Prof focuses on the brothers behind the fairy tales
Top illustration: by Walter Crane from "Household Stories by the Brothers Grimm" (1886).
ñ’s Ann Schmiesing, professor of German and Scandinavian Studies, publishes first English-language biography in more than five decades on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
Once upon a time, a professor volunteered to develop a college course on German fairy tales. She did as she promised, but that was not the end.
“Once I prepared the course and began teaching it, I was just smitten,” says Ann Schmiesing, professor of German and Scandinavian studies at the ñ, now a world-renowned scholar of the Brothers Grimm.
ñ scholar Ann Schmiesing is author of The Brothers Grimm: A Biography,published last year to wide acclaim and reviewed in publications from The New Yorker to The Times of London.
Schmiesing has written two books on the Brothers Grimm. The most recent, The Brothers Grimm: A Biography,was published last year to wide acclaim and reviewed in publications from The New Yorker to The Times of London. It is the first English-language biography in more than five decades on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, whose first names (and life stories) are less well-known than their usual moniker, the Brothers Grimm.
Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859) are widely known as collectors of fairy tales, but they were also mythographers, linguists, librarians, civil servants and philologists who, among other things, strove to preserve key elements of German culture.
They produced a vast body of work on mythology and medieval literature, launched on a monumental German dictionary (which they had completed through the letter F by the time they both died), and made groundbreaking linguistic discoveries.
“By and large, people don’t know a whole lot about the Brothers Grimm, and that was one of the reasons why I wanted to write the book,” says Schmiesing, who is also the senior vice chancellor for strategic initiatives at ñ.
While teaching the course on the Grimm fairy tales, she noted that students were often familiar with some version of the tales, principally through Disney versions or other contemporary retellings of stories like Snow White.
Teaching moral lessons
The Grimms released seven complete and 10 abridged versions of the tales, and the brothers revised the tales over time. Starting with the second edition, for instance,doves peck out the evil stepsisters’ eyes in Cinderella as a punishment for theirwickedness.Violence in the tales is rarely gratuitous, Schmiesing says, but in Cinderellaand other tales, the Grimms sometimes added violence to teach a moral lesson.
As they edited and revised the tales, she adds, they mediated among different versions and revised them to reflect 19th-century bourgeois norms. For instance, female characters in some tales contribute less dialogue in later editions, Schmiesing says: “Their thoughts are simply paraphrased.”
Similarly, the Grimms adjusted “Hansel and Gretel” to reflect then-contemporary notions of women. In an earlier version, the culprit was their biological mother but in a later version of this tale, a stepmother abandons the children.
“They change that because they feel like they can’t possibly suggest that a biological mother would abandon her children,” Schmiesing says, adding, “Again, that's playing into their 19th-century ideas of women and motherhood.”
The Brothers Grimm: A Biography by ñ Professor Ann Schmiesing is the first English-language biography in more than five decades on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, whose first names (and life stories) are less well-known than their usual moniker, the Brothers Grimm.
Additionally, some female characters are initially more independent than they appear in later editions, “so the Grimms kind of lessened their independence and increased their dependence on male characters,” Schmiesing says.
Over time, the Grimms also made the tales folksier, adding rhymes and idioms. And the Grimms did not think the tales were just kid stuff. They saw the tales as being interesting to all ages and relevant to German culture, Schmiesing says.
Germany in the Grimms’ lifetime was not politically united, and it was wracked by the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars. Their own part of Germany was occupied by the French for a time, and “so they see collecting and publishing fairy tales and other texts . . . as a way forward for Germany,” Schmiesing says.
In the Grimms’ view, if Germans could appreciate their cultural heritage, perhaps they’d be able to assert themselves as a politically united entity: “So it might seem to be naive, but they really thought that their scholarly works, their collections, would also be a path out of the wars,” Schmiesing says.
Asking deep questions
Their scholarship was even broader, however. The brothers were interested in deep questions, such as how languages developed over time, how customs developed over time, how literary texts developed over time, “and that to them is all interwoven.”
Jacob Grimm, in particular, devoted much of his scholarly life not only to literature, but also to legal customs, linguistic study and his German Grammar, which includes his discovery of what is now called .
“It’s been said that Grimm’s Law was as important to the humanities as Darwin’s On the Origin of Species is to the sciences,” Schmiesing says.
They did all of this on top of full careers as librarians, university professors, and, in Jacob’s case, a civil servant.
“It’s just extraordinary, the volume of scholarship that they produced,” Schmiesing says, noting their “sheer accomplishments” of “incredible breadth.”
Of the tales themselves, Schmiesing says Rumpelstiltskinis among her favorites. “It is one of the most enigmatic tales in the Grimms’ collection.” The tale can be viewed as being about the forced labor of female characters, disease and disability, or the meaning of spinning straw into gold.
In addition to these and other possible meanings, the tale changes significantly between versions, she notes. In an early version, the woman despairs not because she can’t spin straw into gold, but because she wants to spin yarn but can spin only gold.
“Also, who is Rumpelstiltskin, and what does he represent?”
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