seven years after the first edition of Grimms’ Fairy Tales was published, Jacob began working on German Grammar. According to Schmiesing, the most notable part of this text was his groundbreaking “Grimm’s law,” also known as the First Germanic Sound Shift.

While the details of this theory are arcane, Schmiesing said that it allowed him to explain why words for the same thing in different languages descended from the Proto-Indo-European language, such as Greek, Gothic and Old High German.

“The significance of Grimm’s law to the humanities has been compared to the significance of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species to the life sciences,” Schmiesing said.

Shortly after the completion of German Grammar, the Brothers Grimm made history again by protesting the annulment of the constitution of Hannover with five other professors from the university where they worked, a group now known as the Göttingen Seven.

“The King of Hannover not only terminated all seven professors, but he further decreed that three of them, including Jacob, had three days to leave Hanoverian soil,” Schmiesing noted. “As news of the terminations and banishments spread, students poured into the streets in protest.”

According to some scholars, the Göttingen Seven contributed to the development of liberalism in Germany.

A disputed legacy

The Grimms’ legacy, though, is not as straightforward as history has made it out to be. For several decades after World War II, Schmiesing said, the Grimms were viewed in intellectual circles as “quaint, old-fashioned and even dangerous, largely because their constructions of Germanness were too easily appropriated by Nazi ideology.” Relatedly, some of their correspondences reveal anti-Semitic attitudes, she noted.

However, there are several distinctions between the brothers’ views and Nazism, some scholars have argued. Schmiesing explained that “whereas Jacob regarded a people or a folk principally as the embodiment of people who speak the same language, later 19th century and early 20th century figures took this a step further to mean ancestry, such that folk becomes a biological category with racial overtones.”

More importantly, Schmiesing said, the Grimms’ nationalism existed in the context of a culturally united but politically divided Germany that was dominated first by the Holy Roman Empire and later by the French under Napoleon. In fact, Schmiesing added, after the Revolutions of 1848, “Jacob was called to be a representative at the Frankfurt National Assembly, which was the first freely elected parliament for the German-speaking lands,” demonstrating that he was invested in creating a unified Germany.

Ultimately, the Grimms sought to study the past as a way of bettering the present, Schmiesing concluded. “What is often overlooked in the popular consciousness of the Brothers Grimm is that they passionately believed in the power of humanistic study to contribute to and foster civic discourse, and they vigorously challenged attempts to censor academic and political expression.”

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