None so queer as volk

Scholars are difficult subjects for the biographer, since they spend – or fantasize about spending – most of their time at their desks. Jacob Grimm was a particularly reclusive character; his more outward-going brother Wilhelm was often debilitated by ill health. Yet the two produced a prodigious body of work, of which the famous Tales are only a tiny fragment. They edited medieval German and Scandinavian texts; Jacob produced a German Grammar which comprehended all the Germanic languages; they published collections of German legends, taken from written sources, and a compendium of German mythology; and they began on the dictionary that is Germany’s closest counterpart to the Oxford English Dictionary. Wilhelm was assigned the letter D and had completed it by his death in 1859; Jacob, a faster worker, reached F and died in 1863 midway through the word frucht (the Grimms objected to the German practice of capitalizing nouns). The dictionary was completed only in 1961.

The Grimms’ work deserves credit not only for bulk but also for originality. The medievalist Tom Shippey argues that Jacob’s German Grammar (1819-37) revolutionized the humanities much as Darwin’s Origin ofSpecies did the life sciences. For in the first volume Jacob formulated what is now called “Grimm’s Law”: the regular sound shifts whereby Indo-European p, t and k become, in Germanic languages, f, th and h (e.g. Latin pater, English father). This principle made it possible to show precisely how Indo-European languages were related and to reconstruct the vanished original which philologists call PIE (Proto-Indo-European).

All this was accomplished in poorly paid and often insecure employment as librarians, administrators and, ultimately, professors. Jacob was also a diplomat, part of the delegation that his native region, Hessen, sent to the Congress of Vienna in 1814. Public affairs unavoidably impinged on their studies. After they had reluctantly left their home town Kassel to take up chairs at Göttingen, then part of the kingdom of Hanover, its reactionary ruler, Ernst August (uncle of Queen Victoria), had no sooner taken power than he revoked the constitution granted in 1833 and demanded that all officials, including university professors, should swear allegiance to him personally. Seven eminent academics, including both Grimms, signed a protest and were dismissed; three of them, including Jacob, were expelled from Hanover. The “Göttingen Seven” would be remembered as courageous liberals; in the revolutionary year 1848, Jacob was elected to the Frankfurt Parliament, though he took little active part.

A biography of the Grimms is amply justified, and Ann Schmiesing chronicles their lives briskly, readably and often vividly, drawing on a huge body of primary and secondary literature. We hear much about their interaction with Romantic contemporaries, such as the poet Clemens Brentano and the path-breaking legal scholar Friedrich Carl von Savigny (who employed the young Jacob as his research assistant). There is an amusing glimpse of Jacob sitting in Brentano’s room, hearing him read aloud from his work, while Savigny pours red wine into the tea.

Ample space is necessarily given to the Children’s and Household Tales, the first version of which appeared in 1812, and to the many criticisms made of this project. The Grimms have been accused of sloppy research; of brazenly misleading the public by attributing to oral tradition tales that were literary in origin; and of helping to found a malign nationalism that would poison German history down to 1945. What is the truth?

Numerous collections of fairy stories already existed. In seventeenth-century France, those by Charles Perrault and Madame d’Aulnoy were an upper-class entertainment. Later, in Germany, the collections entitled Folktales of the Germans by J. K. A. Musäus and Benedikte Naubert took popular tales and elaborated them. As Schmiesing makes clear, it was this elaboration that the Grimms rejected. They wanted to preserve the simplicity of what they called Naturpoesie, “poetry of nature”, and to record stories typically told to people engaged in collective work such as spinning. Their task felt urgent. Like rescue archaeologists keeping ahead of the bulldozers, the Grimms wanted to catch oral culture before it was extinguished by the spread of literacy. So they sought out working-class storytellers, such as the retired army sergeant Johann Friedrich Krause, though some of the most prolific, such as the Märchenfrau Dorothea Viehmann and Wilhelm’s future wife Dorothea Wild, were educated and acquainted with French tales. Of course, as Maria Tatar points out in TheHard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales (1987), reciting a story to two scholars with pens in their hands was much more artificial than speaking to servants or children, and the storytellers’ tones and gestures were inevitably lost. The Tales do not so much recover oral tradition as transmute it into a new literary form.

In the preface to their first edition, the Grimms claimed: “We have tried to collect their tales in as pure a form as possible”. By this they did not mean transcribing the storyteller’s exact words; they realized that oral tales were fluid and constantly changing. Rather, they wanted to preserve the poetic core and the simple narrative style, which they considered authentic. The great Grimm scholar Heinz Rölleke (1936-2023) suggested that they found specific models in two stories in Pomeranian (north-eastern German) dialect, sent to them by the painter Philipp Otto Runge: “The Fisherman and his Wife” and “The Juniper Tree”. These are wonderfully told and structured, interspersing narrative with dialogue and verses. Having identified the true folktale spirit to their satisfaction, the Grimms found these qualities also in written texts, such as the short narratives included in sixteenth and seventeenth-century novels by Fischart and Grimmelshausen. In claiming always to detect the genuine core, the Grimms no doubt let their romantic enthusiasm run away with them. We must remember that not only the tape recorder but also the science of folklore had yet to be invented.

If the first edition of the Tales, with its heavy apparatus of notes, was intended for scholars, later editions, prepared mainly by Wilhelm, targeted parents and children. Hence the bowdlerization and the moralism with which Wilhelm has been charged. For example, in the first version of Rapunzel, the heroine, after receiving many visits from the prince, complains to her guardian fairy that her clothes are now too tight; in the second, her pregnancy is intimated more discreetly. Had they really wanted to sanitize the stories, however, the Grimms would hardly have left the fisherman and his wife living in a Pissputt, nor retained the murderous mother and the cannibalistic father in “The Juniper Tree”.

What about the Grimms’ nationalism? They played up the “German” character of their tales, replacing French with German words (e.g. “Fee” becomes “Zauberin”) and claiming that every tale was “purely German in its origins”. They knew, as Schmiesing indicates, that folktale motifs could be found in many cultures, including those of Africa and North America. Nevertheless, they were anxious to help strengthen German national identity. And a little historical imagination will show why. Two centuries earlier, Germany had provided European powers with a battleground in the Thirty Years War. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) created a patchwork of mostly petty states governed by autocrats such as those who later hampered the Grimms. After Prussia’s disastrous defeat at Jena in 1806, Napoleon invaded and reorganized Germany. Heinrich von Kleist compared this with Roman rule over Germanic tribes. In an essay on Machiavelli, the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose Addresses to the German Nation the Grimms admired, compared Germany under French rule to the helpless and divided Italy invaded by France in 1494. The Grimms likewise longed for a patriotic resurgence, which should sweep away autocracy and install constitutional governments. History took a more tortuous path, but it is deeply mistaken to see the Grimms as anticipating Bismarck and Hitler.

Finally, Jacob’s German Mythology (1835) deserves attention. This huge work aims to transfer the comparative method from philology to mythography and to reconstruct the coherent belief system that Jacob thought had once existed in Germany. He reviewed supernatural beliefs, stories about gods, elves, dwarfs and giants, and conceptions of magic and fate, drawing on medieval literature, ballads, legends and the traditions of neighbouring Slavic and Finnish peoples. He tidied up these scattered records by constructing a monotheistic system, in which the various deities were subordinate to Wotan.

German Mythology is fascinating, but so cluttered with etymologies, references and untranslated quotations that, as Schmiesing not unfairly says, it reads as though Jacob “were principally engaged in a private conversation with himself”. The book is to be quarried rather than read. An enthusiastic quarrier was Richard Wagner, who found inspiration for the theology of the Ring des Nibelungen with its supreme god Wotan, his quarrelsome wife Fricka (resembling the classical Juno), and its semi-divine Valkyries. And an even deeper immersion in Germanic lore underlies J. R. R. Tolkien’s mythology, in which the supreme god has delegated the governance of Middle-earth to a pantheon of deities, eventually assisted by lowlier immortals such as Gandalf, and a mysterious providential force steers the loss, discovery and eventual destruction of the Ring, working through the hobbits as its humble instruments. Jacob Grimm not only revolutionized linguistics but made possible works that have captivated the imaginations of innumerable readers and listeners ever since.

Ritchie Robertson’s most recent book is German Political Tragedy: The Machiavellian plot and the necessary crime, 2024

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