The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales: Expanded Edition

by Maria Tatar

Murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide, and incest: the darker side of classic fairy tales is the subject of this groundbreaking and intriguing study of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Nursery and Household Tales. This expanded edition includes a new preface and an appendix featuring translations of six tales with commentary by Maria Tatar. Throughout the book, Tatar draws on the disciplinary tools of psychoanalysis and folklore while also providing historical context to explore the harsher aspects of these stories, presenting new interpretations of tales that engage in a kind of cultural repetition compulsion. No other book so thoroughly challenges us to rethink the happily-ever-after of these classic stories.

Genres: Nonfiction, Fairy Tales, Folklore, History, Psychology, Mythology, Germany

376 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1987

About the author

Maria Tatar is the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures. She chairs the Program in Folklore and Mythology at Harvard University. She is the author of Enchanted Hunters: The Power of Stories in Childhood, Off with Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood and many other books on folklore and fairy stories. She is also the editor and translator of The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen, The Annotated Brothers Grimm, The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, The Annotated Peter Pan, The Classic Fairy Tales: A Norton Critical Edition and The Grimm Reader. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Reviews

[Penny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't say I read this from start to finish. I read this as a companion book while reading The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales and honestly it made all the difference! I didn't particularly care for the Tales, they seemed rather abrupt, strange and often left me with a slightly bad feeling, but this book made up for all of that.

The most interesting part of the Grimm's Tales is the history of the lore and how the stories have changed over time. I learned through this book that the commonly read and translated version on the Grimm's Tales is the 4th edition put together by the brothers themselves. I tried to get my hands on a first edition but couldn't. However many of the most interesting differences were chronicled in here.

For example, between the first and second edition, the brothers changed the mothers in the fairy tales into step mothers. I found that very interesting! I think most of us find it easier to believe that a step mother with no blood relation to a child would find it easier to be cruel to said child than we would a mother who gave birth to the child. I think the stories take on a very different tone when you leave out the word "step" and leave the mothers as mothers. I understand why they might have made the change, but I was very interested to learn what it had been originally.

The Frog King was one of my favourite stories to discuss because it was so weird. I found a lot of information about the original here and how the princess had thrown him against the wall and he fell onto her bed where she lay down with him and they passed the night together. By the 4th edition that had been edited to them being companions and leaving to go marry at his castle. The original and the subsequent kiss the frog and he turns into a prince makes far more sense than the 4th edition "original".

If you've ever planning to read The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales, I'd highly recommend that you read this at the same time. Simply brilliant!

[Nicky · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales is a pretty good discussion of, not the origins of the tales in the Grimms' collection, but in how the Grimms treated them and why. It looks at some of the publication history and the issues surrounding different editions, the changes in audience, and it deals with some pretty common interpretations of some of the tales (e.g. why Bluebeard is considered a cautionary tale about the evils of curiosity instead of, you know, the evils of killing your wives and butchering their dead bodies and then marrying again) and how they came about.

I guess it's probably a bit dry if you're not particularly interested in the topic, but I found it perfectly readable. It does help that I recently reread selections from the Grimms' work, and looked at some of them in my SF/F class -- I notice myself falling into some of the traps of thinking about these stories which Tatar discusses and evades -- so that the whole topic is fresh in my mind and relevant to what I'm thinking about lately.

If you're looking for salacious details of the "real" Bluebeard, or the real Hansel and Gretel, seek elsewhere. Tatar doesn't really go in for that kind of interpretation of fairytale/folklore origins.

[Ana Mardoll · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hard Facts of Grimms' Fairy Tales / 0-691-11469-2

Like many of us, I am deeply interested in fairy tales and I eagerly anticipated this book, looking forward to an engaging, informative handling of the content and textual analysis of the Grimms' tales, with a focus on the un-"child-friendly" elements so common in the stories, due to their original intent to entertain mature audiences.

Unfortunately, I was profoundly disappointed in this book. Clarity and organization are severely lacking and the whole book feels very much like a hastily expanded dissertation that was haphazardly padded to 'book size'. The writing runs in various different directions, often seemingly at random, with no clear view of why a certain topic was discussed, nor how it led into the next topic.

For example, in the first chapter ("SEX AND VIOLENCE: The Hard Core of Fairy Tales"), Tatar deals very briefly and very superficially on the existence of sex and violence in fairy tales before moving hurriedly on to devote the bulk of the chapter on the Grimms' financial difficulties, publishing woes, irritation over harsh critics, and such varied and dissimilar themes as the differences in vernacular between various editions, the misfortunes of modern compilers who have not had the older, less heavily edited versions available, and authors who failed to realize that the "Grimms" author were two people, not one. Most of these topics, as the shrewd reader will note, have little or nothing to do with sex or violence in Grimms' fairy tales or any others, so it is deeply unclear why this comprised the bulk of a chapter titled "SEX AND VIOLENCE".

Another flaw in this book pointing to a dissertation source is Tatar's baffling obsession with diagrams. Multiple diagrams are devoted to detailing the difference between "fairy" tales and "folk" tales. This was not a topic that interested me whatsoever, and the multitude of pages devoted to it was deeply annoying. What does the difference between a fairy/folk tale have to do with the "hard facts" of the Grimms' tales? Nothing, as we later find out. It's just something Tatar is interested in, and she hopes we will be, too. Slightly more pertinent is the number of diagrams devoted to detailing the relationships between various story archetypes, but once again, I did not buy this book to learn about the archetypes of fairy tales, but rather to deal with the "hard facts" of the Grimms' tales - specifically the existence of, explanation for, and critical analysis of the sex, violence, and abandonment in the Grimms' tales, along with the fact that a number of endings were very much "happily ever after". The lack of serious treatment of these grim topics makes me feel that this book was misnamed in an attempt to drum up sales.

I do not think it is appropriate to market a book to an audience expecting analysis and explanation of the content of the Grimms' tales, when the book should more accurately be billed as a "history of the publication of the Grimms' tales" or "an analysis of relationships between archetypal characters in classic fairy/folk tales" or something similarly close to the actual content of this book. If you want a book on deconstructing fairy tales in general, this is a decent resource, if somewhat dry. If you want a book on the grim realities of the Grimms' tales, look elsewhere.

~ Ana Mardoll

[Margaux · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maria Tatar did a wonderful job of explaining the history of the Grimms' Fairy Tales in this book. The first section on the sexualization and desexualization of the stories we now associate with young children was a totally new concept for me. I never would have thought to look at Jacob Grimm & Wilhelm Grimm's educational background to deduce how they would have come up with their stories, nor would I have thought to question the long-believed notion that the Grimms got their stories from "folk resources." However, Tatar debunks and explains some of these scenarios in a way that is totally believable.

For any teacher or librarian planning on using these stories with any age level of children, I would say this book is worth checking out at the library. For parents, the ones who should be the most vigilant about knowing what kinds of goblins and witches await their children in the forests of their dreams, you should definitely look at this or a similar title. Just to know what you're up against.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Skipped around a lot through this book because it was just waaaayyyy too much useless information. She spent more time telling the fairy tales than actually talking about the history behind them; at least, that's how it felt to me.

[Nancy 6+ · Rating 2 out of 5]

I little dry in the telling, but interesting.

[Tony Sullivan · Rating 5 out of 5]

(First edition, 1987)

Trigger warning: incest, fratricide, child abandonment, cannibalism

Maria Tatar says that "even the most restrained Freudian interpreter can have a field day" with the psychic origins of Grimms’ fairy tales. Fairy tale plots, she says, are driven by the transgression of taboos: "incest, fratricide, child abandonment, cannibalism and so on". She quickly dispenses with a crude application of Freud, which sees sexual symbols everywhere: the allegedly “phallic” stick, or sword, or whatever, does not appear in some versions of the story, so cannot be central to the tale. What doesn’t change, she says, is the underlying structure of the Grimm fairy tale: it begins with a family conflict, then reproduces it in supernatural form. Recognising this pattern also debunks political, philosophical, and cosmological interpretations of these tales, which ignore the initial family setting.

The psychological core of the stories is then shaped by wider social conditions. The tales originally accompanied "collective household chores and harvesting activities that had created a forum for oral narration". They appeared in print "just when folktales were moving out of the barns and into the nursery". They were soon censored by interpreters and editors, partly due to commercial pressures from the reading public. Harsh realities of former times, such as child abandonment, were culled, as were sexual references deemed inappropriate for children – though violence, transferred to supernatural settings, had free rein for much longer.


Girls and women

In fairy tales siblings are mostly just “pretenders to the throne”. The main drama takes place with parents, particularly the mother, who has good and bad versions. The good mother is concealed, dispersed into creatures aiding the hero or heroine; she becomes Mother Nature. The bad one becomes a stepmother, rescuing motherhood’s reputation.

Initially, the stepmother may present as kindly and maternal. That doesn’t last; she’s the principal agent of enchantment, becoming "an overpowering presence in the tale. She stands as the flesh and blood embodiment of maternity, and it is this figure of manifest evil that is most openly associated with women as mothers." Such maternal evil represents “the obverse of all the positive qualities associated with mothers. Instead of functioning as nurturers and providers, cannibalistic female villains withhold food and threaten to turn children into their own source of nourishment, reincorporating them into the bodies that gave birth to them.”

While sorceresses may harm boys from the background, "they remain visible, palpable presences" in heroines' lives.

The animosity of stepmothers, alongside a passive, generally harmless father, dovetails with a different type of story in which the father has incestuous desires for the daughter. Seen together, Tatar says, they express an Oedipal desire on the girl-fantasist's part, and furnish a motive for the stepmother's hostility. (This is not to downplay real instances of such abuse, rather to say that the fantasy of it may occur independently.) But stories were adapted to suppress the incestuous father and highlight the evil stepmother. The father became hidden, e.g. as the evil queen's mirror in Snow White, determining who is the fairest of them all.

Even in the early versions of the stories, though, there are sex-stereotyped lessons for the young. The heroines toil away at spinning or other domestic chores for their deliverance, while the boys can rely more often on luck and supernatural helpers. Some girls reappear from the dead to broadcast the harm done to them, but those who survive set up happy families of their own.

Heroine-victims usually preserve their human form and beauty, whereas hero-victims often turned to beasts. Tatar calls this "a telling commentary on women's attitude toward male sexuality" while the catatonic Snow White or Sleeping Beauty offer "a sobering statement on folklorist visions of the ideal bride."


Boys and men

Fairy tales are themed on the triumph of the weak over the strong. Contrary to the modern notion of princely dragon-slayers, the young hero tends to be innocent and silly: useless, foolish, simple, guileless. He “acquires intelligence and power by displaying obtuseness and vulnerability… A hero's stupidity can take such extreme forms that it utterly disarms his antagonists." But the stories also tend to be ambiguous as to whether he hero is truly foolish or merely pretends to be.

Whereas the heroine tends to be actively humiliated, the hero is more often simply humble. He is also kind: this morally distinguishes him from his brothers, and also furnishes him with magical helpers.

What are the psychological drivers here? Tatar suggests that we all suffer from anxiety and tend to feel more lowly than those around us, but retain hopes that we can yet make good. Perhaps, though, the abject, suffering hero plays to further unconscious wishes; and since we are dealing with deep and primitive desires, contradictory wishes can coexist. For the creator or listener, the story externalises helplessness and anguish: it’s the character in the tale who is helpless, not me. Insofar as we do identify with the character, the tale sets limits to the intensity and duration of our suffering, reassuring us about our plight in real life. Helplessness may also spare us from attack by the all-powerful father figure at the back of our minds, just as a lion cub rolls over before the dominant male. And helplessness can, too, be an appeal to the mother for help, which arrives via the supernatural creatures.

Helpless is one thing, but why should the hero be kind, if as Tatar says these stories stem from the amoral depths of the mind? Perhaps the creator/reader is once again identifying with the weak little animal. I am that helpless creature – and I am helped. Simultaneously, the vulnerability is externalised: it’s not me that’s helpless, it’s that little creature. In fact I am the empowered one, able to do the helping.

I’m not sure that this methodology explains all fairy stories; some describe only one person, or a couple, for example, though these may be fragments of old family-based tales. But whether or not they can all be traced to such origins, Tatar makes a powerful case: that fairy tales evoke primal fears and desires born in early childhood within the family setting, and retained in the back of our minds.

They hold their power today, but each successive society has adapted the tales to suit prevailing values and interests. Medieval Christians stick priests into the story, then come Victorian moralisers, Disney, ultra-hyped cartoons, and finally modern liberals and feminists, merging with the hard-ass cynicism of today’s entertainment industry and social media. It is like watching a river disperse into swampy rivulets as it nears the sea: each one twisting its own path, each one ever-dependent on the original life-giving river.

[Edward Batres · Rating 3 out of 5]

The chapter on Sex and Violence was the best...

[Paula Soper · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is really interesting. I have learned a lot about fairy tales (or folk tales or folktales). If you like fairy and folk, this is the book for you.

[Boweavil · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely top flight work by internationally acclaimed scholar, full of carefully documented information and thoughtful analyses.

[Aaron · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fairy Tales without the Victorian cleaning white-wash.

[Kelly · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book is clearly well-researched and there is a lot to learn. However, it also feels a bit repetitive at times (reiterating plots and connections without necessarily adding something new to deepen the ideas explored) and sometimes feels scattered. I think a different approach to structuring this would have been more helpful.

Tatar broadly breaks the book into four sections: Children's Literature?; Heroes; Villains, and an appendix of some stories with commentary. I feel like within these categories, her essays on various aspects (Sex and Viownce, Fact and Fiction, etc.) do not actually align in content with the proposed title.

Once she gets into more focused analysis of the stories themselves (Heroes and Villains sections), the book picks up a bit and is better aligned with the chapter title's promise and more like what I expected from the book in general.

I get the sense that these chapters are more like collected papers than a true book, and I wish someone had taken a more thoughtful eye to helping Tatar shape this collection so that it felt better organized and clearer. I also wish more depth went into certain topics.

Off the top of my head, in a perfect world she would have detailed the Grimms' intentions, the history of the various volumes, their place in the written and oral traditions, and the influence of the cultural climate in shaping the telling. Next, a preliminary exploration of the various types of stories and their general characteristics and role in the fairy tale spectrum. Then, using that framework, in depth essays exploring the stories individually or intentional groupings to shed light on the sociological and cultural importance of the stories, making connections to their cultural cousins as needed. Finally, some essays that speak on the broader takeaways and relevance.

This is a worthwhile text, and it will get you thinking, but I wish it had been even better. Tatar clearly has so much to offer, this book falls a bit short.

[Elizabeth ♛Smart Girls Love Trashy Books♛ · Rating 3 out of 5]

~POTENTIAL SPOILERS~

Maria Tatar is one of the originals when it comes to serious fairytale and folklore study, digging deep into the historical, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds of fairytales and helped pave the way for many other scholars and researchers. The work she's done in the field can't be overstated and is felt even to this day. So I was really excited to read this, especially as an expanded edition twicefold. I was very disappointed.

Maybe this isn't for me. Maybe I'm way past fairytale 101 and maybe this is a book made specifically for those types of people. I didn't really learn anything new with this. Despite the description, this collection is just the author describing various different types of stories and tropes, saying 'isn't it crazy how they're all so similar?' but then never expanding on them or providing an explanation for why that seems to be the case. Like for example, she says most fairytale heroes are slow and useless, but doesn't explain why that was so common. Same with the common occurrence of cannibalistic women outside of an aside that it might've been brought on by famine.

The idea isn't bad. She knows her stuff and is very well-educated. I feel if you want a good place to start diving into fairytale study that doesn't feel uninviting or intimidating, this would be a good one for you. I just feel that maybe I'm too advanced for the type of audience she's trying to target with this.

[Steve Chisnell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Tatar's straightforward examination of Grimm's tales (and those related to them) seems at first to be mostly exposition and explication of the tales and their history with some interesting thematic oddities along the way. As the book progresses, however, Tatar begins to reveal some of the larger archetypal patterns which suggest our historical and contemporary prejudices along with some concerns for what these tales have represented ideologically for our culture. While she has little patience for the broader field of literary criticism (especially post-structuralists) as it applies itself to the tales, she at least acknowledges the misogyny and problematic behaviors of families while recognizing the metaphorical roles of monsters and magical solutions.

If I have any concerns for her approach, it is in this more conservative analysis, that she, perhaps heeding her own Bluebeard warning, walks right up to the doors of meaning and fails to enter. By opting for an overview of the tales, she excuses herself from a close or thorough examination of any.

[Sean]

This book delivers on its titular premise with a method balanced roughly halfway between scholarly and popular, with endnotes rather than footnotes and relatively few bulky in-text citations. The key points of each chapter are interesting but relatively modest, outlining patterns but not aspiring to earth shattering psychological insights. Worthwhile if the topic interests you.

[Pandit · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a pretty decent discussion of the main themes and archetypal characters in Fairy and folk tales.
It's advised to be fairly familiar with Grimms stories, and to a lesser degree their European counterparts before reading, in order to follow the discussion.

[Flare TheGunCalamity · Rating 4 out of 5]

it's like the bible of fairy tale literacy. not totally the kind of book i'd sit down and read from start to finish but 4/5 is much higher than I'd give literally any other book i've had as assigned reading for a literature class

[Becky Graham · Rating 4 out of 5]

an interesting look at the history of the editorial changes made by the Grimm Brothers, especially in terms of sex and violence towards women and in gender roles

[Marissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting.

[Rita]

1987
I would probably like to read some of this book.
Referred to in OPZIJ fall 2024

[tamar · Rating 1 out of 5]

this is utter rubbish....so grateful i only had to read a few chapters for class.

[Kristen Chojnacki · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you have even the slightest interest in fairy tales and folklore I can’t recommend this enough! I look forward to reading more Tatar in the future!

[Josie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Tatar’s readability and wit she is able to bring a variety of unique perspectives and apply a vast depth of knowledge. Personally, I prefer many of the essays in “off with their heads”

[grace · Rating 4 out of 5]

any academic work by maria tatar i love.

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

“‘Thousandfurs’ reminds us of the power of storytelling to foster dialogue, to heal, and to assure survival.” 🤍

[Nevzat · Rating 3 out of 5]

while i was expecting a book that gave an anthropological study of Grimm tales in Germany or the relation between human psyche and the tales (as it was mentioned in the foreword), the book was more focused on factual knowledge on Grimm brothers, their tales and first editions.

Nevertheless detailed comparisons between different tales with similar structures and were fun to read.

[Nadine · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book really snuck up on me! I really enjoyed it.

[Sapote3 · Rating 4 out of 5]

I very much enjoyed the excerpts from the original Grimms' that were appended at the end; I skipped over a great deal of the intermediary analysis. What I really loved about this book was the way it redeemed stories that have been treated as the birth of "children's literature" and pointed out that these were originally part of a community storytelling tradition that included adults and children both. I loved that glimpse into a very eloquent - if gorey - oral tradition - I'm afraid I've really absorbed the idea that "illiterate German peasant" meant that this was a group of people who didn't have a literature, which of course they did, even if it took the Grimm brothers to record it in writing and pretty it up.

What I really skimmed in boredom, though it might have just been personal laziness, were all the careful explanations that a lot of these stories evinced, you know, discomfort with forests and stepmothers.

[Nathan Dehoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

The scholar who did the annotations for The Annotated Brothers Grimm here does a general overview of the brothers' collection of stories, noting how it developed and what changes they made to it. While it was first billed as a collection of folklore for fellow academics, it became popular with children, so the Grimms altered the tales accordingly. Interestingly, while they tended to edit out references to sex, they increased the violence in many cases. They also often changed evil mothers into stepmothers, both to make less cases of biological parents being abusive and to reflect realities in a time of scarce resources. Something like the Hansel and Gretel situation of the stepmother convincing her husband to abandon the kids out in the woods didn't happen often, but it wasn't totally outside the realm of possibility.

[Jennifer Orr · Rating 3 out of 5]

My youngest is obsessed with fairy tales right now and after many evenings of glossing over some of Grimms' finest for appropriate bedtime reading, I started wondering about the history of these stories. This book didn't go as deep as I wanted into how and where these stories actually originated; that probably is an impossible task. But it is an interesting look at how the Grimms modified these tales for their collection (Rapunzel pregnant!) and analyzes the messages behind some of these tales.