Grimm and the Origin of Fairy Tales

Society has become inoculated by the Disney adaptations of classic fairy tales to the point where we’ve forgotten that the earlier versions are filled with the same violent tendencies that run through the television series Grimm. “For many adults, reading through an unexpurgated edition of the Grimm’s collection of tales can be an eye-opening experience,” Maria Tatar remarks in the introduction to The Hard Facts of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales (Princeton University Press, 2003). “Even those who know that Snow White’s stepmother arranges the murder of her stepdaughter, that doves peck out the eyes of Cinderella’s stepsisters, that Briar Rose’s suitors bleed to death on the hedge surrounding her castles, or that a mad rage drives Rumpelstiltskin to tear himself in two will find themselves hardly prepared for the graphic descriptions of murder, mutilation, cannibalism, infanticide and incest that fill the pages of these bedtime stories for children.”

In actuality, fairy tales were never intended for children but instead served as an oral form of entertainment geared towards adults. According to Maria Tatar, these stories were primarily recited while the men and women of a village were dispensing their daily chores in the rural atmosphere of the middle ages. “But as industrialization gradually curtailed the need for the kinds of activities that had created a forum for oral narration, folktales as a form of public entertainment for adults died out,” Tatar explains. It was therefore the intention of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm to transcribe these oral narratives into written words as a means of historically preserving the tradition before the stories themselves completely vanished from civilization. The title of their first edition was named Children’s and Household Tales, however, and a different patron arose for the volume than the Brothers Grimm originally envisioned for the project. The stories in future editions were thus altered, polished and even editorialized by the Grimms in order to make them more appropriate for a new audience—children.

The need for such sanitization was apparently great. “In Eighteenth Century French versions of Little Red Riding Hood, the heroine unwittingly eats the flesh and drinks the blood of her grandmother, is called a slut by her grandmother’s cat, and performs a slow striptease for the wolf,” Maria Tatar writes. “An Italian version has the wolf kill the mother, make a latch cord of her tendons, a meat pie of her flesh, and wine from her blood. The heroine pulls the latch, eats the meat pie, and drinks the blood. Even this folktale, which in its later-day version appears to be the most explicitly didactic of all, evidently started out as a bawdy tale for adults hardly suitable for children. As much as readers may be shocked by the cruelty and violence of the Grimms’ tales, they would find many of the stories tame by comparison with their corresponding peasant versions.”

The original meanings of many fairy tales were ultimately obscured by the Brothers Grimm when they reworked the various storylines that encompass Children’s and Household Tales. To further complicate the ability to correctly interpret these tales, slight alterations to the narratives can be found within different cultures, regions and nations from around the world. Both Cinderella and Snow White are males instead of females in Turkish versions, for instance, while Sleeping Beauty is likewise a male in Russia. Despite such nuanced differences, however, each of the stories still contains the same basic structure no matter where a specific variation may have derived. The fact that these fairy tales all share the same universal traits, meanwhile, raises the question of how so many different cultures developed the same fundamental narratives in the first place.

One theory suggests that these stories originated in India, migrated to both Europe and Asia via foot-bound travelers, and were then polished with the various traits of the specific cultures that they reached during their journey. This explanation, however, fails to consider the vast geographical distances that the tales appear to have travelled. “How is one to explain the similarity of the tale about the frog queen in Russia, Germany, France, India, in America among the Indians, and in New Zealand, when the contact of peoples cannot be proven historically?” Maria Tatar quotes former Soviet scholar Vladimir Propp as asking. An alternative theory thus contends that the narratives are instead part of a universal psyche or collective consciousness that is shared by all human beings no matter where they are located.

“On a more sophisticated level, critics have argued that fairy tales translate the eternal truths of mental life into concrete actions and images,” Maria Tatar contends. “They may incarnate the highest hopes and the deepest fears of every childhood, or they may preserve the fantasies and phobias of an earlier age, of the childhood of mankind. In the savage practices and violent events depicted in fairy tales, those critics have found an expression of regressive models of thought or of primitive ways of life. Both of these views—one emphasizing the uniformity of life in general, the other stressing continuities in the life of the mind—suggest that fairy tales traffic in truths so fundamental to life and so universal in their application that they are necessarily alike everywhere.”

These aforementioned themes include issues of abandonment, parental disapproval, low social status and a correlation between sexuality and bestiality. As Maria Tatar likewise makes clear, meanwhile, the heroes of fairy tales are initially the victim within any given narrative. This goes for the male version, which is often “underprivileged and taken for a fool,” as well as the female variety, who are “subjected to all manner of abuse and humiliation.” These traits stand in stark contrast to the depiction of the villains of the tales, who are no doubt metaphors for the seeming injustice of the world-at-large that all human beings inherently experience. It should be no surprise then that the hero eventually defeats his or her enemy in a violent, horrific form of retaliation—an outcome born from the frustration of every day existence and the desire for retribution against the obstacles that make life an ostensibly difficult proposition.

“The sufferings inflicted on the victim or intended for him are ultimately visited on the adversary,” Maria Tatar observes. “A woman who throws her daughter-in-law into a river ends by drowning. The stepmother who proposes to abandon her stepdaughter in the woods is torn to pieces by wild animals. There is no casual capriciousness in the selection of appropriate punishments or in the means of establishing justice. This is the Old Testament logic of an eye for an eye. In fairy tales, getting even is the best revenge.”

The NBC drama Grimm is an extension of this fairy tale legacy in that the series returns the narratives to their original dark and sinister nature while erasing the sanitization that the likes of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm added in an effort to make them more suitable for children. While the original fairy tales relied on vengeance to alleviate the unfortunate situations in which the protagonists find themselves, however, Grimm has Nick Burkhardt, a “hero” who brings a modern day sensibility to the proceedings. Fairy tales may have begun as universal stories derived from a shared collective consciousness before developing into bedtime stories for children, but in the hands of Grimm they take on new life while likewise retaining their primary intent.

“Few people look to fairy tales for models of humane, civilized behavior,” Maria Tatar concludes in The Hard Facts of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales. “The stories have taken hold for a far more important reason: the hard facts of fair-tale life offer exaggerated visions of the grimmer realities and fantasies that touch and shape the lives of every child and adult.” With a narrative filled with its own depictions of violent deaths, primordial fears and ancient customs, it is a tradition that Grimm itself ultimately upholds.

Anthony Letizia (May 7, 2012)

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