Infanticide, incest, cannibalism ... the real Brothers Grimm

I would like to tell you a story : he was once a woman who wanted more than anything in the world, having a child. A winter day , she cut his finger while peeling an apple in his garden juniper , and some blood dripped on the snow. Nine months later she gave birth to a boy with skin as white as snow and lips as red as blood. Unfortunately she died at birth and , over time , her husband ends up taking a new wife, who bore him a daughter .

The stepmother hated the boy and made his life impossible . One day, she invited him to choose an apple in a safe , when the toddler leaned to grasp , she slammed the lid so hard that the child had his head blown off. Stepmother replaced the head on the neck and the boy sat down on a chair. When the nasty little girl came home , his mother encouraged him to claim his brother apple he held in his hand: " And if you do not respond, flanked him a good slap . " Obviously, he remained silent , and his sister made ​​him flying slapping his head.

" Do not worry , I know how to hide your crime ," said the little woman . And cut the boy into small pieces to cook stew . In the evening, she served this dish to her husband who , unaware of the drama, the assessment as it ate up the last bite , throwing the small bones under the table.

Distraught with grief, then the girl began to collect the bones of his brother to deposit at the foot of juniper. Soon, a splendid bird emerges from the branches , singing a song that wonderfully stated:

My mother killed meMy father ate meMy sister buried my bones ,Under the juniper.Beautiful bird am I ! "

Thus begins the " Tale of juniper ," one of the " Märchen " collected by Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm , and first published in the " Tales of childhood and home," in 1812. In the rest of the story , justice is done when the bird uses its singing to destroy her stepmother and recover human form.

Dance to death in iron shoes white hot

Most readers know that the original version of the Brothers Grimm is more violent and atrocious than their contemporary version . It shows the murderous queen put on a show at the wedding of Snow White, forced to dance to death in red-hot shoes iron half- sisters of Cinderella mutilate feet ( intersecting toe and one end of the heel ) to enter the slipper . The origin stories , as we could read in " National Geographic ", " tell the story as it has been known to generations of people in Central Europe - . Capricious and often cruel"



Popular culture has recently reinvented the Brothers Grimm itinerant charlatans ( in the eponymous 2005 film ) and founder of a dynasty of paranormal inspectors ( in police television series Grimm) . But in reality, the tandem exercised almost as strange craft , although less dashing They were philologists . Writing a definitive dictionary German was their great work - even if they were still in the letter F at the time of Jacob's death in 1863 , four years after the death of his younger brother .

Philologists are intended to go to the root words, and the Brothers Grimm also saw the stories they had begun to gather in the early nineteenth century in Germany, as the roots of their kind . And they were not alone in thinking . JRR Tolkien, another philologist fascinated by fairy tales , said that questions about their origin returned to wonder about " the origin of language and mind ."

What sibling ?

The contemporary novelist Philip Pullman, who recently published a book in which he proposes to adapt fifty of his favorite Grimm tales , once described their collection as " the primary source " ( 1). The austere simplicity of the stories , the ingredients may be coolers infinity and the ability of storytelling to retain its identity across countless alterations confer a primitive essence similar to that myth. ( There are traces of a cult of the common in pagan Europe and the Egyptian myth of murder and resurrection of Osiris in the Tale of the juniper tree).

But the foundations that Grimm brothers believed in the process of exhumation were nationalistic and romantic . Their compilation was in their eyes - in the words of the specialist Maria Tatar - "a form of passive resistance, deaf protest against the Napoleonic occupation , an initiative to lay the foundations of a German cultural identity. " Les " Märchen "were a piece of the fabric of Germanness .

This assimilation would weigh heavily after the Second World War, when the striking cruelty stories ( where there is cannibalism , incisional hernia , murder by immersion in a barrel filled with poisonous snakes [ in " The Twelve Brothers . "], etc. ) and access to anti-Semitism would be taken as evidence of a national psyche perverted - if not the actual cause of evil.

Ironically , Grimm's fairy tales were not so German it . The preface to the first edition announced to readers: they were about to discover stories that certainly drawn from multiple sources, were "the oldest and most beautiful stories " presented " in as pure a form as possible " .

The second volume , published in 1815, which claimed "purely German " had a particular value in the accounts of the storyteller Dorothea Viehmann , whose memory showed , certified the Grimm brothers, "attachment to tradition is more strong among those who still adhere to the same lifestyle that we ( who have a tendency to want to change ) can not understand . "

Viehmann , they claimed "peasant " was indeed tailor woman , and from a long line of French Huguenots. As Maria Tatar writes in the first pages of his new book , " The Annotated Brothers Grimm ," Viehmann " was very likely also familiar fairy tales that French German Märchen ."

What oral tradition?

Tales - where there is " Bluebeard " and " Puss in Boots " will disappear later editions for excess Frenchness - were part of a genre popularized had written a century ago, Charles Perrault and a circle of Parisian writers of good family. It was sophisticated literary works intended for an adult audience , the idea of ​​a specific children's literature does not appear before the nineteenth century .

The compilation of Brothers Grimm embodied a company of any nature, which prefigured the new science of folklore , it was above all an act of nostalgia , reflecting a shared desire to reclaim traditions then cultural extinction.

Nothing is more modern than the idealization of the premodern past , be it in imaginary part. Most sources Brothers Grimm were not farmers , but their bourgeois and educated peers. The " Tale of juniper " , as another iconic story, "The Fisherman and his wife ," and was sent to them in writing by the painter Otto Runge, who for the occasion usa patois Hamburg .

The problem when you hear restore a supposedly authentic oral tradition , it is the perpetual motion that said culture is animated. In the same population and at the same time in history , as storyteller can highlight a scary story when passages such other values ​​in the comic parts . It can include the surrounding objects ( why spindles and spinning wheels occupy such a place in the story , the story helped to pass the time while in the company were taking routine domestic tasks). "The fairy tale is constantly subject to changes and alterations ," Pullman writes in the introduction to his book. Which Pullman, reinforced this belief, proceeded to remodeling, additions and other smoothing collagen participating in the collective work .

The frog who wanted to sleep with a princess

Over the centuries , successive molts have allowed the most popular wedding tastes and changing values ​​of their audience tales , this is how the stories have proved increasingly concerned with the ideal of true love . Think of the widespread belief that the character that gives its title to " Frog Prince " finds human form when the princess deign to kiss .

The version that give the Grimm brothers did not show such humility and such compassion from the irascible young girl. The story opens on his promise to take the frog to playmate , to let her sit next to him during meals , eating his plate , and even share his bed if he reports his favorite toy , a golden ball fell to the bottom of a bottomless well .

The thing done , she tries to return to its commitment , but his father decreed that she must keep its word . At the insistence of the frog to share her bed, the princess ends up throwing the frog violently against the wall. His true form , that of a handsome prince is then revealed and all is forgiven .

Kiss transformer is also absent from the version that give the Grimm Brothers ' Snow White '. The heroine wakes from sleep when enchanted servants carrying his coffin glass castle prince stumble on the road, expelling the shock the poisonous piece of apple stuck in his throat. Snow White is saved , after all, a banal accident. [ ... ]