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From: sean@panix.com (Sean Willard)
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.urban
Subject: Re: the original fairy tales, before the Brothers Grimm?
Date: 24 May 1996 20:17:19 -0400

Emily Kelly (ekelly@acpub.duke.edu) wrote: |
| : I'm not a folklorist, and all of my more credible references are where I | : am not right now, but my own understanding is that while you're correct | : that the Grimm Bros. weren't particularly interested in collecting "nice" | : stories for children, they did do some selective editing. Specifically, | : they left in most of the violence, but they excised or disguised many or | : most of the sexual references and variants.

Jennifer S. Mullen <jsm158@wileypost.cac.psu.edu> writes: | They did do a bit of cleaning up of the stories between the two editions of | the bood that were published. My copy is at home - I'll bring it down | tommorrow and type in a bit from the preface if no one else provides any | cites.

I've waited _well_ beyond the statutory 2 days that is Usenet's memory span, so here goes.

There were seven editions published---the original 1812, along with a second volume published in 1815, a second ``revised and slightly augmented'' two-volume edition in 1819, and eventually the 7th (!) edition of 1857 (each edition featured a few additional tales; there were 157 in 1815 and 201 in 1857). Not only were tales added in each new edition, slight revisions were made by Wilhelm (the more literary one; Jacob was more the scholar, who on his own would have happily transcribed verbatim the tales he collected) in the existing tales.

As to the cleaning up, Emily is more or less right, except to some extent for the first edition. In the introduction to his translation of selected tales (_Selected Tales_, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Penguin, 1982, ISBN 0-14-044401-7), David Luke writes---

Complaints that the _Tales_ were unsuited to the youthful hearers for whom they were presumed to be intended were of course raised in many quarters as soon as the 1812 volume appeared. So far as indelicate sexual details were concerned (references to extramarital pregnancy, for example) these had almost all been sufficiently veiled even in this first volume. As to violence, the Grimms defended themselves by appealing to nature and pointing out that there was violence as well as impropriety even in the Bible; Jacob in any case insisted that the _Tales_ were not intended solely as a children's book. But they did make some further concessions to tender susceptibilities, excising after the first edition, for example, two brief anecdotes---old stories which had already been published for a century and more and were in all probability based on real-life incidents---about young children playing at being butchers.

Some changes that were made after the first edition: the cruel mothers of Hansel and Gretel and of Snowwhite became stepmothers--- though Luke says

In changing Hansel and Gretel's and Snowwhite's mothers to their stepmothers in the later editions, the Grimms were following an instinctively wise convention. A stepmother is near enough to a real mother to represent her, but different enough from her to be hated with a good conscience.

In ``Rapunzel'', the 1812 version had the girl's secret affair with the prince discovered when she asks the sorceress her jailor why her dresses no longer fit! In later versions she asks why it's getting harder to pull her up than the prince.

In ``The Blue Lamp'', involving a spirit-summoning lamp like Aladdin's, the hero's final wish is originally to have the spirit kill all the baddies and hack the evil king into three pieces; in later editions everyone is knocked to the ground with a cudgel and the king gives the hero his kingdom and his daughter in marriage.

In a tale called ``The Three Army-Surgeons'' a pig-eyed man (literally) is drawn to wallow in `filth'; the 1815 edition used a ``less polite German word'' than in later editions.

The other changes mentioned are all pretty minor and not of a sanitizing nature.

More Luke on fairytale violence:

It is hardly necessary to point out that violence is characteristic of folktale [urban as well as traditional! - sw] and myth as such, and that these fantasies were not the Grimms' own or peculiarly German, as some have naively supposed.... But the possibility that emerges more clearly in the psychoanalytical perspective is that for the child, in whom violent impulses and guilt about them exist anyway, repeated encounters with such fictional events, so far from being frightening or disturbing, may be satisfying, guilt-relieving, reassuring and therapeutic. (A seven-year-old to whom a solicitous adult read `Snowwhite' but censored its ending promptly complained about the omission of the bit about the red-hot slippers.)

Sean