The Grimms softened wicked mothers into stepmothers but made the punishments bloodier
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm set out as law students hoping to rescue old German stories, not to entertain children. Their first volume of 1812 was attacked as unfit for young readers, so over seven editions they rewrote the tales, cutting sexual hints and replacing cruel mothers with stepmothers, while villains suffered ever harsher fates.
Both brothers studied law at Marburg, Jacob from 1802 and Wilhelm a year later, and fell under the influence of Friedrich Carl von Savigny, whose private library fed their growing interest in German history and folklore. While Jacob spent a year in Paris as Savigny's assistant, Wilhelm began collecting German literature; on returning to Kassel in 1806, Jacob switched his own focus. Their friends Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano wanted folk tales to publish and asked the pair to gather oral stories, which they did from old books and from acquaintances around Kassel.
The Children's and Household Tales appeared on 20 December 1812 with 86 stories, and a second volume of 70 came in 1815. Editions kept arriving until 1857, when the seventh reached 200 tales plus 10 children's legends. Critics had complained that the early books were packed with scholarship and unsuitable material. In response, Snow White and Hansel and Gretel lost their murderous mothers; the scholar Jack Zipes argues the brothers regarded motherhood as sacred. Rapunzel no longer asks innocently why her dress is tightening, a detail that exposed her pregnancy. Violence against villains, meanwhile, increased. A separate small edition of 50 tales for children, illustrated by their brother Ludwig Emil Grimm, ran through ten editions from 1825.
The Grimms held that authentic culture lived in language and history, and that conviction spread. Collectors such as Alexander Afanasyev in Russia and Joseph Jacobs in England began gathering national tales, often assuming, in a spirit of romantic nationalism, that such stories expressed a single country and overlooking borrowing between cultures.
Readers put the book to wildly different uses. W. H. Auden counted it among the founding works of Western culture during the Second World War, while Hitler's enthusiasm for it as racially instructive led the Allies to warn against it. UNESCO now lists it in the Memory of the World Register.
Source: Grimms' Fairy Tales
