Book Review: The Complete First Edition The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm
Translated and Edited by Jack Zipes
I rather boldly claimed in my critique of the translation of Charles Perrault that scholarly editions don’t tend to show the beauty of the tales. I questioned whether the authors even liked the stories they were translating. My claim is mostly rooted in fairy tale scholarship but also extends to other literary genres and time periods as well. In my Masters program, I worked primarily with Jane Austen’s archive which is scattered throughout the world, and I discovered that much of the scholarship around Austen also led me to question whether the people writing scholarship about her even liked her or her books. Anecdotally, there are many who complete degrees in the humanities only to never pick up another book again because the process of dissecting much beloved works has taken all the joy out of reading and they often forget why they chose to pursue their degree in the first place. I will also add that the reading lists at many large state-funded institutions leave a lot of really good literature out, and there is an unfortunate predisposition to reading contemporary works rather than the canon.
Fortunately, I kept my love of reading, but I never have and likely never will enjoy applying “critical theory” to the texts. It feels very much like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole. I enjoy finding connections among works, but don’t enjoy enforcing a specific lens or worldview. Books are as complicated as the people who wrote them, and likely, like the people who wrote them, the books will never be completely comprehendible. It’s why you can read a book as a teenager, in your 20s, in your 30s, and beyond and still get more and different thoughts in every reading. The more books you read, the more experience you acquire, the better and broader your interpretations and connections will be.
Fairy tales are no different. Each reading produces new ideas, new connections, and a broader understanding of human nature. It seems ironic and maybe even paradoxical because fairy tales are relatively simple. They are relatively formulaic. At first blush, re-reading short and simple tales shouldn’t lend itself to deep and critical thinking, but it does. Most of us could probably rattle of plot points of our favorite tales but we’d all tell them a little bit differently. We might emphasize the beauty of Cinderella’s clothes, or the length of Rapunzel’s hair, or the number of warts on the frog’s nose. Despite their universal applicability, fairy tales are personal. According to Northrup Frye, a prominent scholar from the 70s, fairy tales are “sentimental literature” that are a subcategory of the “Romantic” (note the capital R). He writes, "The popularity of romance, it is obvious, has much to do with its simplifying of moral facts. It relieves us from the strain of trying to be fair-minded, as we see particularly in melodrama, where we not only have outright heroism and villainy but are expected to take sides, applauding one and hissing the other" (50). Fairy tales are explicit as to who the good guys are who are the baddies which is reinforced by in the genre by the form.
Like Lewis mentioned the necessary structure of the fairy tale, Frye agrees that "In the general area of [R]omance we find highly stylized patterns like the detective story, which are so conventionalized as to resemble games. We expect each game of chess to be different, but we do not want the conventions of the game itself to alter, or to see a chess game in which the bishops move in straight lines and the rooks diagonally. Whether we consider detective stories worth reading or not depends on our willingness to accept the convention" (44). I argue (and I think Lewis would agree) the same can be said for fairy tales. It can be rather jarring when we see the bad fairy made good or the good falter where it clearly should have overcome. Tolkien refers to the joyful turn as the “eucatastrophe,” the moment when all was made right.
If fairy tales aren’t made right, something has gone wrong.
Unlike Betts, Jack Zipes appears to love and appreciate the genre he writes about. I have some serious questions for Zipes’ interpretations of fairy tales as he tends to take a highly politicized view, but with his Complete First Edition The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, I appreciate his relative neutrality.
He uses the 1812 edition which is important because most scholars use the 1857 edition as the authoritative copy-text because it is the most “recent” publication and Wilhelm Grimm made a lot of edits. Most scholars and publishers tend to err on the side of the author’s wishes in regards to how a work is published, but there are varying degrees to which accuracy, authenticity, and plain-old spite factor in publishing any type of work, especially those published in the 19th and previous centuries. As far as I’m aware, Zipes’s work is the only 1812 scholarly translation. This scholarly edition includes a table of contents, author acknowledgments, an introduction (more below), a preface to Volume I, Volume I tales, a preface to Volume II, Volume II tales, a list of contributors and informants, notes for both volumes, and an index of tales.
For most scholarly editions, the introduction sets the intention of the scholarly edition as well as provides additional historical and biographical information. For fairy tales, this is incredibly important for number of reasons but the most important is arguably that there isn’t a single “author” of fairy tales and that socio-historical context matters greatly. No, Fitzgerald couldn’t have written about the disillusioned youth, post-World War, without the War itself, but fairy tale compilations are uniquely situated as cultural markers. Each edition speaks intimately of their specific time and place.
He explains of his choice of using the 1812 first edition for this scholarly edition, “They are stunning narratives precisely because they are so blunt and unpretentious.” Their brevity and frankness are what, Zipes believes, what makes this edition better suited for understanding the authorial intention of publishing the fairy tales. The Grimm Brothers were philologists, language-lovers, and wrote numerous texts on the differences between High and Low German. What better way to introduce these nuances in language than through Kinder (children’s’) and Haus (house) stories?
Zipes mentions the female influence without fixating on feminism as the lens with which to view the collection of tales. Many of the Grimms’ sources were women, but their is no evidence that suggests the brothers abused them in order to obtain these stories; most if not all were written or told directly to the brothers and then included in their compilation which included additional philological partners.
Through a few comparisons — The Frog Prince and Rapunzel — Zipes shows some of the narrative differences between the 1812 and 1857 editions. Wilhelm Grimm did expand in many cases — like with Cinderella — adding his own authorial tid-bits, making the stories more his own in a sense rather than the German peoples.
I thinks Zipes gets closest to what a good scholarly edition of a single work of fairy tales should do. Anthologies are an entirely different ball-game that we’ll dive into later.