But once the stories started gaining popularity, the Grimm brothers found it too tempting to alter some of the more unsavory aspects to appeal to a wider audience. These preservation efforts are seen most clearly in the first edition, with all its lewdness and violence. Underlying their work was a pronounced romantic urge to excavate and preserve German cultural contributions made by the common people before the stories became extinct.'Ī portrait of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm by their brother Ludwig Emil Grimm / Historisches Museum Hanau, Wikimedia Commons // Public Domain the more they began gathering tales, the more they became totally devoted to uncovering the ‘natural poetry’- naturpoesie-of the German people, and all their research was geared toward exploring the epics, sagas, and tales that contained what they thought were essential truths about the German cultural heritage. In the introduction, translator Jack Zipes writes that '. In 2014, Princeton University Press published The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, the first-ever English translation of the first edition of the Grimms' stories. The Grimms were scholars, working primarily at their desks, who relied on friends and informants and the occasional written document to source the folklore that had been passed down for generations.Īlthough they added clear transitions where necessary to complete the tales, for the most part the Grimms stayed as true to the original sources as possible. The original intent of the project was to record and anthologize the oral tradition in German-speaking countries at the start of the 19 th century.

When they set out to produce their Kinder- und Hausmarchen ( Children’s and Household Tales)-the first volume of which was published on December 20, 1812-the brothers viewed themselves not as authors or even really editors, but as collectors and literary historians. But it’s not because Jacob and Wilhelm were a pair of deviants eager to write about child abuse. You probably know that the original Brothers Grimm fairy tales didn't have the same sort of kid-friendly happy endings as the Disney versions.

Grimms' Fairy Tales by Jacob Grimm