One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales

One Fairy Story too Many tells the tale of how the Grimms' fairy tales, beloved the world over, originated in a literary fraud. When the brothers presented these tales to the world, they claimed to have tapped an oral tradition of folk story-telling in Germany. Supposedly, the tales were written down as the Grimms heard them told by peasants and other simple, uneducated folk. But John Ellis argues in this book that the tales have little to do with (lei man folklore and that the brothers clearly knew it. Analyzing and interpreting all the available evidence, Ellis shows that the Grimms deliberately made false claims for their tales and suppressed the evidence of their actual origin. In fact, their sources were not authentic folk story-tellers, and in many cases were not even German - the celebrated Marchenfrau of Niederzwehren was educated, middle-class, and French. Moreover, the brothers' treatment of their source material was astonishingly casual. Even while claiming to be utterly true; to his sources, Wilhelm Grimm continued, throughout the seven editions, to amend and augment the tales. He changed plots, characters, literary style, and moral tone seemingly to suit his whim. Woven like a secondary plot through Ellis's account is the strange history surrounding the evidence that he uses. That the Grimms had perpetrated a fraud should have been clear to Grimm scholars' years ago - most of the evidence was available by 1924. But the wider scholarly world never received the bad news. As each new piece of damning evidence was revealed, its impact was blunted by scholars either explaining it away or making unconvincing excuses for the Grimms. The irresistible fairy tale of the two brothers going among the simple folk, carefully gathering their tales, had so beguiled even the most knowledgeable that they could not face the reality that the brothers had deliberately deceived their public German scholars, Ellis shows, were especially reluctant to question the authenticity of what had become a national monument. By comparing the Grimms' tales with the notorious Ossian forgery of James Macpherson, Ellis shows that the brothers' deception was far more serious. The paradox that Macpherson was quickly discredited and humili¬ated, while the Grimms remained immune from criticism, is explored in Ellis's historical analysis of the two cases. This book seriously calls into question the long-held notion that (he Grimms are the fathers of folklore research. One Fairy Story too Many is a provocative, well-documented book - but also a highly readable account of the text and history of a work that has achieved enormous importance in 'Western culture. Quotations from German sources are given in both English and German, and sample texts of three famous tales -The Frog prince, Sleeping Beauty, and Hansel and Gretel are provided in their original form and as later versions reworked by the Grimms.… (more)