One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales

by John M. Ellis

Children's classic

Genres: Nonfiction, History

224 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1983

Reviews

[Hal Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ellis can barely keep his rage in check when he writes about the Grimms' shenanigans, and the way they tried to cover them up. To be fair, his case is pretty damning; and the cognitive dissonance of everyone who should have known better but still managed to pretend to themselves that the Grimms were models of folklorist propriety, which Ellis cites gleefully, is particularly hilarious.

The only thing I would have wanted more of from this book is an examination of the implications of Ellis's case. If a group of young Francophile local bourgeois ladies were the source for most of these stories, as they seem to be, why are the stories so different from Perrault, or other written sources? Why do they partake of universal (or at least pan-European) folklore motifs so readily? If the Grimms cleaned up the tales to make them palatable to a bourgeois audience (as Ellis proves they did), how did the bourgeois sources know the original unbowdlerized tales?

Grimms' fairy tales may not be the pure voice of the German volk (gag); they may not even be folklore. But they can scarcely be dismissed, and so--what are they?

[Deirdre · Rating 4 out of 5]

This looks at the myth of the Grimms and exposes some issues with them. Ellis looks at the stories and the editions and asks why they change so much from the sources and why the Grimms destroyed the originals (excepting some they had given away); why they depended heavily on friends and family for the tales, and why a woman of a Huguenot, educated background was relied so heavily for the stories which have obvious French inspiration. He argues that not only is their scholarship suspect, but that the ridiculed Ossianic tales are more authentic and less subject to authorial intervention. He also offers the text of three of the tales, The Frog Prince, Sleeping Beauty and Hansel and Gretel in the various variations through various editions, in both German and English (now I don't speak or read German so I can't comment on those editions) and it's amazing how the stories are made more moral (for a 19th century moral baseline); how they're elaborated and how some of the elements you'd be familiar with are actually later additions. The Grimms weren't great scholars with what they did but they could write a memorable story.

It's an interesting look at the intersection of scholarship, nationalism and unthinking trust. There is a certain amount of emotional investment in the concept that these are truly stories but the problem is that digging deeper is problematic as it destroys a mental certainty and a certainty that your country had a legacy of stories that were passed down.

I couldn't help but compare and contrast the Aran Jumper myth.

[BRNTerri · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is pretty short, 209 pages. The first 110 pages discuss where the author thinks the stories really came from. A lot of those pages include German and English excerpts, comparisons and discussions of certain stories and how those stories were changing slightly as each new edition was published. Pages 111-194 contain manuscripts from 1810, two years before the first volume of their book was published, and different versions/reworkings, in German and English, for Hansel and Gretel, Sleeping Beauty, and The Frog King, that were put in different editions, showing how the stories kept changing over the years.

The author, and apparently some who came before him, thinks the stories originated with the Grimms themselves and a group of women, some sisters, one the future wife of Wilhelm Grimm, Dortchen Wild, and their elderly housekeeper they had growing up, "old Marie" and a woman named Dorothea Viehmann, who's of French descent and who may have provided her take on Frenchmen Charles Perrault's tales published over 100 years before. Neither brother ever said who, exactly, the peasants were who supposedly told them all of these tales. If these tales were indeed told to them and written down, as they claim, there wouldn't be a reason to keep tampering with them. You'd write down what they said verbatim and keep it that way. They appear to have kept reworking their own stories or those told to them by the group of women, until they liked the new versions. I believe there's a good chance that's what they did but I don't understand why they'd lie about the origin and pretend the stories came from others when they could have just taken credit for it themselves.

[Boweavil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although the author is a thorough scholar and has impressive focus to his work, he seems far too emotionally affected by this issue, i.e., whether or not the work of the Grimms is authentic German folklore.

[Courtney Kleefeld · Rating 5 out of 5]

I partially read this because I'm a writer and I like to find the core of fairy tales before I write my own version of them. This book made me ask more questions, and that's good. It was surprising (and sometimes disturbing) to read of the original tales before the brothers Grimm changed them. I only wish there were books of the original oral folk traditional stories in their plain language. They would have been fascinating to read.

This book is a little repetitive sometimes, and that can get a little annoying so I found myself skimming a little bit, but then it gets very interesting in other places. This is a book for scholars, or scholar wannabes. It's an important book, and I only hope the truth comes out soon.

And then there's that news of five hundred German tales rediscovered in Germany last year or the year before that are presently slowly being translated. They weren't collected by the Grimms, but someone else whom I can't remember his name. But if you google "five hundred fairy tales discovered," you'll find articles about it.