Grimm’s Fairy Stories

Grimm’s Fairy Stories is one of the many English language selections of the tales originally collected and published in German by the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the early decades of the nineteenth century. The original Kinder und Hausmärchen first appeared in 1812 with a second volume in 1815, and the brothers continued to revise and expand the collection across multiple editions through the 1850s.

Jacob Grimm, who lived from 1785 to 1863, was the elder of the two brothers and the more philologically oriented. He worked primarily on the linguistic and historical aspects of the German folk material that the brothers were gathering, and his Deutsche Grammatik and Deutsches Wörterbuch became foundational works in the academic study of the German language. Wilhelm Grimm, who lived from 1786 to 1859, was the principal stylistic editor of the fairy tales themselves and was responsible for much of the literary form in which the tales eventually reached the wider public.

The tales the brothers collected drew on oral and manuscript sources from across the German speaking regions of central Europe. They included some of the most famous folk narratives in the European tradition. Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, and dozens of others first reached the wider literate public through the Grimm collections. The tales had circulated in oral form for centuries before the Grimms recorded them, but the literary form the brothers gave them became the basis on which the tales subsequently entered global culture.

The early English translations were sometimes substantially edited to remove the darker and more violent elements that Victorian editors thought unsuitable for children. The actual Grimm tales are often much grimmer than the children’s versions readers grew up with. Cinderella’s stepsisters cut off parts of their feet to fit the slipper. The witch in Hansel and Gretel meets a particularly graphic end. The Brothers Grimm were preserving the folk tradition rather than softening it for nursery use.

The collection runs several hundred pages depending on the selection. For readers wanting the full Grimm tradition, the Jack Zipes translation of all 211 tales is the modern standard. For readers wanting a selection, a Grimm’s Fairy Stories collection of this kind is the natural starting point.