Kinder‐ und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales, 1812–15), compiled by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and edited by Wilhelm Grimm, is one of the most influential tale collections in the Western world. Translated into scores of languages, Children's and Household Tales has enriched children's literature world‐wide.
Nearly all of the tales of volume I of the first edition (1812) came from young acquaintances in the Grimms' bourgeois circle in Cassel and nearby towns. Volume II (1815) had a radically different character, its stories stamped by the plots and diction of Dorothea Viehmann, a tailor's widow from the neighbouring village of Zwehrn.
Children's and Household Tales appeared in seven Large (1812–15, 1819, 1837, 1840, 1843, 1850, 1857) and ten 50‐story Small Editions (1825, 1833, 1836, 1839, 1841, 1844, 1847, 1850, 1853, 1858). Often adding new tales from published sources, occasionally substituting more authentic versions, and constantly smoothing their literary style, Wilhelm set an international standard for fairy tales, the Gattung Grimm (Grimm genre).
Within Germany Children's and Household Tales was also published as popular poster‐sized Bilderbogen (broadsides). Single‐text editions, such as ‘Hänsel und Gretel’ appeared early, as did illegal pirated editions of the Small Edition. In addition, other tale collectors frequently incorporated the Grimms' tales into their own works. From the early 19th century, Children's and Household Tales attracted the interest of the world's principal illustrators of children's literature.
The publishing history of Children's and Household Tales falls into two clearly demarcated segments. During nearly the whole of the 19th century (1806–93) the Tales continued under the legal control of Jacob and Wilhelm and, after their deaths, of Wilhelm's son Hermann. The family marketed the Tales conservatively, in complete editions, whether Large or Small, and apparently without offering cheaply printed editions for mass consumption. When copyright lapsed in 1893, 30 years after Jacob's death, an explosive increase in the number and kinds of editions followed. This wave of printings, in addition to the tales' historical inclusion in school readers in the preceding decades, brought Children's and Household Tales into the 20th century on a crest that remained high till a generation ago.
The history of publishing and reading in Germany reveals that a flood of fairy‐tale books (Märchenbücher) had inundated Germany's women readers from the late 1700s onward, and, in fact, most of the tales the Grimms collected in the early years have been identified in published sources. In all probability, therefore, the Grimms' early informants' tales derived not from the folk but either directly or indirectly from printed books. In the 19th and 20th century, however, widespread belief in unbroken chains of oral transmission, reaching from the present to antiquity, made critics ascribe the tales' simple and simplified plots to the ‘childhood of man’ and view them as the folk equivalent of ancient Greek myth. Nationalists of the 19th century exploited this approach to posit a continuous link between the fragmented 19th‐century German nation and its medieval past. Much of the influence exerted by Children's and Household Tales in the 20th century stemmed from a related conviction among psychologists and educators that the tales metaphorically represented universal stages of children's psychological maturation.
Bibliography
- Bastian, Ulrike, Die ‘Kinder‐ und Hausmärchen’ der Brüder Grimm in der literaturpädagogischen Diskussion des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (1981).
- Hennig, Dieter, and Lauer, Bernhard (eds.), Die Brüder Grimm. Dokumente ihres Lebens und Wirkens (1985).
- McGlathery, James, Grimms' Fairy Tales: A History of Criticism on a Popular Classic (1993).
- Rölleke, Heinz, Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm (1985).
— Ruth B. Bottigheimer
