Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from how
Speaker 1: Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy, and today we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about the Grimm Brothers and their fairy tales,
Speaker 1: and we talked a little bit about fairy tales and
Speaker 1: blue Beard. I've been reading The Bloody Chamber by Angela
Speaker 1: Carter lately, which is really cool modern retellings of fairy
Speaker 1: tales if you want to pick it up. But we
Speaker 1: wanted to talk a little bit about fairy tales and
Speaker 1: folk tales in general and the difference between them. Folk
Speaker 1: tales start with an oral tradition and they're written down later,
Speaker 1: so they're kind of living things. Think about it. If
Speaker 1: you're telling a story over and over again, it'll change,
Speaker 1: sometimes slightly, sometimes in big ways. You might emphasize a
Speaker 1: part that you really like a lot, play down another um,
Speaker 1: and then story you tell would be different from the
Speaker 1: way I would retell it, yeah, exactly, and then it
Speaker 1: would find be written down and we'd have a folk tale. Um.
Speaker 1: Fairy tales contain magic, so you could look at it
Speaker 1: like a sub genre of folk tales or a totally
Speaker 1: different thing. And if you haven't picked up any fairy
Speaker 1: tales since your childhood, I highly recommend that you do.
Speaker 1: I took a children's lip class in college with Dr Katagina,
Speaker 1: your Jack, and she recommended the classic fairy Tales by
Speaker 1: Iona and Peter Obe and it's a really fantastic addition.
Speaker 1: And these tales are very dark. There's frog sex and
Speaker 1: decapitated heads, so keep that in mind when you start reading.
Speaker 1: We could talk about fairy tales all day, really, but
Speaker 1: we won't, so instead we're going to talk about two
Speaker 1: of the most famous men behind fairy tales and folk tales,
Speaker 1: the brothers Grimm. And the cool thing about them was
Speaker 1: that they wrote stories down like their neighbors and friends
Speaker 1: actually told them, mostly without messing too much with them.
Speaker 1: And the science of folklore began with these two. So
Speaker 1: we're going to talk about where they came from. Jacob
Speaker 1: Ludwig Carl Grimm and will Holm Carl Graham were born
Speaker 1: about a year apart in hand Out, Germany Jacob Villehem
Speaker 1: seventeen eighty six. Their parents were Philip Wilhelm Grimm, who
Speaker 1: was a lawyer in Dhortea Graham, and they were a
Speaker 1: solidly middle class family, not the kind who's going to
Speaker 1: have a a scary fairy tale childhood. Until their father dies,
Speaker 1: and that was in seventeen ninety six, and it left
Speaker 1: them quite poor, and Bill Holme was in bad health
Speaker 1: his whole life, and now Jacob, at the age of eleven,
Speaker 1: was the man of the family. So poor little guys.
Speaker 1: They soon went to live with an aunt and they
Speaker 1: pretty much do everything together for the rest of their lives.
Speaker 1: They both went to study law at the University of
Speaker 1: Marburg like their dad, but they found a new interest
Speaker 1: folk poetry. Yeah, because there they befriend Clemens Brentano, who
Speaker 1: was a German romantic who would go on to do
Speaker 1: very unusual works, taken the dictation of a nun who
Speaker 1: had received the Stigmata, and Akam von Arnhem, who collected
Speaker 1: folk songs into a book which later really influenced Maller.
Speaker 1: The grim started collecting stories and songs and poems that
Speaker 1: they hoped would have been in this book, but when
Speaker 1: they weren't, they just kept doing it on their own.
Speaker 1: Will make our own collection. They run into more trouble
Speaker 1: in eighteen o eight when their mother dies and Jacob
Speaker 1: then has five siblings to care for, and money is
Speaker 1: pretty tight. He and Wilhelm actually go hungry a lot
Speaker 1: of the time, sharing a meal a day, something that
Speaker 1: I don't know makes their reminiscent of all the starving
Speaker 1: children in their fairy tales. Yeah, he holds a lot
Speaker 1: of jobs to try to make enough money for the
Speaker 1: family too. He's a secretary to a war office and
Speaker 1: a private librarian for the King of Westphalia Um. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just a sort of tough time for the two brothers.
Speaker 1: And they ended up in a library and cough soul
Speaker 1: and officially gave up on the law to pursue their
Speaker 1: studies of folklore because they had finally found their calling.
Speaker 1: And their famous book, Kinder Owned House Mershon was published
Speaker 1: in eighteen twelve, the first volume at least the second
Speaker 1: part published in eighteen fourteen. And in that table of
Speaker 1: contents we have the Frog, King, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella,
Speaker 1: Little Red riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, snow White, and Rumpel
Speaker 1: still Skin. So all the familiar characters here. But we
Speaker 1: should say that these stories weren't new. They weren't making
Speaker 1: them up or presenting them for the first time their
Speaker 1: versions of stories that were told in many languages and
Speaker 1: many cultures, just the specific versions they happened to copy down.
Speaker 1: And this book was for adults and children, not just kids.
Speaker 1: And it wasn't at all poetic. Again, they wrote down
Speaker 1: stories the way that people told them, so there were colloquialisms,
Speaker 1: and you know, it sound a little bit more like
Speaker 1: dialogue casual exactly. And they had character, and they reflected
Speaker 1: German settings like big scary forests and German people and
Speaker 1: German values. And the stories were often very dark and
Speaker 1: contained a lot of cruelty, which this definitely reminds me
Speaker 1: of Dwight and his Grandmater reading a story about what
Speaker 1: happens to little children who stuck on their thumb. Very
Speaker 1: bad things. But the book became incredibly popular in Germany,
Speaker 1: not immediately but a bit later, and once translated in
Speaker 1: the world, it's in one hundred and sixty languages. Now
Speaker 1: you've probably seen some version of probably have an addition
Speaker 1: on your shelf, although it may be a sanitized version.
Speaker 1: They saw six editions of it just in their lifetime.
Speaker 1: The final count was something like two hundred stories and
Speaker 1: ten children's legends. And speaking of those sanitized versions. They
Speaker 1: later cleaned up a lot of their own tales to
Speaker 1: make them nicer for kids. For Punzel, for example, a
Speaker 1: dozen't have premarital set from the later ones, and no
Speaker 1: one dances herself to death in hot iron shoes. Um,
Speaker 1: and I thought that was funny because kids are so
Speaker 1: often rather ghoulish and not innocent little angels, and really
Speaker 1: enjoy some good and evil tales. Yeah. Well, and they
Speaker 1: take these tales pretty literally as cool magic stuff happening.
Speaker 1: And if you do go back and read them, you know,
Speaker 1: as an adult, you can see more of the symbolism
Speaker 1: that's really behind some of the stories. But it's important
Speaker 1: to note too that their great accomplishment wasn't just transcribing stories.
Speaker 1: Their book is considered the first scientific collection of folk tales,
Speaker 1: and the brothers were really interested in language and highly
Speaker 1: skilled researchers because their lawyers exactly that that came in
Speaker 1: to serve them well. They both studied medieval manuscripts and
Speaker 1: the history of law, and after this they published a
Speaker 1: book of German legends and a translation of Irish tales,
Speaker 1: along with lots of critical essays and interpretations of what
Speaker 1: folklore meant. These guys are a pretty big deal in
Speaker 1: the academic world. Consequently, Yaka more than will Holm. But
Speaker 1: Yacop has other projects to work on philology and linguistics,
Speaker 1: and if we got too much into some of those subjects,
Speaker 1: I think most of you would fall asleep during the pout.
Speaker 1: But he writes a giant grammar book. That's a good example.
Speaker 1: You might get one weekly and another book on the
Speaker 1: history of the German language. And there's even a linguistic
Speaker 1: law named after him, Grimm's law. If anyone would like
Speaker 1: to explain it to us more clearly, please email us
Speaker 1: at History podcast at how stuff Works dot com. And
Speaker 1: he also did a lot on Teutonic mythology, which makes
Speaker 1: sense because that's going to be pretty close to your
Speaker 1: Germanic folk tales. And as far as their academic careers,
Speaker 1: they had to leave Kastle in eighteen nine do to
Speaker 1: some politics of higher academia and they went to the
Speaker 1: University of Guttingen instead, But when they protested against some
Speaker 1: political actions of the King of Hanover, they were let go.
Speaker 1: So they were men of principle as grims, but they
Speaker 1: were in great demand even after they were let go,
Speaker 1: and they were trying to decide where they would settle,
Speaker 1: and they chose the University of Berlin as the place
Speaker 1: to continue their work and their lectures, and they started
Speaker 1: writing an absolutely enormous German dictionary, the Deutsche forger Book.
Speaker 1: And please excuse me if that's not the correct pronunciation,
Speaker 1: but it took one hundred years to finish, so obviously
Speaker 1: it wasn't them living ageless, and we wouldn't that be
Speaker 1: a great grim spiry tale. Fantastic. They're like two d
Speaker 1: years old work in the dictionary. But everything you could
Speaker 1: ever possibly want to know about any German word ever,
Speaker 1: isn't this, and I mean everything. According to Britannica, Yakob
Speaker 1: only lived to see it get to the letter f
Speaker 1: and now it's thirty two volumes. And another thing we
Speaker 1: thought was kind of cool about these two guys is
Speaker 1: how close they are. They of together, and they worked together.
Speaker 1: Jacob even lives with his brother after Wilhelm gets married,
Speaker 1: all of them getting along pretty well with the kids
Speaker 1: in the house and fairy tales presumably being told. Bill
Speaker 1: Holmes's son said about them. The brothers had one house,
Speaker 1: one library, one purse, and Wilhelm died in Berlin on
Speaker 1: December six, eighteen fifty nine. Jacob died there on September
Speaker 1: sixty three, and I imagine Jacob was rather lonely without
Speaker 1: his lifetime companion. In his eulogy he called Bill Holme
Speaker 1: the fairy tale brother. So that's the end of our
Speaker 1: Grim Brothers podcast. And that brings us to listener Mail.
Speaker 1: This is another edition of real Mail, this time from
Speaker 1: Sarah in California, and she wrote us to say that
Speaker 1: she was visiting New York City for the first time
Speaker 1: and listening to one of Candice and Jane's older podcasts
Speaker 1: on trading Manhattan for Nutmeg, and just looking around her
Speaker 1: and thinking, m much is the worth a bunch of nutmeg?
Speaker 1: I guess um? And she mentioned she kept on telling
Speaker 1: all of her friends this little titbit related to that.
Speaker 1: We got an email from a listener who asked that
Speaker 1: if someone sent real mail, did that up their chances
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