Grimm Fairy Tales
I read several of the Grimm fairy tales from their collection. I found it interesting to read these classic stories that I only knew from Disney movies. I liked seeing the darker side to the fairy tales that are often left out in the movies or more popularized versions of the stories. For instance, in the first tale in their collection The Frog Prince, the frog does not transform until the princess throws him against the wall in raged. In the popular version of this story the princess kisses him. Another popular one is Snow White, which originally ends with this line about the evil step mother, “She is then forced to step into the iron shoes and dance until she falls down dead.” I can’t imagine seeing something like that in a Disney movie! Also it is believed that originally the Grimm brother’s had the step mother being Snow White’s actual mother, but it was later changed so it wasn’t so…grim.
I read a few others that I was familiar with to see the differences. Some of these included:
Thumbling
The Theif and His Master
Little Red Riding Hood
Sleeping Beauty
The Gold Children
Twelve Brothers
Cinderella
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were born in Hanau in 1875 and 1876 respectively. His father, who was educated in law and served as a town clerk, died when Jacob was young. With financial help of Dorothea’s sister, Jacob and Wilhelm were sent to Kasel to attend the Lyzeum. After studying law at Marburg, Wilhelm worked as a secretary at Kassel, where Jacob was a librarian. In 1812, the year their fairy tales were published, the Grimms were surviving on barely any money at all. Between 1821 and 1822 the brothers raised extra money by collecting three volumes of folktales.
In 1829 the brothers moved to Göttingen, where Wilhelm was an assistant librarian and Jacob a librarian. In 1835 Wilhelm was appointed professor, but they were asked to leave 2 years later for protesting against the king. In 1840 the brothers accepted an invitation from the king of Prussia, Frederick William IV, to go to Berlin. In 1841 they became professors at the University of Berlin, and worked with their most ambitious enterprise, the Deutsches Worterbuch, a large German dictionary. Its first volume appeared in the 1850s. The dictionary ended up being 33 volumes and was finished in the 1960s. Jacob died in 1963 and Wilhelm died in 1859.
