Literature · Premium
The Brothers Grimm and the enchanted world of fairy tales
The Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, did not write their fairy tales for children. They were Romantic philologists who, in the early nineteenth century, wanted to save from oblivion the oral tradition of the German people, threatened by the spread of writing. They travelled the countryside listening to elderly storytellers and transcribed the tales as they were handed down: cruel, bloody stories, without censorship. Only when they realised that their book was increasingly being read to children did they begin to clean it up. But the violence remained, because it served to teach that evil is always punished. The original fairy tales were nightmares for adults, not reassuring fables: Snow White, Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood, in their primitive versions, hid blood, mutilations and atrocious revenge. Disney made them sweet, but the Grimms had something much darker in mind.
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