First, you said:
When the Grimm brothers began the research that culminated in Grimm's Fairy Tales, they had as their target audience adult German readers, particularly the educated burgher class, who would (so they hoped) treasure these tales as written survivors of Germany's rich oral historic past. Instead, what happened was within a generation, these tales had passed into the province of children, where stories such as "The Frog Prince" (quoted above), "Rumpelstiltskin," and "Tom Thumb," among others became viewed as being mere childish fantasies, doomed to fade just as juvenile attitudes wilt in the strong heat of maturity.
This is patently incorrect. The stories were stories that were meant to be told to children. The name of the book is, I repeat, Kinder- und Hausmärchen. The Brothers Grimm revised the stories specifically to make them more acceptable to children after initial criticism regarding overt sexuality in the stories. Someone who did not intend for the tales to be told to children would simply not do this. Dostoevsky would not rework The Brothers Karamazov if he found out people were using it as a bedtime story for children. That wasn't his intent (and of course, he died before he could finish the second part, so he had no time to revise anyway, but that's beside the point).
No, what I said is correct in that the brothers undertook this collection as a folklore project and that they never expected it to be of greater interest than to those who were also pursuing this then-nascent field. I'm well aware of the Children and Household Tales subtitle; I think the over-emphasis on the years has been on the first part and not the second, as evidenced in the various expurgations that have taken place over the years. I think the Grimm brothers edited in part due to the surprising success of their edition of tales, as after all there were several other printed editions available in Germany in the early 19th century that weren't as laboriously faithful (well, at first) to what the brothers recorded. Then came the editing out of things like the blood/wine and the meat/cakes out of Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel's pregnancy, and the like.
The overarching interest of the Brothers Grimm in folklore was to preserve national traditions. This is why many stories they heard were excluded. They wanted to preserve the GERMAN stories. They certainly intended for adults to buy the books that they published, but it wasn't because they felt the stories were for adults. It was part of the Romantic (as a movement in the arts) notion of a national identity. However, the stories were still stories for children. Your review implies that somehow, the stories were really for adults but were "degraded" into being childrens' stories. That is directly misleading.
No, what I referenced was that folklore that held multi-generational appeal for centuries had been relegated by the late 19th century solely into the province of children's lit, a very different thing than what you state above. There's been quite a bit of cultural research over the past 150 years or so into the connections those stories had with peasant life, not to mention explorations of how the burgher/bourgeois class in Germany and France modified them when recorded in print form to suit their different tastes. Robert Darnton does address this in the opening section of his The Great Cat Massacre, if memory serves.
Then, you go on to say, in response to my points:
I should also note that I'm familiar with dozens of variations, including some from Italy that vary even more from the bowdlerized editions that were printed centuries later. Some of what I said in the latter half of the review is based on that exposure and not just the edited form that the Grimm brothers chose for their collection.
Dozens of variations? Dozens? That implies around 40 or more variations of each story, to be charitable. I'm fairly certain that the variations are minor and the numbers of variant writings are far lower, so let's cut the hyperbole. In addition, you're not reviewing dozens of variations. You're reviewing the stories that the Brothers Grimm set to paper. To say that, because a different version contained anti-religious statements, there is an anti-religious "foundation" or "echo" remaining in the Grimm stories, is to impute something that isn't there. That would be like saying that Oh Brother, Where Art Thou? is an excellent example of the use of dactylic hexameter on the grounds that it is a retelling of The Odyssey.
Dozens is being conservative, to be honest. There are variants where it is not a wolf, but an ogress. Others where the girl (sans red hood, which didn't appear until Perrault) slipped naked into the bed and got fucked rather hard before she was consumed by the ogre/werewolf/wolf. Others where she feed the false grandmother rocks instead of cakes/meat. Then there's the infamous path of pins and needles which I mentioned before. In some versions, there is no hunter. In a few, both the girl and the grandmother die; in others, they cut their way out of the wolf/ogre by themselves. Those are just the ones off the top of my head; I know there are several others listed under AT-333.
Not only that, but saying that the anti-religious tone had dwindled to "naught" as the result of the passage of time is to imply that there weren't variant versions floating around in the German oral tradition that were anti-religious, or in other countries.
No, what I was referencing was that by the time the Grimm Brothers recorded stories that were told by descendants of Huguenots, the Eucharistic elements had been purged, almost certainly due to the differences between Catholicism and Calvinism, at least on the popular level by the early 19th century.
I just have had the experience of encountering several other variants that for obvious reasons are not as readily available. Also some of these points were (I believe) raised in Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre, although other parts come from monographs I read in grad school. There are certainly "code elements" that are present in certain tales that denote more than just that wolves are bad and that feasts are great.
I didn't say there weren't deeper meanings. My point is that you shouldn't talk about meanings that aren't there and avoid the ones that are. You're writing a review of Kinder- und Hausmärchen, not a thesis on the evolution, variation and meaning of the fairy tale generally. The "several other variants that for obvious reasons are not as readily available" can be reviewed if you want to, but they really aren't relevant to any discussion if no one you are discussing the works with has access to them. If you want to review The Great Cat Massacre, go ahead.
In reviewing one collection of tales, I do have the right (and I noted the transition before launching the aside) to note that the Grimm Brothers' version of tales differs significantly from others, considering that they did not create those tales. I'm noting (as a transition from the previous tale quoted) that there are elements in these tales that have shifted over time and before the Grimm brothers set down their version(s). In order to review Grimm's Fairy Tales as a work of collected tales, I do need to place it within the context of oral tales from the 14th-19th centuries. The problem is that under the constraints of limiting myself to around 1000 words is that I can only hint at the wide divergences in these texts; that they exist and are important to note, however, is paramount to any serious discussion of this particular edition.
A far better thing to have done in this post, however, would have been to actually discuss the book you were reviewing in more depth and with more clarity. For example, Little Red Riding Hood (Rotkäppchen) is described in the first sentence as "eine Dirne", which at the time could mean "a lass" but is now solely a term for prostitutes.
You mean to also reference the still older French and Italian versions to highlight the similarities and differences as well?
Not only that, but look at the interaction between parents and children, which is often quite ghastly. Hänsel and Grethel's OWN MOTHER suggests driving them out into the forest to fend for themselves (this was changed in the later versions to a stepmother, but my book is from the original edition - it was shocking). In the story of Cinderella (Aschenputtel), the name is a cruel nickname given to her by her stepsisters, yet her OWN FATHER uses it when he addresses her in direct speech for the first time in the story. That by itself is worthy of note.
The stories are no more shocking than that of Perrault's version of Bluebeard. Life was hard for many; starvation was eminent at times and if I recall, there were some quasi-sellings of children into servitude that took place. Again, some of this reflects the multi-generational audiences for these tales.
Rather than mention all of these things, however, you turned the review into some vague and nebulous summary of fairy tales generally.
Considering, as I said above, that I was limiting myself to around a newspaper-length review and not going for the critical monograph that I might have written 15 years ago, what more could be done than to discuss generalities and to take a representative, well-known story and note briefly how it diverges from other versions of it?
I'm not saying these things to try to offend you, but rather, as constructive criticism of someone who generally writes more pointed and relevant reviews, and concerning a work that has a lot of interesting things going on that didn't get mentioned in your review.
You didn't see what I said before, since it was on Twitter, but when I began writing the review, I said:
Time to attempt a short review of Grimm's Fairy Tales. This might get ugly.
I knew much of it would be lacking, because writing about a few hundred short tales is going to leave a helluva lot out and limit myself greatly as a result. Considering that most online readers won't read past 1000 words, I had to dress up that dog's supper the best I could.
Illusions fall like the husk of a fruit, one after another, and the fruit is experience. - Narrator, Sylvie
Je suis méchant.
Je suis méchant.
Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, Grimm's Fairy Tales
- 09/02/2011 01:15:09 AM
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Of course, the Grimms wanted to listen to how the people told the tales, too.
- 09/02/2011 05:39:39 AM
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That and they were after specific German examples
- 09/02/2011 10:33:27 PM
599 Views
I think you need to modify your review.
- 10/02/2011 06:03:26 AM
638 Views
Not really
- 10/02/2011 07:02:15 AM
735 Views
Well, in that case your review sucks.
- 10/02/2011 04:08:21 PM
485 Views
I won't get into your debate with Tom. It looks like it is about to degenerate.
- 10/02/2011 04:37:34 PM
649 Views
Re: I won't get into your debate with Tom. It looks like it is about to degenerate.
- 10/02/2011 04:51:36 PM
734 Views
Re: I won't get into your debate with Tom. It looks like it is about to degenerate.
- 10/02/2011 04:58:30 PM
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I had to see the approximate numbes when I was taking some social history courses
- 10/02/2011 05:25:06 PM
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