Charles Perrault (1628-1703)

Jacob Grimm & Wilhelm Grimm (1785-1863 & 1786-1859)

Although, the brothers Grimm were not historically the first folklorists to collect and publish folktales, they have undoubtedly been the most popular and influential. With the exception of Bible stories, probably no tales are more widely known than some of those that these two German scholars copied down and put into print in the first decades of the nineteenth century.

The Grimms were among the earliest students of European folklore to take what might be called a scholarly or scientific interest in the fairy tale. Both of them were scholars first and writers for children second. Together they devoted the greatest share of their intellectual energies not to their famous fairy tales but to a massive and pioneering multivolume dictionary of the German language. Jacob, the older of the two by a year, was primarily a grammarian and philologist; his major works include a four-volume German grammar and a two-volume history of the Germanic languages. Wilhelm, the more poetic and literary of the two, compiled, translated, and wrote copiously about heroic legends, sagas, epics, and ballads from the German past and from several other cultures as well.

As young men in their twenties, the Grimms began collecting folktales from among their neighbors and relatives—and, as word of their interest spread, from among their neighbors’ and relatives’ neighbors and relatives. They persistently sought out people with a reputation for being skillful tellers of stories like the ones that they had heard circulated orally all their lives. Their inquiries took them to kitchens, barnyards, taverns, poorhouses. In writing down the stories they heard, the Grimms tried above all to retain both the content and the manner of the tellers’ renditions.

They undertook the project not only because they found the stories interesting in themselves, but also because they believed they were salvaging remnants of a rich tradition that was in danger of being lost. The Grimms believed these stories to be fragments of grand old myths, and thus a living link with the most ancient of societies. In the preface to their first collection, which they published in 1812, they observed that their tales contained the most timeless and unchanging of situations and characters—”all who have stayed closest to nature. . . . The whole of nature is animated, as it is in the myths of a golden age. Sun, moon and stars are our fellows. They give presents and even have garments woven for themselves. Dwarfs work the ore in the mountains, nymphs sleep in the waters, birds, plants and stones can talk and express their sympathy.”

The title of that first collection was Kinder- und Hausmarchen (“Folktales for Children and the Home”), showing that the Grimms recognized that the tales would appeal to the young. By the standards of nineteenth-century publishing, the book was a decent success from its first appearance, selling out a first printing of 1,000 within a few years. But it was with the tales’ first translation into English that their truly extraordinary popularity began. Sir Edgar Taylor, a London lawyer and man of letters, translated and published a selection of Grimms’ stories as German Popular Tales in 1823, profusely illustrated with woodcuts by the famous English illustrator George Cruikshank. The book was an immediate success in England. Taylor sent copies of it to the Grimms, who heartily approved and recognized the virtues of Taylor’s livelier, less scholarly format. The Grimms soon followed Taylor’s lead and published a selection of fifty of their best-liked tales, with illustrations, in 1825. The popularity of this Kleine Ausgabe (“Little Edition”) was instantaneous.

Since then, their stories have been translated into more than seventy different languages, including Vietnamese, Moldavian, and Afrikaans, and have become known in virtually every literate culture and some that are not literate. The universality of their appeal suggests that they touch ideas and feelings lying near the heart of the human race. Attempts to define and explain this appeal have inspired the efforts not only of folklorists and literary theorists but of anthropologists, psychologists, historians, linguists, and even theologians.

Source: Griffith, John W. and Frey, Charles H. Classics of Children’s Literature, Sixth Edition. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson 2005.

Little Red-Cap

Once upon a time there was a dear little girl who was loved by everyone who looked at her, but most of all by her grandmother, and there was nothing that she would not have given to the child. Once she gave her a little cap of red velvet, which suited her so well that she would never wear anything else; so she was always called ‘Little Red- Cap.’

One day her mother said to her: ‘Come, Little Red-Cap, here is a piece of cake and a bottle of wine; take them to your grandmother, she is ill and weak, and they will do her good. Set out before it gets hot, and when you are going, walk nicely and quietly and do not run off the path, or you may fall and break the bottle, and then your grandmother will get nothing; and when you go into her room, don’t forget to say, “Good morning”, and don’t peep into every corner before you do it.’

‘I will take great care,’ said Little Red-Cap to her mother, and gave her hand on it.

The grandmother lived out in the wood, half a league from the village, and just as Little Red-Cap entered the wood, a wolf met her. Red-Cap did not know what a wicked creature he was, and was not at all afraid of him.

‘Good day, Little Red-Cap,’ said he.

‘Thank you kindly, wolf.’

‘Whither away so early, Little Red-Cap?’

‘To my grandmother’s.’

‘What have you got in your apron?’

‘Cake and wine; yesterday was baking-day, so poor sick grandmother is to have something good, to make her stronger.’

‘Where does your grandmother live, Little Red-Cap?’

‘A good quarter of a league farther on in the wood; her house stands under the three large oak-trees, the nut-trees are just below; you surely must know it,’ replied Little Red-Cap.

The wolf thought to himself: ‘What a tender young creature! what a nice plump mouthful--she will be better to eat than the old woman. I must act craftily, so as to catch both.’ So he walked for a short time by the side of Little Red-Cap, and then he said: ‘See, Little Red-Cap, how pretty the flowers are about here--why do you not look round? I believe, too, that you do not hear how sweetly the little birds are singing; you walk gravely along as if you were going to school, while everything else out here in the wood is merry.’

Little Red-Cap raised her eyes, and when she saw the sunbeams dancing here and there through the trees, and pretty flowers growing everywhere, she thought: ‘Suppose I take grandmother a fresh nosegay; that would please her too. It is so early in the day that I shall still get there in good time’; and so she ran from the path into the wood to look for flowers. And whenever she had picked one, she fancied that she saw a still prettier one farther on, and ran after it, and so got deeper and deeper into the wood.

Meanwhile the wolf ran straight to the grandmother’s house and knocked at the door.

‘Who is there?’

‘Little Red-Cap,’ replied the wolf. ‘She is bringing cake and wine; open the door.’

‘Lift the latch,’ called out the grandmother, ‘I am too weak, and cannot get up.’

The wolf lifted the latch, the door sprang open, and without saying a word he went straight to the grandmother’s bed, and devoured her. Then he put on her clothes, dressed himself in her cap laid himself in bed and drew the curtains.

Little Red-Cap, however, had been running about picking flowers, and when she had gathered so many that she could carry no more, she remembered her grandmother, and set out on the way to her.

She was surprised to find the cottage-door standing open, and when she went into the room, she had such a strange feeling that she said to herself: ‘Oh dear! how uneasy I feel today, and at other times I like being with grandmother so much.’ She called out: ‘Good morning,’ but received no answer; so she went to the bed and drew back the curtains. There lay her grandmother with her cap pulled far over her face, and looking very strange.

‘Oh! grandmother,’ she said, ‘what big ears you have!’

‘The better to hear you with, my child,’ was the reply.

‘But, grandmother, what big eyes you have!’ she said.

‘The better to see you with, my dear.’

‘But, grandmother, what large hands you have!’

‘The better to hug you with.’

‘Oh! but, grandmother, what a terrible big mouth you have!’

‘The better to eat you with!’

And scarcely had the wolf said this, than with one bound he was out of bed and swallowed up Red-Cap.

When the wolf had appeased his appetite, he lay down again in the bed, fell asleep and began to snore very loud. The huntsman was just passing the house, and thought to himself: ‘How the old woman is snoring! I must just see if she wants anything.’ So he went into the room, and when he came to the bed, he saw that the wolf was lying in it. ‘Do I find you here, you old sinner!’ said he. ‘I have long sought you!’ Then just as he was going to fire at him, it occurred to him that the wolf might have devoured the grandmother, and that she might still be saved, so he did not fire, but took a pair of scissors, and began to cut open the stomach of the sleeping wolf. When he had made two snips, he saw the little Red-Cap shining, and then he made two snips more, and the little girl sprang out, crying: ‘Ah, how frightened I have been! How dark it was inside the wolf’; and after that the aged grandmother came out alive also, but scarcely able to breathe. Red-Cap, however, quickly fetched great stones with which they filled the wolf’s belly, and when he awoke, he wanted to run away, but the stones were so heavy that he collapsed at once, and fell dead.

Then all three were delighted. The huntsman drew off the wolf’s skin and went home with it; the grandmother ate the cake and drank the wine which Red-Cap had brought, and revived, but Red-Cap thought to herself: ‘As long as I live, I will never by myself leave the path, to run into the wood, when my mother has forbidden me to do so.’

It also related that once when Red-Cap was again taking cakes to the old grandmother, another wolf spoke to her, and tried to entice her from the path. Red-Cap, however, was on her guard, and went straight forward on her way, and told her grandmother that she had met the wolf, and that he had said ‘good morning’ to her, but with such a wicked look in his eyes, that if they had not been on the public road she was certain he would have eaten her up. ‘Well,’ said the grandmother, ‘we will shut the door, that he may not come in.’ Soon afterwards the wolf knocked, and cried: ‘Open the door, grandmother, I am Little Red-Cap, and am bringing you some cakes.’ But they did not speak, or open the door, so the grey-beard stole twice or thrice round the house, and at last jumped on the roof, intending to wait until Red-Cap went home in the evening, and then to steal after her and devour her in the darkness. But the grandmother saw what was in his thoughts. In front of the house was a great stone trough, so she said to the child: ‘Take the pail, Red-Cap; I made some sausages yesterday, so carry the water in which I boiled them to the trough.’ Red-Cap carried until the great trough was quite full. Then the smell of the sausages reached the wolf, and he sniffed and peeped down, and at last stretched out his neck so far that he could no longer keep his footing and began to slip, and slipped down from the roof straight into the great trough, and was drowned. But Red-Cap went joyously home, and no one ever did anything to harm her again.

This text is based on translations from the Grimms’ Kinder und Hausmarchen by Edgar Taylor and Marian Edwardes.