Grimm or What?

“Love . . sky . . dream . . heart . . bird . . ”: French love songs. “Princess . . forest . . stepmother . . frog . . huntsman . . ”: German folk tales as collected and recorded by the Brothers Grimm. My father used to read them to me, translating as he went along from an old German edition in the Gothic script which had dark little line drawings. And of the key words the one that stuck was “forest”. For the strange fact was that if you look at the map, our home was surrounded by the forests of Rossendale, Trawden, Bowland and Pendle, but these forests had barely any trees and they had gone in Neolithic times if they were ever there. They were moorlands, hunted rather than farmed, and therefore casually classified as forests by the Normans. Of real, deep, dark forests there were none and that (along with the Gothic script) made real forests seem very exotic.

So there was always something exciting about forests for me and I half expected something very peculiar to happen once one had penetrated any distance into one. As time went on and I experienced a reasonable number of forests I began to realise that they were only areas full of trees where it was very easy to get lost so the expectation steadily slipped below a half, but a sliver still remains. In any case, the Grimms are not solely to blame for my forest complex. There were many reinforcements including Wind in the Willows and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. But I mainly blame the Grimms.
       There are 210 stories in the full Grimm collection. Attempting to read them en masse is undoubtedly an unnatural literary act, but it is repetitive and depressing. The temptation to construct a composite is irresistible. So here goes: A young man (ex-soldier, huntsman, or peasant chucked out of the family home because there is not enough to eat) is on the move and penetrates deep into the forest. There he meets a dwarf (or old crone or talking animal) who tells him of a cave where he will find a dragon (or large snake etc). Having killed this creature he must extract a ring from its stomach and take it to the city where it will establish his right to marry the local princess and, eventually, succeed as ruler. But when he does this the king (who doesn’t think he’s posh enough for his daughter) insists on him accomplishing a number of bizarre and pretty well impossible tasks including bringing back a donkey that poos gold bullion. He succeeds, but only with the aid of talking swans (or ravens, frogs, hares, etc) and possibly the devil’s grandmother. On completion of the tasks the swans (or whatever) turn into the handsome princes of neighbouring states who had had a spell put on them. He is allowed to marry the princess and somebody who had been unfairly influencing the king against him is torn limb from limb. This can be the king’s mother-in-law or wicked brother or a passing Jew, but whoever it is their painful demise causes great rejoicing throughout the land and a period of happiness ensues.
       An actual example: a princess and her servant girl set out to the princess’s wedding. But, on the journey, the servant girl becomes dominant and they exchange roles and clothes. It is she who marries the prince, but she is betrayed by a talking horse, which, in true Grimm fashion, continues to talk even when she has cut its head off. She is stripped naked and rolled around in a barrel full of spikes, this having been her own suggestion for what should happen to somebody who behaved like her. This is “The Goosegirl” in its original version and it would take a Thomas Bowdler to make it a fit children’s story. To be fair, it isn’t a children’s story and the ten stories classified in the Complete edition as children’s stories are much gentler and more Christian than the rest. Nor are they “fairy” stories, notwithstanding the title of the Complete set because they contain little or nothing which would be recognisable as a “fairy” in Shakespeare’s land; the confusion arises partly out of the use of the generic French term fee which can mean witch.
       I think that even people who have never read a tale collected by the Brothers Grimm have received enough of them indirectly to know that they are “gruesome”. But if you read them in succession it is not the gruesomeness, but the randomness which gets you down. Scheisse happens, Zauber happens, but not in any way you can control or treat rationally. Dead folk are sometimes brought back to life using herbs from distant mountains, but sometimes they aren’t. In terms of social science this is the “amoral” world of Sicily in the 1950s described in the researches of Edward Banfield where keeping your head down and following the dictates of your intuitive cunning  are your best options, though keeping promises can also be important. The same world is described as a “lack of civic culture” in Mexico as it is analysed in Gabriel Almond and Sydney Verba’s The Civic Culture.
There is stark contrast between these stories and those of Hans Christian Andersen who was born in 1805, twenty years after the Grimms. “The Ugly Duckling”, “The Princess and the Pea”, “The Emperor’s Clothes” et al. are meaningful modern fables. The principal difference is surely not that Andersen is Danish and the Grimms German because they are often European and even global stories in outline at least. It may be that the Grimm’s versions have a particular German slant. But the real difference is that Andersen was an “artist”, making a living and using traditional tales if at all only as an inspiration to give his audience (children and parents) what they wanted. The Grimm’s were academics, to a much greater extent trying to record the authentic flavour of folk tales before they disappeared. The earlier French collections of Charles Perrault are closer to Andersen in spirit because he was consciously adapting folk tales for the most sophisticated audience, French high society. And why is there no significant English collection? I don’t know, but I would like to think that it has something to do with the insistence of Bryant, Massingham, MacFarlane and others that an English yeoman was an entirely different creature from a continental peasant.
       And, now I recall, I did try to write my own versions in the 1980s when I had small children. I based them on pub signs and they turned out relentlessly nice and Andersen-like. My “Green Man” was merely an irritating little boggart and the wicked, kidnapping eagle in my “Eagle and Child” was dealt with by a squadron of Canada geese and suffered no worse fate than to fly away and never be seen again. Naked servant girls in barrels full of spikes would have been considered highly “inappropriate” as they say these days.
       One difference between the two published editions is that the Complete is entirely in standard English and makes no attempt at an equivalent to the stories which the Grimm’s put down in varieties of Low German and Swiss German dialects. The Selected does using an Irish dialect (of English) as the equivalent of Swiss German and a Buchan dialect as Low German. Thus, “On this the bird let the golden chain fall, and it fell exactly round the man’s neck, and so exactly that it fitted beautifully” becomes, “At that the bird lat the gowden chyne faa, an it fell richt roon the gweedman’s neck like it wiz made for im.” When does “dialect” degenerate into mere bad spelling, one wonders? More seriously it is bound to be a problem that dialect is so divisive. There are perhaps only a hundred thousand people who would be at ease in my own Pennine dialect and a good deal fewer in the Buchan. Perhaps one should stick to writing in the standard form and reading aloud in dialect?

       *       *       *       *       *       *       *       *       *       *       *       *       *       *       *

       Thus far commentary on the text laced with a little pre-existing knowledge  but no reference to the various Introductions and critical essays which are readily available. I will ignore the  Freudian and Marxian analyses in the belief that readers could easily construct their own. Ditto tedious detail about the interplay of the various motifs in folk tales. But it is amusing to learn that, given that they were collecting for more than half a century,  the Grimms in their 1843 edition included “The Princess and the Pea”, a story made up by Andersen and told to them. That would be like going in search of traditional Irish recipes and coming back with Gaelic coffee! Or that in many respects the stories are substantially bowdlerised. For example the “filthy hovels” particular peasants are said to live in are literally “pisspots”. More importantly, most of the wicked stepmothers were originally wicked mothers, but nineteenth century German society couldn’t handle that view of motherhood any more than could its English equivalent. Which puts down a good deal of (American) academic research on rates of death in childbirth and the historical significance of the stepmother.
       But there remains a huge question about how we look at these tales. They have indisputable explanatory value because they serve as an angle on some eternal human concerns, fears and aspirations. They are a guide to some deep parts of our culture, our “racial memory” as the Victorians would put it. On the other hand I am extremely suspicious of  those (like Padraic Colum in the Introduction to the Collected) who would ask us to celebrate such tales as a part of our culture we ought to value. They are nasty, superstitious, ignorant and irrational and belong in the world of “incest and Morris dancing” to borrow Sir Thomas Beecham’s phrase. The Grimms themselves were genuine liberals, banished from Hanover for their views. But their work was part of that “romantic” celebration of things folkish which offered spiritual feed to the nasty little nationalist regimes of the twentieth century. The Grimm brothers may not be morally responsible for Hitler and De Valera, but they are part of the same syndrome.

 Lincoln Allison