In the Review’s July 24 issue, on the occasion of the first full-length English-language biography of the Brothers Grimm in fifty years, Regina Marler writes about the Grimm family, the German Romantics, and the brothers’ scholarly dedication to the fairy tale:

A strain of medievalism was surfacing that suggested the German past might not be all rye bread and muddy farmyards—or rather that humble places and people might also generate stories, heroes, culture.

Below, alongside Marler’s essay, are six articles from our archive about fairy tales and folklore.

Regina Marler
From Riches to Rags to Renown

Like so many of the adventures recounted in their anthologies of fairy tales, the Grimm brothers’ journey to lasting fame might never have begun had they not suffered a striking reversal of fortune in childhood.

Marina Warner
Rescuing Wonderful Shivery Tales

“Folktales and fairy tales are literature from the era before silent reading; for most of us the Grimms’ tales no longer rely on print to be told and retold but after over two hundred years, the abrupt, sharp tales the brothers published have become richly patined with memories of such performances—musical versions, films, television series…as well as parents’ and schoolteachers’ readings.”

—July 9, 2015

Darryl Pinckney
The High Priestess of the Vernacular

“To present folk culture as black communities experienced it, neither intimidated nor dressed up nor mediated by an outsider, was something of a crusade for Zora Neale Hurston. She was engaged in a heroic enterprise, that of trying to scrape the blackface from folk culture, to extricate it from layers of stereotype and scorn to let it breathe.”

—September 26, 2002

Janet Adam Smith
Hard Times

“Remembering his own childhood, Hans Christian Andersen could appeal to his readers’ memories of childish humiliations, of daydreams of revenge on those by whom they had been misunderstood. And he could tell the tales in a manner that brought the teller and the hearer close together—sharing little jokes against the pompous and the powerful, enjoying the clever tricks that let the simple and the weak win through.”

—June 27, 1991

Alison Lurie
Fairy Tale Liberation

In choosing a text, the editor of a book of fairy tales can either reproduce the original version as collected in the field, or he can retell the story—with the object of making it more elegant and literary, easier for young children to understand, more moral, or less disturbing.

Fidelity to the original may seem at first the best choice, but it is not as easy as that. The semiliterate elderly rural people who are folklorists’ usual informants tend to repeat themselves and forget episodes. Even the literary version may be incomplete: Perrault’s “Little Red Riding-Hood” ends with both the heroine and her grandmother eaten alive. No last-minute arrival of the Woodman, no miraculous surgical operation, no punishment of the Wolf. A responsible editor has to combine the available versions or select the best of them, which in this case is probably still that of the Brothers Grimm.

—December 17, 1970

Albert B. Friedman
The Best Turnips on the Creek

Those critics…who have shown how the distinctiveness of American culture evolved during the early nineteenth century, have based their studies not so much on folklore as on popular lore, i.e., on comic almanacs, songsters, and chapbooks printed in the large Eastern cities; the tall tales and legends of roaring backwoods heroes concocted by subliterary hacks; character types, like the Yankee trickster, handed down from the theater; and the songs and turns of blackface minstrelsy instead of the authentic plantation product. But under American conditions, as I shall argue presently, it is probably useless to insist on a rigid separation of popular lore from folklore.

—March 28, 1968

Matthew Hodgart
The Witches’ Secrets

“From a purely literary point of view [in Andrew Lang’s collections of fairy tales] the least literary stories are the best. They have the strongest and most poignant imagery, and the most striking dreamlike fantasy. At their purest the tales, with their intricate formal structure, offer a marvelous verbal ballet, and it is not surprising that many of them have been adapted for dancing, like Stravinsky’s Firebird.”

—December 21, 1967

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