From Harry Potter to Power Rangers, nothing in contemporary children's culture is darker or more powerful than Grimm's fairy tales. A complete collection has just been re-issued - not just for the little people, writes Eileen Battersby.
To entertain or to teach - fairy tales do both, and as the Brothers Grimm tell them, darkly. Even the most exciting of current children's literature tends to play down the blackness.
Yet J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter series recognises the appeal of having a thoroughly evil villain, as in Lord Voldemort. Aware that children are realists with a feel for the surreal, Rowling is in turn influenced by a modern master, J.R.R.Tolkien. His epic The Lord of the Rings, while shaped by his singular genius, also reflects the central devices of the traditional fairy tale.
One of the oldest literary genres and possibly the most diverse, the fairy tale is certainly the most ambiguous. For a start, fairies, or the "little people" as they are more widely known in Ireland, are not that central (dwarves are), while witches and evil spirits are more closely connected with ghost stories.
It is interesting that Irish myths and legends tend to have quasi-heroic themes: the balance of political powers, or the pursuit of young lovers. The central European fairy tale, particularly as most Western readers know it, is more dark; menacing with a strong element of sadomasochism, adventure, robust humour and justice at work. It is an influential formula that has endured, particularly in today's animated narratives, such as Power Rangers. Truth and honour are important, and while the good suffer hardship, they usually win in the end - leaving the baddies to messy finales, such as burning shoes to dance to death in. Most importantly of all, the timeless fairy tale, though apparently intended for children - a child's imagination and innate common sense invariably grasps the gruesome logic behind the violence, the darkness and the talking animals better than any adult's - is for everyone.
The sources are complex and cross-cultural; the interpretations have become increasingly sexual. Still, literary critics aside, story remains essential to all literatures. It is as ancient as man, or more accurately, human communication. Folklore - a combination of myth, fable and oral storytelling - creates stories, many of which begin with that magical preface, "Once upon a time . . ." Such is the power of story, as well as its innate pace and tension, that when the woodcutter arrives to cut Red Cap (or Red Riding Hood) from the wolf's stomach and then pulls Grandmother free, who is going to question the story teller? Why shouldn't an evil witch's house be a trap made of bread and sweets?
Every culture has its tales, often variations of stories known in many countries and common to their respective literatures. Classic mythologies have also provided a rich base for these national literatures to draw from. As seen in the animal tales of the 6th century BC Greek storyteller Aesop (and in the tales of Boccaccio, Chaucer and in the famous Arabian sequence, The Thousand and One Nights), story is a narrative impulse, inspired by the desire to simply ask "and then what happened?"
By the early 19th century, a remarkable feat of folkloric research would gather and re-present a wealth of cultural treasures for the Fatherland and the world. No single collection of work can match the achievement of two German brothers, serious scholars of language and mythology who identified the cultural importance of oral folklore and the risk of this legacy being lost through neglect. They realised that within the old stories told by generations of German peasants lay elemental moral and religious beliefs, outweighing simple superstition. Survival in the face of poverty and starvation underlie some of the more brutal stories.
Time and tonal shifts had caused ancient myths to pass into legend and romance literature on the way to becoming tales exclusively told to children. The Grimm brothers, Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859), spent a number of years interviewing farming folk and villagers, listening to the stories these people knew by heart, and told by mouth - and wrote them down, careful to preserve the voice of the tellers.
The brothers worked in harmony. They had contrasting personalities; Jacob appears to have been hardworking, relentlessly meticulous and obsessed with accuracy. The less driven, more sympathetic Wilhelm, was equally diligent; though hampered by ill health, he was also more alert to reader-appeal and the art of shaping a story while remaining true to its source. There are several works dealing with the achievements of the Grimms. While Bruno Bettelheims's The Uses of Enchantment (1976) will have quite an impact on any reader, Haydn Middleton's Grimm's Last Fairytale (1999) is a imaginative novel based on the last journey of Jacob, who survived his brother by some four years. Throughout it, Middleton makes effective use of a line that becomes a refrain, "This is my story, I've told it, and in your hands I leave it". Biographers look at the folklore within the broader context of Grimm scholarly studies. In 1852, they began work on Deutsches Wörterbuch, the German etymological dictionary and equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary. Extending to 32 volumes, it would eventually be completed by later scholars in 1960. The patriotic Jacob, a keen supporter of German unification, also devised "Grimm's Law", an analysis of the mutations of the consonants in the various non-Jewish German languages.
But the true test of the pioneering Brothers Grimm and their influence on Western culture lies in the legacy of the 210 fairytales and folk narratives they gathered for posterity. First published in Germany in three volumes between 1812 and 1815, the first English translation of the tales appeared in 1823, while the first complete edition in English, with an introduction by the Irish writer Padraic Colum, was published in 1948. This wonderful edition has now been re-issued. Buy it. Most collections and anthologies include about 30 core classic stories. This edition is a banquet. It is not surprising that poet W.H. Auden declared "it is hardly too much to say that these tales rank next to the Bible in importance". Stories such as Little Red Cap (or Little Red Riding Hood), Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstilzskin, Rapunzel (or Sweet Rampion), The Frog-King, Little Snow White (or Snow White and the Seven Dwarves), The Golden Goose, Briar Rose (or The Sleeping Beauty), The Fisherman and His Wife, Clever Elsie, Thumbling (or Tom Thumb) Cinderella - and the list goes on - are so much part of our consciousness it is impossible not to know them. Grimm's Fairy Tales are among our first story experiences, as listeners being read to and later as readers. Some, of course, have become Disney classics, and while Snow White, Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella on film are very charming, Grimm's versions are far blacker.
Consider Little Snow White. In Grimm's version, the prince has fallen in love with the apparently dead heroine, who lies in state in her glass coffin. Having persuaded the dwarves to allow him have the dead girl's casket moved, the Prince then watches as the coffin bearers trip. The poisoned apple falls from her mouth. She revives. Meanwhile, Snow White's wicked stepmother, convinced she has finally killed her rival, consults her looking glass for reassurance. There is none: "the young Queen is fairer by far as I trow". So wretched is the stepmother at being bested, that she goes to the wedding: "and she stood still with rage and fear, and could not stir. But iron slippers had already been put upon the fire, and they were brought in with tongs, and set before her. Then she was forced to put on the red hot shoes and dance until she dropped down dead."
DETAILS are also more graphic in Cinderella. Whereas the Disney version shows the ugly, near-comic step sisters attempting to fold their big feet into the tiny glass slipper, the Grimm version describes the sisters as beautiful and "fair of face" but "vile and black of heart"; the first, obeys her mother's instructions, and cuts off her big toe in an effort to fit the slipper. Off she goes with the prince who, thanks to some helpful pigeons, notices blood trickling from the foot. The second sister slices off part of her heel. Again, she briefly fools the prince, until the pigeons again intervene. And there's more, the pigeons then peck out the eyes of each of the nasty sisters, ". . . for their wickedness and falsehood, they were punished with blindness" - who cares about losing a prince?
Throughout the stories, the emphasis shifts from talking animals, to wrongly assessed individuals who finally prove their worth, to childless women making deals in order to have a long desired daughters, to cautionary tales about greed, to enchantment and the breaking of spells. Children's literature has long since entered the science fiction and computer age. Yet these diverse, black, moralistic and often subversive folk and fairy tales, ranging in length from a paragraph to a few pages, collected by a pair of scholarly German brothers, continue to dazzle and beguile through being strange and familiar.
Grimm - Complete Fairy Tales is published by Routledge, at £9.99 sterling.
