May 12, 2010 • 11 mins
Fairy tales weren't always safe fodder for the latest Disney film. In fact, some were downright macabre. Learn more about the original versions of fairy tales -- and the eccentric brothers responsible for popularizing them -- in this podcast.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy, and today we're
going to talk about the Grimm Brothers and their fairy tales,
(00:21):
and we talked a little bit about fairy tales and
blue Beard. I've been reading The Bloody Chamber by Angela
Carter lately, which is really cool modern retellings of fairy
tales if you want to pick it up. But we
wanted to talk a little bit about fairy tales and
folk tales in general and the difference between them. Folk
tales start with an oral tradition and they're written down later,
(00:42):
so they're kind of living things. Think about it. If
you're telling a story over and over again, it'll change,
sometimes slightly, sometimes in big ways. You might emphasize a
part that you really like a lot, play down another um,
and then story you tell would be different from the
way I would retell it, yeah, exactly, and then it
would find be written down and we'd have a folk tale. Um.
(01:02):
Fairy tales contain magic, so you could look at it
like a sub genre of folk tales or a totally
different thing. And if you haven't picked up any fairy
tales since your childhood, I highly recommend that you do.
I took a children's lip class in college with Dr Katagina,
your Jack, and she recommended the classic fairy Tales by
(01:23):
Iona and Peter Obe and it's a really fantastic addition.
And these tales are very dark. There's frog sex and
decapitated heads, so keep that in mind when you start reading.
We could talk about fairy tales all day, really, but
we won't, so instead we're going to talk about two
of the most famous men behind fairy tales and folk tales,
(01:45):
the brothers Grimm. And the cool thing about them was
that they wrote stories down like their neighbors and friends
actually told them, mostly without messing too much with them.
And the science of folklore began with these two. So
we're going to talk about where they came from. Jacob
Ludwig Carl Grimm and will Holm Carl Graham were born
(02:06):
about a year apart in hand Out, Germany Jacob Villehem
seventeen eighty six. Their parents were Philip Wilhelm Grimm, who
was a lawyer in Dhortea Graham, and they were a
solidly middle class family, not the kind who's going to
have a a scary fairy tale childhood. Until their father dies,
(02:26):
and that was in seventeen ninety six, and it left
them quite poor, and Bill Holme was in bad health
his whole life, and now Jacob, at the age of eleven,
was the man of the family. So poor little guys.
They soon went to live with an aunt and they
pretty much do everything together for the rest of their lives.
They both went to study law at the University of
(02:48):
Marburg like their dad, but they found a new interest
folk poetry. Yeah, because there they befriend Clemens Brentano, who
was a German romantic who would go on to do
very unusual works, taken the dictation of a nun who
had received the Stigmata, and Akam von Arnhem, who collected
folk songs into a book which later really influenced Maller.
(03:11):
The grim started collecting stories and songs and poems that
they hoped would have been in this book, but when
they weren't, they just kept doing it on their own.
Will make our own collection. They run into more trouble
in eighteen o eight when their mother dies and Jacob
then has five siblings to care for, and money is
pretty tight. He and Wilhelm actually go hungry a lot
(03:33):
of the time, sharing a meal a day, something that
I don't know makes their reminiscent of all the starving
children in their fairy tales. Yeah, he holds a lot
of jobs to try to make enough money for the
family too. He's a secretary to a war office and
a private librarian for the King of Westphalia Um. But yeah,
(03:54):
it's just a sort of tough time for the two brothers.
And they ended up in a library and cough soul
and officially gave up on the law to pursue their
studies of folklore because they had finally found their calling.
And their famous book, Kinder Owned House Mershon was published
in eighteen twelve, the first volume at least the second
(04:14):
part published in eighteen fourteen. And in that table of
contents we have the Frog, King, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella,
Little Red riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, snow White, and Rumpel
still Skin. So all the familiar characters here. But we
should say that these stories weren't new. They weren't making
(04:35):
them up or presenting them for the first time their
versions of stories that were told in many languages and
many cultures, just the specific versions they happened to copy down.
And this book was for adults and children, not just kids.
And it wasn't at all poetic. Again, they wrote down
stories the way that people told them, so there were colloquialisms,
(04:56):
and you know, it sound a little bit more like
dialogue casual exactly. And they had character, and they reflected
German settings like big scary forests and German people and
German values. And the stories were often very dark and
contained a lot of cruelty, which this definitely reminds me
of Dwight and his Grandmater reading a story about what
(05:20):
happens to little children who stuck on their thumb. Very
bad things. But the book became incredibly popular in Germany,
not immediately but a bit later, and once translated in
the world, it's in one hundred and sixty languages. Now
you've probably seen some version of probably have an addition
on your shelf, although it may be a sanitized version.
(05:40):
They saw six editions of it just in their lifetime.
The final count was something like two hundred stories and
ten children's legends. And speaking of those sanitized versions. They
later cleaned up a lot of their own tales to
make them nicer for kids. For Punzel, for example, a
dozen't have premarital set from the later ones, and no
(06:02):
one dances herself to death in hot iron shoes. Um,
and I thought that was funny because kids are so
often rather ghoulish and not innocent little angels, and really
enjoy some good and evil tales. Yeah. Well, and they
take these tales pretty literally as cool magic stuff happening.
And if you do go back and read them, you know,
(06:22):
as an adult, you can see more of the symbolism
that's really behind some of the stories. But it's important
to note too that their great accomplishment wasn't just transcribing stories.
Their book is considered the first scientific collection of folk tales,
and the brothers were really interested in language and highly
(06:42):
skilled researchers because their lawyers exactly that that came in
to serve them well. They both studied medieval manuscripts and
the history of law, and after this they published a
book of German legends and a translation of Irish tales,
along with lots of critical essays and interpretations of what
folklore meant. These guys are a pretty big deal in
(07:03):
the academic world. Consequently, Yaka more than will Holm. But
Yacop has other projects to work on philology and linguistics,
and if we got too much into some of those subjects,
I think most of you would fall asleep during the pout.
But he writes a giant grammar book. That's a good example.
(07:23):
You might get one weekly and another book on the
history of the German language. And there's even a linguistic
law named after him, Grimm's law. If anyone would like
to explain it to us more clearly, please email us
at History podcast at how stuff Works dot com. And
he also did a lot on Teutonic mythology, which makes
sense because that's going to be pretty close to your
(07:44):
Germanic folk tales. And as far as their academic careers,
they had to leave Kastle in eighteen nine do to
some politics of higher academia and they went to the
University of Guttingen instead, But when they protested against some
political actions of the King of Hanover, they were let go.
So they were men of principle as grims, but they
(08:05):
were in great demand even after they were let go,
and they were trying to decide where they would settle,
and they chose the University of Berlin as the place
to continue their work and their lectures, and they started
writing an absolutely enormous German dictionary, the Deutsche forger Book.
And please excuse me if that's not the correct pronunciation,
(08:27):
but it took one hundred years to finish, so obviously
it wasn't them living ageless, and we wouldn't that be
a great grim spiry tale. Fantastic. They're like two d
years old work in the dictionary. But everything you could
ever possibly want to know about any German word ever,
isn't this, and I mean everything. According to Britannica, Yakob
(08:49):
only lived to see it get to the letter f
and now it's thirty two volumes. And another thing we
thought was kind of cool about these two guys is
how close they are. They of together, and they worked together.
Jacob even lives with his brother after Wilhelm gets married,
all of them getting along pretty well with the kids
in the house and fairy tales presumably being told. Bill
(09:11):
Holmes's son said about them. The brothers had one house,
one library, one purse, and Wilhelm died in Berlin on
December six, eighteen fifty nine. Jacob died there on September
sixty three, and I imagine Jacob was rather lonely without
his lifetime companion. In his eulogy he called Bill Holme
the fairy tale brother. So that's the end of our
(09:35):
Grim Brothers podcast. And that brings us to listener Mail.
This is another edition of real Mail, this time from
Sarah in California, and she wrote us to say that
she was visiting New York City for the first time
and listening to one of Candice and Jane's older podcasts
on trading Manhattan for Nutmeg, and just looking around her
(09:57):
and thinking, m much is the worth a bunch of nutmeg?
I guess um? And she mentioned she kept on telling
all of her friends this little titbit related to that.
We got an email from a listener who asked that
if someone sent real mail, did that up their chances
of being talked about on listener mail. And we have
(10:18):
to say, yes, well, we'll put your podcast topic a
little higher on the list LUs we tape it up
on the wall. We do. We have a whole little
section right now between our women are cube. We sit
next to each other so that's where we've put all
of them. So if you'd like to send us some mail,
please do, and you can follow us on Twitter at
Miston History and we also have a Facebook fan page
(10:39):
that we update regularly. And if you'd like to read
some more cool history articles, you should come search our
homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
stuff works dot com and be sure to check out
the stuff you missed in History Glass blog on the
how stuff works dot com homepage. Be doing blue
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy, and today we're
going to talk about the Grimm Brothers and their fairy tales,
(00:21):
and we talked a little bit about fairy tales and
blue Beard. I've been reading The Bloody Chamber by Angela
Carter lately, which is really cool modern retellings of fairy
tales if you want to pick it up. But we
wanted to talk a little bit about fairy tales and
folk tales in general and the difference between them. Folk
tales start with an oral tradition and they're written down later,
(00:42):
so they're kind of living things. Think about it. If
you're telling a story over and over again, it'll change,
sometimes slightly, sometimes in big ways. You might emphasize a
part that you really like a lot, play down another um,
and then story you tell would be different from the
way I would retell it, yeah, exactly, and then it
would find be written down and we'd have a folk tale. Um.
(01:02):
Fairy tales contain magic, so you could look at it
like a sub genre of folk tales or a totally
different thing. And if you haven't picked up any fairy
tales since your childhood, I highly recommend that you do.
I took a children's lip class in college with Dr Katagina,
your Jack, and she recommended the classic fairy Tales by
(01:23):
Iona and Peter Obe and it's a really fantastic addition.
And these tales are very dark. There's frog sex and
decapitated heads, so keep that in mind when you start reading.
We could talk about fairy tales all day, really, but
we won't, so instead we're going to talk about two
of the most famous men behind fairy tales and folk tales,
(01:45):
the brothers Grimm. And the cool thing about them was
that they wrote stories down like their neighbors and friends
actually told them, mostly without messing too much with them.
And the science of folklore began with these two. So
we're going to talk about where they came from. Jacob
Ludwig Carl Grimm and will Holm Carl Graham were born
(02:06):
about a year apart in hand Out, Germany Jacob Villehem
seventeen eighty six. Their parents were Philip Wilhelm Grimm, who
was a lawyer in Dhortea Graham, and they were a
solidly middle class family, not the kind who's going to
have a a scary fairy tale childhood. Until their father dies,
(02:26):
and that was in seventeen ninety six, and it left
them quite poor, and Bill Holme was in bad health
his whole life, and now Jacob, at the age of eleven,
was the man of the family. So poor little guys.
They soon went to live with an aunt and they
pretty much do everything together for the rest of their lives.
They both went to study law at the University of
(02:48):
Marburg like their dad, but they found a new interest
folk poetry. Yeah, because there they befriend Clemens Brentano, who
was a German romantic who would go on to do
very unusual works, taken the dictation of a nun who
had received the Stigmata, and Akam von Arnhem, who collected
folk songs into a book which later really influenced Maller.
(03:11):
The grim started collecting stories and songs and poems that
they hoped would have been in this book, but when
they weren't, they just kept doing it on their own.
Will make our own collection. They run into more trouble
in eighteen o eight when their mother dies and Jacob
then has five siblings to care for, and money is
pretty tight. He and Wilhelm actually go hungry a lot
(03:33):
of the time, sharing a meal a day, something that
I don't know makes their reminiscent of all the starving
children in their fairy tales. Yeah, he holds a lot
of jobs to try to make enough money for the
family too. He's a secretary to a war office and
a private librarian for the King of Westphalia Um. But yeah,
(03:54):
it's just a sort of tough time for the two brothers.
And they ended up in a library and cough soul
and officially gave up on the law to pursue their
studies of folklore because they had finally found their calling.
And their famous book, Kinder Owned House Mershon was published
in eighteen twelve, the first volume at least the second
(04:14):
part published in eighteen fourteen. And in that table of
contents we have the Frog, King, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella,
Little Red riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, snow White, and Rumpel
still Skin. So all the familiar characters here. But we
should say that these stories weren't new. They weren't making
(04:35):
them up or presenting them for the first time their
versions of stories that were told in many languages and
many cultures, just the specific versions they happened to copy down.
And this book was for adults and children, not just kids.
And it wasn't at all poetic. Again, they wrote down
stories the way that people told them, so there were colloquialisms,
(04:56):
and you know, it sound a little bit more like
dialogue casual exactly. And they had character, and they reflected
German settings like big scary forests and German people and
German values. And the stories were often very dark and
contained a lot of cruelty, which this definitely reminds me
of Dwight and his Grandmater reading a story about what
(05:20):
happens to little children who stuck on their thumb. Very
bad things. But the book became incredibly popular in Germany,
not immediately but a bit later, and once translated in
the world, it's in one hundred and sixty languages. Now
you've probably seen some version of probably have an addition
on your shelf, although it may be a sanitized version.
(05:40):
They saw six editions of it just in their lifetime.
The final count was something like two hundred stories and
ten children's legends. And speaking of those sanitized versions. They
later cleaned up a lot of their own tales to
make them nicer for kids. For Punzel, for example, a
dozen't have premarital set from the later ones, and no
(06:02):
one dances herself to death in hot iron shoes. Um,
and I thought that was funny because kids are so
often rather ghoulish and not innocent little angels, and really
enjoy some good and evil tales. Yeah. Well, and they
take these tales pretty literally as cool magic stuff happening.
And if you do go back and read them, you know,
(06:22):
as an adult, you can see more of the symbolism
that's really behind some of the stories. But it's important
to note too that their great accomplishment wasn't just transcribing stories.
Their book is considered the first scientific collection of folk tales,
and the brothers were really interested in language and highly
(06:42):
skilled researchers because their lawyers exactly that that came in
to serve them well. They both studied medieval manuscripts and
the history of law, and after this they published a
book of German legends and a translation of Irish tales,
along with lots of critical essays and interpretations of what
folklore meant. These guys are a pretty big deal in
(07:03):
the academic world. Consequently, Yaka more than will Holm. But
Yacop has other projects to work on philology and linguistics,
and if we got too much into some of those subjects,
I think most of you would fall asleep during the pout.
But he writes a giant grammar book. That's a good example.
(07:23):
You might get one weekly and another book on the
history of the German language. And there's even a linguistic
law named after him, Grimm's law. If anyone would like
to explain it to us more clearly, please email us
at History podcast at how stuff Works dot com. And
he also did a lot on Teutonic mythology, which makes
sense because that's going to be pretty close to your
(07:44):
Germanic folk tales. And as far as their academic careers,
they had to leave Kastle in eighteen nine do to
some politics of higher academia and they went to the
University of Guttingen instead, But when they protested against some
political actions of the King of Hanover, they were let go.
So they were men of principle as grims, but they
(08:05):
were in great demand even after they were let go,
and they were trying to decide where they would settle,
and they chose the University of Berlin as the place
to continue their work and their lectures, and they started
writing an absolutely enormous German dictionary, the Deutsche forger Book.
And please excuse me if that's not the correct pronunciation,
(08:27):
but it took one hundred years to finish, so obviously
it wasn't them living ageless, and we wouldn't that be
a great grim spiry tale. Fantastic. They're like two d
years old work in the dictionary. But everything you could
ever possibly want to know about any German word ever,
isn't this, and I mean everything. According to Britannica, Yakob
(08:49):
only lived to see it get to the letter f
and now it's thirty two volumes. And another thing we
thought was kind of cool about these two guys is
how close they are. They of together, and they worked together.
Jacob even lives with his brother after Wilhelm gets married,
all of them getting along pretty well with the kids
in the house and fairy tales presumably being told. Bill
(09:11):
Holmes's son said about them. The brothers had one house,
one library, one purse, and Wilhelm died in Berlin on
December six, eighteen fifty nine. Jacob died there on September
sixty three, and I imagine Jacob was rather lonely without
his lifetime companion. In his eulogy he called Bill Holme
the fairy tale brother. So that's the end of our
(09:35):
Grim Brothers podcast. And that brings us to listener Mail.
This is another edition of real Mail, this time from
Sarah in California, and she wrote us to say that
she was visiting New York City for the first time
and listening to one of Candice and Jane's older podcasts
on trading Manhattan for Nutmeg, and just looking around her
(09:57):
and thinking, m much is the worth a bunch of nutmeg?
I guess um? And she mentioned she kept on telling
all of her friends this little titbit related to that.
We got an email from a listener who asked that
if someone sent real mail, did that up their chances
of being talked about on listener mail. And we have
(10:18):
to say, yes, well, we'll put your podcast topic a
little higher on the list LUs we tape it up
on the wall. We do. We have a whole little
section right now between our women are cube. We sit
next to each other so that's where we've put all
of them. So if you'd like to send us some mail,
please do, and you can follow us on Twitter at
Miston History and we also have a Facebook fan page
(10:39):
that we update regularly. And if you'd like to read
some more cool history articles, you should come search our
homepage at www dot how stuff works dot com. For
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
stuff works dot com and be sure to check out
the stuff you missed in History Glass blog on the
how stuff works dot com homepage. Be doing blue
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