The brothers grimm biography education

According to scholars such as Tatar and Ruth Bottigheimer, some of the tales probably originated in written form during the medieval period with writers such as Straparola and Boccacciobut were modified in the 17th century and again rewritten by the Grimms. Moreover, Tatar writes that the brothers' goal of preserving and shaping the tales as something uniquely German at a time of French occupation was a form of "intellectual resistance", and in so doing they established a methodology for collecting and preserving folklore that set the model followed later by writers throughout Europe during periods of occupation.

From onward, the brothers added to the collection.

The brothers grimm biography education: with the intention of entering

Jacob established the framework, maintained through many iterations; from until his death, Wilhelm assumed sole responsibility for editing and rewriting the tales. He made the tales stylistically similar, added dialogue, removed pieces "that might detract from a rustic tone", improved the plots, and incorporated psychological motifs. He believes that Wilhelm "gleaned" bits from old Germanic faithsNorse mythology, Roman and Greek mythologyand biblical stories that he reshaped.

Over the years, Wilhelm worked extensively on the prose; he expanded and added detail to the stories to the point that many of them grew to twice the length they had in the earliest published editions. After he began writing original tales for children children were not initially considered the primary audience and adding didactic elements to existing tales.

Some changes were made in light of unfavorable reviews, particularly from those who objected that not all the tales were suitable for children because of scenes of violence and sexuality. The Grimms' legacy contains legends, novellasand folk stories, the vast majority of which were not intended as children's tales. Von Arnim was concerned about the content of some of the tales—such as those that showed children being eaten—and suggested adding a subtitle to warn parents of the content.

Instead the brothers added an introduction with cautionary advice that parents steer children toward age-appropriate stories. Despite von Arnim's unease, none of the tales were eliminated from the collection; the brothers believed that all the tales were of value and reflected inherent cultural qualities. For example, in the Grimms' original version of " Snow White ", the Queen is Little Snow White's mother, not her stepmother, but still orders her Huntsman to kill Snow White her biological daughter and bring home the child's lungs and liver so that she can eat them; the story ends with the Queen dancing at Snow White's wedding, wearing a pair of red-hot iron shoes that kill her.

To some extent the cruelty and violence may reflected the medieval culture from which the tales originated, such as scenes of witches burning, as described in " The Six Swans ". Tales with a spinning motif are broadly represented in the collection. In her essay "Tale Spinners: Submerged Voices in Grimms' Fairy Tales", Bottigheimer argues that these stories reflect the degree to which spinning was crucial in the life of women in the 19th century and earlier.

Spinning, particularly of flaxwas commonly performed in the home by women. Many stories begin by describing the occupation of their main character, as in "There once was a miller", yet spinning is never mentioned as an occupation; this appears to be because the brothers did not consider it an occupation. Instead, spinning was a communal activity, frequently performed in a Spinnstube spinning rooma place where women most likely kept the oral traditions alive by telling stories while engaged in tedious work.

The Grimms' work have been subjected to feminist critique. For example, Emma Tennant writes:. But the worst of it was that two men—the Brothers Grimm—listened to these old tales told by mothers to their daughters; and they decided to record them for posterity. But the Brothers Grimm could understand only the tales of courage and manliness and chivalry on the part of the boys.

Always we must read that our heroine is a Beauty. The tales were also criticized for being insufficiently German, which influenced the tales that the brothers included and their use of language. Some critics, such as Alistair Hauke, use Jungian analysis to say that the deaths of the brothers' the brother grimm biography education and grandfather are the reason for the Grimms' tendency to idealize and excuse fathers, as well as the predominance of female villains in the tales, such as the wicked stepmother and stepsisters in "Cinderella".

The collection includes 41 tales about siblings, which Zipes says are representative of Jacob and Wilhelm. Many of the sibling stories follow a simple plot where the characters lose a home, work industriously at a specific task, and in the end find a new home. The Large editions contained all the tales collected to date, extensive annotations, and scholarly notes written by the brothers; the Small editions had only 50 tales and were intended for children.

Emil GrimmJacob and Wilhelm's younger brother, illustrated the Small editions, adding Christian symbolism to the drawings, such as depicting Cinderella's mother as an angel and adding a Bible to the bedside table of Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother. The first volume was published in with 86 folk tales, [ 22 ] and a second volume with 70 additional tales was published late in dated on the title page ; together the two volumes and their tales are considered the first of the annotated Large editions.

The seventh and final edition of contained tales— numbered folk tales and 11 legends. The stories were often added to collections by other authors without respect to copyright as the tales became a focus of interest for children's book illustrators, [ 39 ] with well-known artists such as Arthur RackhamWalter Craneand Edmund Dulac illustrating. Another popular edition released in the midth century included elaborate etchings by George Cruikshank.

Jacob's and Wilhelm's collection of stories has been translated to more than languages; different editions of the text are available for sale in the US alone. While at the University of Marburgthe brothers came to see culture as tied to language and regarded the purest cultural expression in the grammar of a language. They moved away from Brentano's practice—and that of the other romanticists—who frequently changed original oral styles of folk tale to a more literary style, which the brothers considered artificial.

They thought that the style of the people the volk reflected a natural and divinely inspired poetry naturpoesie —as opposed to the kunstpoesie art poetrywhich they saw as artificially constructed. The brothers strongly believed that the dream of national unity and independence relied on a full knowledge of the cultural past that was reflected in folklore.

The Grimms considered the tales to have origins in traditional Germanic folklore, which they thought had been "contaminated" by later literary tradition. Between and the brothers published a two-volume work, Deutsche Sagen German Legendsconsisting of German legends. Unlike the collection of folk tales, Deutsche Sagen sold poorly, [ 46 ] but Zipes says that the collection, translated to French and Danish in the 19th century but not to English untilis a "vital source for folklorists and critics alike".

Not until did they begin publishing the dictionary in installments. The brothers responded with modifications and rewrites to increase the book's market appeal to that demographic. In the 20th century the work was second only to the Bible as the most popular book in Germany. Its sales generated a mini-industry of critiques, which analyzed the tales' folkloric content in the context of literary history, socialism, and psychological elements often along Freudian and Jungian lines.

In their research, the brothers made a science of the study of folklore see folkloristicsgenerating a model of research that "launched general fieldwork in most European countries", [ 49 ] and setting standards for research and analysis of stories and legends that made them pioneers in the field of folklore in the 19th century. In Nazi Germany the Grimms' stories were used to foster nationalism as well as to promote antisemitic sentiments in an increasingly hostile time for Jewish people.

In both stories the children are violently killed and mutilated. In both stories a Jewish man is depicted as deceitful for the sake of money. In the former the man admits to stealing money and is executed instead of the protagonist. In the latter, the Jewish man is found to be deceitful in order to be rewarded with a sum of money. The specific deceit is irrelevant and here too the protagonist triumphs over the Jew.

Antisemitism in folklore has contributed to the popularization of antisemitic tropes and misconceptions about the Jewish faith, but the Nazi Party was particularly devoted to the Grimms' collected stories. Blood libel tales accused Jews of stealing Christian the brothers grimm biography education to perform religious rituals on them, and most notably, turn their blood into matzah.

The accusation of ritual murder emerged in England in the mid-twelfth century with the charge that Jews had killed a Christian youth in order to mock the Passion of Christ. By the middle of the thirteenth century the belief that Jews killed Christians had spread to the European continent, where gentiles now accused Jews of desecrating the Host and using gentile blood for religious purposes, including consuming it in matzo.

Cruentation described the phenomenon of a corpse spontaneously bleeding in the presence of its murderer. In the United States the release of Walt Disney 's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs shows the triumph of good over evil, innocence over oppression, according to Zipes. The stepmother in Cinderella is the antagonist of the story and appears Jewish, with a big nose and dark features.

Even more blatantly, Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty has devil horns, just as Christians would paint Jews as devils or demons in the Middle Ages. On the other hand, some educators and psychologists believe that children easily discern the difference between what is a story and what is not and that the tales continue to have value for children. Other stories have been considered too gruesome and have not made a popular transition.

The Brothers Grimm showed their brilliant abilities while they were still young. After a graduation at the Kassel School, the Grimms continued their education at Marburg University, with the firm intention to become lawyers, following the example of their father. They listened to lectures at the Law School, studied legal science, but their natural inclinations led them in a completely different direction - the study of German and foreign literature.

In the famous romantic Ludwig Tieck issued his "Minnelieder aus der schwabischen Vorzeit". In the preface he strongly urged to study the native cultural heritage. Under his influence, soon after graduating, Brothers Grimm decided to inspect the manuscripts with ancient German literature and continued their research in this area until the end of their life.

The brothers grimm biography education: They eventually attended the

In Jacob Grimm went to Paris to do scientific work. The Brothers, accustomed to always live and work together found their parting difficult and decided never to be separated again. After the war with France, Jakob Grimm received a task from the Elector of Kassel - to go to Paris and return to Kassel Library manuscripts which were stolen from the French.

He looked down upon a prosperous political career - all business matters were an obstacle to his scientific pursuits. They were the second and third of six children in the family. Tragedy struck early in their lives when their father passed away in The loss of their father significantly impacted their upbringing, and they were raised by their mother and a supportive family friend named Friedrich Savigny.

The brothers displayed remarkable academic talent from an early age. They attended the Friedrichsgymnasium in Kassel and later enrolled at the University of Marburg, where they pursued studies in law, philology, and ancient literature. This is the high peak of an ancient oral tradition revealed to the European who can enrich his own world of fairy stories with those from this new and unfamiliar one.

On the other hand, however, for all their adventurousness, how little these intricate and, in part, darkly tragic tales have to do with our own children's fairy stories. Similarly, with the complexity of a novel, we find the vigorous tales of Giambattista Basile which appeared in Naples in the sixteen-thirties. The Cinderella or indeed The Sleeping Beauty of the Italian writer to select two well-known fairy stories are tales of some intensity in which fearful murder, plain but strangely committed marital infidelity, and horrible—but ultimately thwarted—child murder all play a considerable part.

Cinderella is induced to kill her first stepmother by her second, and even more evil one; while the Sleeping Beauty is seduced in her sleep by a king who is already married. She gives birth to twins and is finally woken up through their hungry nuzzling for food. Even Charles Perraultwho was the first to tell fairy stories to children themselves, cannot quite shake off an inclination towards the courtly novel wrapped up with political ethics.

And yet The Thousand and One Nights and Charles Perrault are the most distinguished ancestors of the fairy story as it was created by the nineteenth century—and created then indeed for children. With the flowering of the novel in the nineteenth century it was natural that the fairy story should increasingly become reading-matter for children only, in spite of the great artistic impetus given by Romanticism to fairy-tale literature, which got so full of wit, satire, poetry, and fantasy that only very clever adults could fully grasp its merit.

Indeed, with the growth of the children's book of today, where boys and girls are told stories of events which could actually happen to them, the fairy story has been relegated to those young children who have stories read to them or who battle their way painfully through the undergrowth of the printed page. This age group is designated by teachers and librarians the 'fairy-story age' and by this means, especially in German-speaking areas, a limitation is imposed which has an impoverishing effect throughout the whole of children's literature.

People forget that often older children, particularly girls, take a natural delight in fairy stories and that they only fully appreciate the richness of certain stories, for example those of Andersen, when they have outgrown the so-called 'fairy-story age'. The chief point of difference between fairy stories and other tales is to be found in their apparatus of fantastic happenings such as marvels, spells, and strange transmogrifications, all of which give rise to boundless possibilities.

Why should these be confined to the world of little children and cease to exist in that of the nine- or ten-year-old, giving way to the stories of everyday reality? Heidi was one of the first and most famous books of this latter kind, a combination of human and poetic insight which was written in so simple and homely a style that it conquered the hearts of children immediately.

If only it had not found so many imitators! Once the way had been paved the German-speaking peoples could not get away from it, although in more northerly countries, particularly England and Scandinavia, the lore of fairy tale with its daring possibilities penetrated the whole of children's literature, even in those age groups for whom claims to higher stylistic and intellectual appreciation are made.

Now what are the characteristic features of the fairy tale? One of its fundamental qualities is its narrative flow, which stems from its very origin in the spoken word. A second quality is that these tales for telling must be both true and not true at the same time. They must contain an inner truth which keeps them viable even though the path of the story can be anything but true, which is to say that magic and mystery are midwives to the impossible.

The difficulties of ordinary life can be overcome by extraordinary means and through improbable powers, such as seven-league boots, prophetic insight or cunningescape into invisibility, or else through the helpful support of such spirits as dwarfs, the brothers grimm biography education, and giants. That witches, man-eaters, and evil stepmothers also belong to the powerful forces who keep the action of fairy stories on the move has brought the genre into disrepute among the modern educationists and has tempted the psychologists into many curious speculations.

But at the same time it contains other elements which appeal deeply to the hearts of children: the feeble father's hidden love for his children, their own affection for each other, even in the extremities of starvation, the solitude of the wood at night, and the allurement of the gingerbread house. The wonderful thing about them is that they express so perfectly every nation's feeling for fairy stories.

Fairy stories truly embody an 'international' European literature such as is only possible in other branches of writing through the increased activities of translators. That this should be so may be accounted for by the great power of conviction which fairy-tale figures carry with them and by their ancient principles of action, which express the primitive and unconscious needs of the human heart.

As a rule it is the prospect of saving something from extinction which inspires the activity of collectors. This is the case with fairy stories to a high degree, for the spread of printing and the recession of illiteracy in Europe increasingly brought about the disappearance of story-tellers, who gained their living from the demands made upon their traditional function.

This was the situation which confronted Charles Perrault and, a hundred years later, the Brothers Grimm. Today, years on from them, story-tellers still miraculously exist in lonely mountain valleys, in iso-lated villages of Yugoslavia, Greece, or Asia Minoreven though to a growing extent they mingle elements of modern life with their ancient traditional tales.

The great collections of folk-tales which are now being established in almost every country are mostly museums of fairy-lore. Not so the stories of the Brothers Grimm, however. For reasons which it is almost impossible to explain, they managed to find the precise combination of respect for tradition and free personal expression which was necessary to give their collection its freshness, redolent of neither the study nor the glass-case and timeless as only a few works of great literature.

The enormous importance of this collection, however, did not reside solely in the consequences which followed upon its rediscovery of an ancient national heritage. It also immeasurably furthered the influence which the common elements of the fairy tale would have on the whole of children's literature from this time forward. At this stage it is probably worth while to describe briefly those few cornerstones which support the superstructure of the European fairy tale—a meeting-place where you will find witches, dwarfs and elves, princes and princesses, kings and magicians, wood-cutters and ragged children, sympathetic doves and talking storks, good and even wicked fairies, all together in a peaceable assembly.

In this book we have to deal with a long series of fairy stories which, so far as we know, found their way into manuscript in Arabia round about The provenance of some stories, however, leads back to Persia and even to India. Furthermore, the theme of the princess saving herself by telling stories existed for so long in this form that The Thousand and One Nights takes its place within a long written tradition.

Thus, so far as the older civilization of the East was concerned, the committing of these stories to writing was an act corresponding to our own in the nineteenth century, when writers settled the the brother grimm biography education of fairy-tale literature for those who should succeed them. In this way we received the ancient and mighty narrative traditions of the East, with all their overtones of oriental manners and contemplativeness.

Galland's first translation was followed by countless others in almost every country in Europe. In passing, we should note the strong supposition that the Italians knew of the stories beforehand, since Basile's fairy tales, whose basic material came from the common people, nevertheless show some astonishing similarities. Often many of those who retold the stories sought to suppress the more racy passages, inseparable from descriptions of harem life, but deemed unsuitable for European sensibilities.

On the other hand, some editions turned these into the big attraction. But none of them could eradicate entirely the scent of eastern musk, the unbridled passion, the delicate and intricate filigree of the stories' construction, and thereby many of their other oriental charms. Many great illustrators of the last two hundred years down to the immediate present have made their attempts on these stories and have served to formulate our ideas of the East more than any of the other volumes of travellers' tales.

Among the German writers of fairy stories it is quite impossible to think of, say, Hauff without this literary inheritance. But even Andersen, as a small boy in his father's cobbler's shop, had these stories read to him as part of a common inheritance. Later he was to follow the attraction which had been aroused by this childhood experience and take a journey to the Near East.

Whoever reads his diaries of this journey, his fairy stories or his Picture-book without pictures will find in the work of this northern story-teller astonishing echoes of the oriental themes which he first heard in The Thousand and One Nights.

The brothers grimm biography education: After graduation from the

Europe's earliest fairy stories to be set down on paper are without doubt the Piacevoli notti of Giovan Francesco Straparola, in which recognizable fairy-story "the brothers grimm biography education" appear for the first time. The Italian folk-story, however, reveals itself in all its abundance in the book by Giambattista Basile— Lo cunto de li cunti —which first appeared in the Neapolitan dialect in five parts between and Basile, who was born aroundwas a soldier of fortune who occupied himself at the courts of various Italian princes in some very varied roles.

He wrote odes, eclogues, and all kinds of courtly poetry in the affected manner of his times. He was a member of numerous academies, among which was one of the largest in his native Naples: the Otiosi or 'Lazybones' Academy, and he named himself 'Pigro'—the sloth. But he also possessed something rare among the courtiers of his time: a sense of justice, an integrity and a feeling for the needs and the dignity of the Neapolitan people.

In order to give expression to this he recited and wrote down his fairy stories in his native dialect. As Grimm and Perrault were to do later, he used for his foundation the, in parts, very primitive and entirely oral traditional tales which the women of the district told to their children. These fairy stories were only printed after Basile's death ina good sixty years before Perrault's collection.

As with Perrault's tales, these also are in no way a collection of items of folk-lore copied down straight from the mouths of the story-tellers. They are rather an expression of the powerful Baroque Age, which still lives for us in its marvellous pictures and which cannot see the sun rise without personifying it and having it sweep out the morning sky with a golden broom.

Basile's portrayals of nature are always full of this kind of personal life, even where they stand as allegories or as symbols, while the action is dramatic, often bloody or full of complicated intrigue, but always reaching its climax in the triumph of right. Unnecessary decorative details are rarely found, but on the other hand, the dialogue is witty, full of allusion, and without concessions to the prudish.

This above all is Basile's instrument for conveying the truth to his age. While it cannot be denied that Basile obtained the framework of his stories from the women of his immediate locality, just as Perrault and the Grimms were to do in their time, the audience for the humane and humorous 'Pigro' of the Lazybones' Academy was composed of intelligent men—'all fellows at the same club', as we might say today.

Certainly, therefore, he did not tell them fairy stories, although he wove in many threads from these. Even so we already find noted down here such tales as Cinderella and The Sleeping Beautythe brother grimm biography education as there are clues pointing to sources in the Near East. Especially notable among these is the way the stories are arranged within a story about a treacherous Moorish slave-girl, whose wickedness is finally revealed so that the virtuous and patient princess finally gains her rightful reward.

This firm framework holding the book together is found neither in Perrault nor in Grimm, but Jakob Grimm saw in Basile over the gulf of two hundred years a comrade of similar aims and helped him to his delayed fame in Northern Europe, writing an introduction to the first edition of his works in German in In Italy itself the finest translation of the book into modern Italian was by Benedetto Crocewho saw in it not just a collection of popular tales but 'the finest book of the Italian baroque'.

It has, in common with the two most famous fairy-tale collections which followed it, a naturalness and freshness which have lasted to our own times. Where wit and effervescent imagination are concerned, Basile's tales are inexhaustible and contain some ingredients so bizarre as to be seldom found elsewhere. Perhaps the most felicitous of these occurs in the scene in the bedroom when the heart of a sea-dragon is brought to the boil and the steam spreads pregnancy throughout the room; not only for the cook but also for the utensils and the furniture, so that the bedstead acquires a baby bed, the big chairs little chairs, and the chamber-pot a baby chamber-pot.

Such an ingenious animation of lifeless objects is only found again in Andersen. Charles Perrault — may not have been the first to write down fairy tales but he was the first writer of consequence to recognize that they belonged to the world of children. The whole of the vivid, power-flaunting seventeenth century was not unsympathetic to simplicity and straightforwardness, which were precisely the qualities of fairy tales.

Telling them, however, was the occupation of women. It is said of Le Roi Soleil that when he was a little boy in the forties of that century he could not go to sleep without the fairy tales which the ladies-in-waiting used to tell him. At the end of the century such tales, racily adapted by the ladies who told them, were paraded in the elegant salons of the Parisian aristocracy.

For in doing such a thing he was likely to have become very conspicuous. Retiringly, therefore, he had the book registered for privilege under the name of his son, Pierre d'Armancour, a fact which the most recent research has converted into a suspicion that the seventeen-year-old boy could have been the actual author. This would provide an explanation for the extraordinarily youthful freshness of the book which conquered in a trice the world of children who had never before possessed anything so much their own.

After all, were not the Grimms, with their passion for collecting such stories, regarded as very singular gentlemen a hundred years later still? Even so, the assertions of an English authority on this matter Percy Muir in English Children's Books, — cannot be rejected. He establishes that no edition in the father's lifetime bore the name Charles Perrault and that at the time of their publication the son Pierre was generally thought to be the author, having had the opportunity of getting the stories straight from his nurse.

In this case it is fascinating to think that the first book of fairy stories for children in Europe could itself have been written by a very young man. This emphasis on children marks the decisive difference between Perrault and Basile, with whom he has a number of things in common. Like his Italian predecessor, Perrault is a member of learned societies and to some extent a moralist.

Both seek in the unsullied fairy-lore of the people a curative for the luxury, corruption, and self-satisfaction rampant in their own stratum of society. Basile proffers his prescription straight to the men around him, but Perrault has a premonition of the ascendancy of the younger generation. He offers his discovery to children, who are to be the future lords and ladies of the land, but he could not know that it was to become the intellectual sustenance of so many of their heirs.

And a full-blooded and to some extent frightening fare it was to be too, a thing which one only realizes when one compares it with the wordy, moralizing tales of Perrault's contemporaries and successors, who were almost all of them women. Perrault's language is concise but lucid. Next to beauty and wealth, the most important attributes of his heroines are courage and a healthy understanding of humanity.

Blood flows plentifully while romantic charm does not even get started, as, for example, in such a story as Little Red Riding Hoodwhich, when told by the Brothers Grimm, possesses a sweetness in spite of the fearful scene in the bedroom which persuades even little children to swallow the whole thing as a wonderful joke. Here, however, Little Red Riding Hood pays the penalty for her disobedience; the wolf begs her to come to him at Grandmother's bedside, and after all too short a conversation, Little Red Riding Hood follows the old lady down his gullet, never to be seen again.

There is no romantic huntsman, no paying out the wolf, no happy ending with cakes and ale. In Germany readers are, as a rule, surprised when they meet stories like this, which they had believed to be typically German, in such an early version. But the children of those days did not demand a lot of consideration for their delicate nerves. The language was direct and forceful and had not yet learned to adopt that consciously condescending tone which goes out of date so rapidly.

Perrault's fairy tales have therefore kept their youthfulness to this very day and they belong to the 'daily bread' of the French nursery. Throughout its first half, the eighteenth century was once again the province of the grown-ups. With the exception of Perrault, fairy stories remained, like the old folk-tales, at most an extensively popular form of oral entertainment, even though they could now to some extent be come by in print.

They represented a truly popular formulation of the old legends, and when Goethe later encouraged the Grimms and Arnim and Brentano in their efforts to reach the natural sources of poetry, he was but keeping faith with the secret love of his own childhood. Furthermore, his childish experiences with these books may well have provided the first impetus for his reworking into High German hexameters of the allegorical Low German beast epic Reineke Fuchs.

The older the century grew, the less was children's inclination to this kind of reading matter concealed. Between the years —86 the poverty-stricken schoolmaster I. I am collecting the most trivial old wives' tales, trimming them up and making them ten times more marvellous than they originally were. My wife hopes that the whole thing will turn out to be a most lucrative piece of work.

The poor poet outlived his lucrative success by only one year. From this extremely interesting letter, from which I have quoted only a short extract, we can grasp almost everything that is worth knowing about our subject. At the same time, however, the jokingly modest reference to 'something in this line' betrays the fact that a preoccupation with fairy stories was not yet taken entirely seriously.

Further, the observation that he was 'trimming up' the fairy stories and 'making them ten times more marvellous' indicates that we are not yet in the exclusive circle of the Brothers Grimm, pursuing the purity and plainness of folk-poetry. In this he portrayed the fairytale writer: 'agreeable and comradely, of great simplicity of character and goodness of heart—a man who bore the heavy burden of his days with cheerfulness and equanimity, merriment and robust good humour.

In my own childhood they were the ones I loved the best. The legendary world of the Middle Ages comes alive in them and their plots are decked out in the brightest colours, such as were never seen in the stories of Perrault nor would be in the stories of Grimm. Their images already foreshadow Romanticism, but at the same time the stories are extraordinarily compelling.

In style these tales stand closer to the Volksbuch in the respectable form given to it by Schwab and Simrock than to the folk-tale as the nineteenth century and we today understand it. But we are made to feel this difference only on the arrival of the Brothers Grimm and Ludwig Bechstein who drew the dividing the brother grimm biography education so sharply between these two worlds.

The French literary historian, Paul Hazard, describes their activity at that time as that of butterfly-catching, an occupation where it is all important to capture the specimens alive. And in a later simile he likens the result to home-made bread. Perhaps only a sympathetic foreign critic can express himself so clearly and simply—but how right he is in both his opinions.

The precise words of her stories, and those of other story-tellers, they got to some extent by heart, although it would be a wrongful underestimation of these worthy brothers to regard their merit as residing only in their activity as collectors. For adult readers the versions of the fairy tales given in the original edition are especially valuable, for they reproduce most strongly the verbal rendering of the original source.

There is not a single superfluous word in this first edition; everything stands clearly delineated as in a woodcut with only the meagrest of necessary detail. Indeed, returning to Hazard, this is the toughest of home-baked bread, with all its aromatic flavour. But if they had continued to present their stories in this way the brothers would never have made their total conquest of the world of children.

Only with the second compilation does one get the feeling that the narrators are really thinking of children as they write. Only now are those small, delightful details added which turn this home-baked bread into the most inviting of the world's delicacies without taking away any of its nutriment. Indeed, we grown-ups can never entirely forget these characters who are for ever young.

They cannot outgrow us like our own children. Scarcely have these last got on to their feet than we must start telling them about Little Red Riding Hood. While, in earlier fairy stories, the world still belonged to princes, princesses, and kings, and exceptional cunning or beauty were the least that was required to distinguish the heroes, we now find, in this Age of Revolution, that a poor miller's lad, a simple servantgirl, or a woodcutter can move the heart as much as the banished princesses and valiant knights of old.

On the other hand, in Starsilverit is demonstrated with contrasting logic that gold and riches are a quite proper reward for those who are pure in heart. This story of the poor naked little girl in the forest on whom the stardust falls moves us in just the same remarkable way as the story thirty years later of 'the little match-girl', whose soul soars to heaven in the warmth and brightness of a blazing bundle of matches.

The two brothers, to whom the children of their own and following generations are so much in debt, were neither of them family men at the time of the first publication of their Household Stories. Born in Jakob and Wilhelm they spent much of their lives in the ducal library at Kassel, foraging into German antiquity, German philology, and German literature.

The brothers grimm biography education: During their time at

Having grown up in an occupied Germany, they experienced in these years the years of the War of Liberation from onward the freeing of their country from the French. The patriotic fervour which reigned at that time was marvelously transmuted by the two brothers into an intellectual quest for the purest and freshest springs of their nation's linguistic heritage.

The wonderful fairy-story figures who were brought to life in this way have been for many of us companions throughout the years of childhood. More than all our other education they have opened our hearts, extended our sensibilities, and acquainted us even at first reading with a prose style of exemplary simplicity. And children have shown their gratitude for this gift with a century and a half of loyalty, so that today the stories are more popular than ever.

But they are threatened. In this age of ours, with its return to visual communication, they, too, have been taken over by pictures. Extravagant, all too emphatic illustrations have strangled their delicate but so much more unpretentious language, while on film Snow-White and so many other figures have been turned into goggling Hollywood stars.

But even this debasement finally bears witness to the continuing power and the profound inner life of the fairy stories. To be completely just it must be said that copying out fairy stories, whether their own or foreign ones, was not a sole privilege of the Brothers Grimm at this time. And even down to the present day the predominant popularity of some, but not all, of Grimms' fairy tales has somewhat mitigated against the spread of other fairy stories.

The fairy stories which at the end of the eighteenth century were already circulating in Germany were little more than the simplest of popular fare. They were not preserved in libraries or in middle-class the brothers grimm biography education and they underwent continual changes through their mode of oral transmission. Perrault, remarkably, leaves this theme out of his Cendrillonbut with the Grimm version it returns in incomparable manner:.

Her place in otherwise very similar stories is filled by fairies imported from France. Among the successors to the Brothers Grimm our gratitude must go chiefly to Ludwig Bechstein. This writer, born in Weimar inpublished in and two volumes of fairy stories. Here to some extent the already well-known tales came creeping back in slightly altered guise, but Bechstein's chief merit lies in the way that he has noted down fairy tales from all parts of Germany with their special regional characteristics, while investigating in detail the rich territory of his particular locality, the Thuringian Forest.

Like the Grimms, Bechstein belongs among those who used their gifts as writers to set down serviceable versions of the existing heritage of fairy tales. In contrast to him are those writers who use the fairy story as an art-form, without feeling themselves thereby committed to the old, traditional themes, even though they bring them in here and there, consciously or unconsciously.

Hoffmann, and W. In yet another direction there is Clemens Brentano who, with his incredibly sure instinct for the genuine, combines in the most exquisite way his own imagination with ancient popular themes, some of which he has taken over from the Italian. Among those named above, only Hauff has proved an outstanding success with children. Born in Stuttgart inhe wrote his fairy tales in to aid him in his work as a family tutor.

His stories combine in an extraordinary way the richness and intensity of the world of Eastern tales with a Romantic and peculiarly Swabian style of recounting them. Without doubt they will long survive his other writings such as his novel in the manner of Scott, Lichtenstein. Nor should we pass over here a famous collection of fairy stories from Scandinavia, which appeared within a generation of those of the Brothers Grimm and in a similar way.