The Brothers Grimm

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were scholars of language. Kinder- und Hausmarchen, published in 1812, was a philological project: the point was to record how German was spoken before it changed, and the first edition came with academic notes and no illustrations. It sold poorly. What made the book famous was everything they did to it afterwards.

Across seven editions up to 1857, Wilhelm rewrote steadily. He lengthened the tales, added dialogue, made the prose warmer, inserted Christian phrasing, and cut what a nineteenth-century parent would not read aloud. He also, famously, turned mothers into stepmothers. In the 1812 Hansel and Gretel and Snow White it is the children's own mother who abandons and hunts them; by 1857 she is a stepmother in both. Violence against children was softened. Violence as punishment, at the end, was often left in or made worse.

Their sources were not the peasants of the legend. Most were educated women of their own circle in Kassel, several of Huguenot descent, who knew French collections well. Dorothea Viehmann, credited as a village storyteller, was the literate wife of a tailor and read Perrault. So a number of the most German of German tales arrived by way of France.

Jacob's other work outlasted the fairy tales in his own field. He formulated Grimm's Law, the sound shift that explains why English has father where Latin has pater, and the brothers began the Deutsches Worterbuch, a dictionary so large it was not finished until 1961, more than a century after they started it.