Other tales have similarly gory episodes. Even the love stories contain violence. Snow White is just 7 years old when the huntsman takes her into the forest with orders to bring back her liver and lungs. She then chops up his body, cooks him in a stew and serves it to her husband, who enjoys the meal so much he asks for seconds. Anti-Semitism The Grimms gathered over tales for their collection, three of which contained Jewish characters.
Most of them were women, one of whom, Dorothea Wild, would later marry Wilhelm. She shared the many tales that travellers had told to her. Brentano did not use the 54 tales that Jacob and Wilhelm sent him in , but Arnim urged them to publish their collection nonetheless. Over a year span, seven editions of the folktale collection were published.
The final edition, published in , is the best known and is notably different from the first in both style and content. In later editions, Wilhelm expanded the originally shorter, sparser prose and modified plots to make parts of the dark, tragic stories more accessible to children.
See also: Ten things you didn't know about Aladdin. Beginning in , illustrations were added to the books. The Grimms had not intended to publish a book of folktales. They wanted to resurrect the German oral tradition, but in the process, they ultimately curated a culturally encompassing collection of tales. As it turns out, the theme of leaving children in the woods was quite popular in European folktales.
A French story, "Le Petit Poucet" from , starts out almost identically, while Madame d'Aulnoy's "Finette Cendron" mentions three princesses who get lost in the woods and find their way to an ogre's house. A miller's daughter is locked in a castle and forced to spin straw into gold.
Fortunately, Rumpelstiltskin comes to her rescue, spinning straw into gold in return for her valuables. In the end, it doesn't quite work out for Rumpelstiltskin, who suffers the unusual death of being "split in two. This sinister Grimm tale may be based on true events.
A glass window in a church of Hamelin depicts a piper and has an inscription that states in "By a piper, clothed in many kinds of colors, children born in Hamelin were seduced, and lost at the place of execution near the koppen. Some Grimm fables are just too dark to be made into Disney classics. Death promises to spare no one, but tells his savior that he will give him a heads-up before his final hour.
Needless to say, death works in mysterious ways, and the youth doesn't quite get what he bargained for. The Brothers Grimm are immortalized with this statue in Kassel.
In their dark tale, a man makes a pact with an evil dwarf, promising to give up his son in exchange for riches. The outcast son goes on a series of harrowing adventures involving a snake, a princess and a magic ring. Atypically, nobody seems to have the redeeming qualities one would expect to find in a typical fairy tale protagonist. Girl meets frog, girl kisses frog, girl gets frog-turned-prince.
We all know this famous amphibious story by the Brothers Grimm, but many may not know it also goes by the title "Iron Heinrich. Moral of the story? Never say never. German scholar Eckhard Sander revealed the story of the fair princess poisoned by her step-mother may have been based on the true story of Margarete von Waldeck, a German countess born to Philip IV in She fell in love with a Spanish prince, whom her parents disapproved of, then died at the age of 21 under mysterious circumstances.
A poisoned apple, perhaps? The misadventures of a donkey, dog, cat and rooster are memorialized in the German town of Bremen where visitors are greeted by a large bronze statue of the group of critters. The story may have arrived in Europe via India as early as 91 B. Are they really so grim? Did the Grimms know these versions and leave them out of their collection?
We might never know. Highly recommended. Smith branch of the Toronto Public Library until Dec. Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www. Report an error. Journalistic Standards.
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