Ogres are cool

The hyper-courtly​ Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote a verse satire in the mid-1530s that begins: ‘My mother’s maids, when they did sew and spin,/They sang sometime a song of the field mouse.’ Wyatt goes on to relate the song, which is pretty much the story of the town mouse and the country mouse as told by Horace in his Satires with some added shivers of late Henrician courtly horror. Did Wyatt’s mother’s maids read Horace? Were they reciting a folk tale they had received by oral transmission? Or (more probably) were the maids a fiction designed to mask a satire on what it was like to be a courtier in the later reign of Henry VIII – an experience which, for want of a better term, could be described as ‘grim’?

This is an extreme version of a problem that arises with many ‘folk’ tales, and indeed with many stories which present themselves as anonymously authored, or which seek to be read just as stories, as enigmatic and unsituated things that get their readers’ minds racing with excitement and perplexity by not quite making it clear where they come from or where their reader stands. Folk tales offer a kind of fabular impersonality, where an author’s voice is lost in a wider fiction machine or culture of storytelling. That form of multi-voiced impersonality played a big part in some of the most influential 20th-century fictions. It was one of the components in the authorial persona of Italo Calvino (who collected Italian folk tales), and fed into the many-personaed slipperiness of Borges’s fictions. The voice of the ‘folk’ – the ‘authentic’ voice of an oral storyteller, who might be from a lower social class than the author – can be a mask behind which the authorial agency of the collector of folk tales is concealed, or it can serve as an echo chamber for earlier stories that amplifies their weirdness, or it can just be the voice of a creator who has got inside the conventions of the folk tale completely enough to be able to make a new one. The narrators of folk tales have often been represented as women, who tell tales, supposedly, to make the labour of sewing and spinning pass more easily, or to entertain and excite their children or lull them to sleep. What could be more innocent than that?

But folk tales usually have higher designs on their readers. The Brothers Grimm (as they rapidly became known) produced their volumes of Children’s and Household Tales between 1812 and 1857. The two hundred or so tales they collected include at least half a dozen that everyone will know. Thumbling or Tom Thumb. Cinderella. Rapunzel. Little Redcap or Red Riding-Hood. They have established themselves as archetypal stories that seem to come from nowhere and to belong to everyone.

This is an illusion, albeit a powerful one, since the collection came from a distinctive place and time. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, born in the mid-1780s, were the older children of a district magistrate in Steinau in the German state of Hesse. They grew up with close links to the government of this small, rural, but relatively prosperous state. The Grimms saw Hesse invaded by Napoleon in 1806. It was then absorbed into the kingdom of Westphalia, which was ruled by Jérôme Bonaparte, the emperor’s self-indulgent youngest brother, and was intended to become a constitutional model for other German states under French rule. The threat of Frenchification during the Napoleonic era was part of what motivated the brothers in their work as collectors of German folk tales and in their closely related research into German language and philology.

The Grimms were not the conjoined and identical twins of the popular imagination. Jacob was the elder and the more scholarly of the two. He held a number of positions as a librarian, first to Bonaparte (whose inclinations were not bookish), then in the library at Kassel, and later in the University of Göttingen, where he was also a professor. Like many librarians before and since, he tried to minimise the time he wasted in meeting the unreasonable demands of readers to get access to the books in his charge. Indeed his career could be seen as a great vindication of the general grumpiness of librarians, since over many years of scholarly labour he produced a German Grammar that changed the way people thought about the interconnection and evolution of languages, as well as the first volumes of the German equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary – a project which by the time of his death in 1863 had only reached the letter ‘F’.

Jacob’s German Grammar set out principles of linguistic change that came to be given the forbidding name of ‘Grimm’s Law’. It explains the way consonants evolved between proto-Indo-European and early Germanic languages, and was one of the foundations of both comparative linguistics and the systematic study of etymology. Jacob was, even as scholars and philologists go, at the dusty end of the academic spectrum, but his nose was not always shoved up his own vowels. He, along with his brother Wilhelm, was one of seven people who lost their jobs at Göttingen after protesting against the suspension of the constitution by the new king of Hanover, Ernst August, in 1837. After the revolution of 1848 Jacob was briefly a representative at the Frankfurt National Assembly, where he supported the establishment of a constitutional monarchy over a united Germany. But he was a liberal rather than a revolutionary, and more of a scholar than either of these things. His lectures were dry and sparsely attended. He never married, and lived and worked closely with his younger brother, on whose practical and intellectual companionship he relied.

Wilhelm was the more outgoing and complex of the two. He eventually married Henriette Dorothea Wild, the daughter of a pharmacist whose family supplied many of the tales that made the Brothers Grimm famous. After the first edition of the Children’s and Household Tales in 1812 it was Wilhelm who did most of the rewriting and extending. The first edition was not child-friendly or popular. It had learned notes and included a more than usually savage story about how children learn to chop up other children. This was omitted from later editions, though the tales that remained were ruthless enough: wicked stepmothers are shod in red-hot shoes or imprisoned in spiked barrels, while Cinderella’s sisters cut off their toes in order to fit into her slipper and end up getting their eyes pecked out by doves.

A few tales survive in manuscript versions from 1810. These were skeletal. Wilhelm seems to have added ornaments and elaborations around these bones, and in several cases fused together variant versions of similar tales. As he did so, he believed that he was preserving the essence of the tale. He certainly added charm, detail, some honks of obtrusive moralism and a scattering of adjectives. The manuscript version of Snow White began: ‘Once upon a time it was winter & snowed down from the sky and a queen sat at a window of ebony wood & sewed.’ The equivalent in the first printed version is: ‘Once upon a time it was the middle of winter and the snowflakes fell like feathers from the sky. A beautiful queen sat and sewed at a window that had a frame made of black ebony.’

Myths rapidly grew up about the origins of the Household Tales. The first English translation claimed they came ‘for the most part from the mouths of German peasants’, and it’s still sometimes said that the Brothers Grimm travelled the country in search of peasant storytellers. Wilhelm marked some tales in his copy as deriving from ‘Marie’, and his son incorrectly supposed that this was a family servant known as ‘Old Marie’. The actual Marie wasn’t very old and certainly wasn’t a peasant who muttered tales while she stirred the cabbage soup. She was the daughter of a government official called Johannes Hassenpflug and her brother Ludwig married the Grimms’ sister, Charlotte.

The Grimms obtained most of their tales from middle-class folklore enthusiasts, many of whom were women. The family of August von Haxthausen (a landowner, poet and lawyer who had supported peasant uprisings against Napoleonic rule) was a good source, as was the family of Wilhelm’s future wife. The Grimms were never entirely honest about how middle-class the whole venture was. Later editions made much of the contributions of a tailor’s wife called Dorothea Viehmann. She had provided only about forty of the tales (roughly the same number as the von Haxthausens), yet her image was used as a frontispiece to the 1819 edition. Even Dorothea was not a mouthpiece for the unadulterated voice of the German people, however, since her father’s family were Huguenots who left France after the Edict of Nantes.

The Grimms never quite came to terms with the awkward fact that folk tales are the ultimate creative migrants. They spread across regional and linguistic borders and blend into one another with as much vigour and energy as languages themselves. Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou contes du temps passé of 1697 had included versions of what became known as Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Bluebeard and Puss in Boots. As early as the 1630s, Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone had presented (in a wildly ornamented Neapolitan dialect) versions of Cinderella (in which Cinderella, or Cenerentola, is given a magic date tree that provides her with gorgeous dresses and coaches) and Puss in Boots (at the end of which Puss feigns death and then leaves his master in disgust when he fails to keep his promise to honour his cat’s corpse). The Grimms came to regard the Pentamerone as the first quasi-national collection of folk tales – though Basile’s collection was more like a southern Italian answer to Boccaccio’s Decameron, with added dragons and many rococo curlicues of style, than an attempt to gather together the stories that belonged to a particular tribe or nation. The Grimms, however, wanted tales which were peculiarly German, so they cut several of those which were clearly not, notably Puss in Boots and Bluebeard, from later editions.

Ann Schmiesing’s​ very thorough biography shows the way the activities of the Grimms as both philologists and folklorists (and medievalists too) grew from a wider network of German Romantic nationalists. These included the Roman lawyer Friedrich Carl von Savigny and Clemens Brentano, the ‘co-editor’ and in many respects improver of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, for whom the Grimms gathered their first clutch of tales. The political ideal that underpinned their work was of a Germany united through a common tongue, which should be governed (in the Grimms’ preferred model) not by French invaders but by a constitutional monarch who loved the German language and (ideally) German philologists. This ideal was, needless to say, never realised during or after their lifetime. Schmiesing carefully distinguishes the Grimms’ ideal of a ‘Volk’ united by a common language from later aggressive forms of German nationalism. But it’s difficult not to see sinister potential in the antisemitism that runs through several of the tales (which Schmiesing neither ignores nor attempts to excuse) when combined with their linguistic nationalism. Imagining a German nation free of French oppression and studying the interrelationships of Germanic languages and myths are apparently innocent activities. But they were readily assimilable to – and were components in the genealogy of – later racialised forms of German nationalism. The Grimms were not Nazis, but it’s not hard to see why the Nazis loved the Grimms.

Schmiesing’s biography is a good one: it even manages to explain Grimm’s Law without inducing a narcoleptic fit in its readers. But the problem with biographies is that they are biographies. And it is perhaps the key feature of a folk tale that its ‘author’ should appear to be a biographical void. Schmiesing shows the way Wilhelm reshaped the tales and tended to diminish both the articulacy and agency of female characters in successive revisions to the collection. But a biography isn’t a good tool with which to get inside the defining and vital weirdness of the tales the Brothers Grimm collected. The stories that have been Disneyfied into blandness – Snow White, Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast – will perhaps never escape the sickly aura of a beautiful princess singing ‘Some day my prince will come’ (birds tweet) and then getting her prince, who hunkily displays the cartoonist’s idea of a lantern jaw, which those of us with more slender jawlines and less musculature I’m sure would heartily like to biff. But the Grimms’ real legacy lies elsewhere, in individual tales (and indeed a collection of tales) that don’t quite make sense or seem to add up. And these are hard to tie into even two life stories because they are hard to tie into anything at all – even, at times, themselves.

The piece of biographical information that may help most in understanding the power of Children’s and Household Tales is that Wilhelm Grimm had Technicolor nightmares. He dreamed once that Jacob was freezing to death on an ice mountain and on another occasion that his brother Ferdinand had been flayed by a machine that combined an organ with an instrument of torture. Another time he dreamed that a sorceress had transformed him into a white bird and then a horse. The savage endings of several Grimm tales have the power of repressed sadism or a nightmare behind them, but many also display the gentler surreal conjunctions of a dream. Why should a princess have to stay silent for six years and make six shirts out of asters in order to reverse a spell that has turned her brothers into swans? Why should an amiable witch warn a girl who has stumbled into a cannibals’ lair how she should hide herself to avoid being eaten? What’s in it for her? What is it with all these silver mountains that are impossibly smooth and impossible to climb, and all those dwarfs who pop up from the edge of the forest to ask for food or offer help, and who either reward or punish the vagrant princess or woodman’s son according to their response? And when a prince falls in love with a beautiful low-born girl, what is the girl herself actually thinking?

But apart from dreams – which would include the German Romantic dream of a folk consciousness – where might these stories come from? What is their implied view of the world? One unifying characteristic of the Grimms’ tales is their social environment, which is bounded by strict rules. The tales are allowed woods and witches and giants and castles and arbitrary commands (don’t use that key whatever you do), and the odd mill and mountain. There’s often one king, and sometimes several, in kingdoms amicably separated by forests, which might be full of wolves or witches or princes cursed to range around them in the form of a bear. Apart from the cursed bear-princes, that landscape does sound quite like the fissiparated Germany made up of many minor kingdoms in which the Grimms grew up.

But what these tales are absolutely forbidden from representing is any agent or action that falls into the social class or milieu of the people who chiefly collected and read them. So the Grimms’ own world of government employees, highly literate women, libraries and universities is perhaps the most profoundly forbidden space of the folk tale. Indeed you might even say that not including that world is what makes a tale seem folkish, rather than, say, novelish. Part of the fiction of the Volk is that there is an absolute social void between the princes, the kings, the princesses on the one hand, and the tailors, discharged soldiers, huntsmen, kitchen maids and impoverished forest dwellers on the other. There are no readers and no writers in the tales to bridge this gap. So if you stop being a princess you become a kitchen maid. You can’t ever become a librarian or a tax collector, but if you do right by a dwarf you might just get back to being a princess again, so long as the right prince fancies you, even if he is initially a bear or a frog.

Although the social landscape is pared down to these extremes, the methods by which one can move from one pole of the Grimms’ folk tale society to the other are almost infinite. You might be given a nut that contains a dress, which at the right moment you could put on to impress a prince; or you might be given another nut, which might hide a miniature spinning wheel that could save you in some unknown future peril when you need to spin a thread or identify yourself. A horse or a fox or a donkey or even a wolf if handled correctly might take you from the low world to the high. Throw a toad against a wall and it becomes a prince; kiss it and it becomes a prince. The sacralisation of everyday life, making the mundane thing hide a dazzle of wonder, is a recurrent feature of the tales (several of which have St Peter or the Virgin Mary roaming the earth), and is why they give the impression of being rooted in the experience of people who work with their hands or who need to imagine their way into a less gritty and less subsistence-based existence. Cinderella is a kitchen maid but isn’t really; Puss in Boots is just a cat and a dud legacy from a mean old dad, but he turns out to be the super-bragger who can imagine kingdoms into his owner’s possession; the magic tables that instantly replenish themselves with all kinds of food don’t need a lot of interpretation to seem like the wish-fulfilment fantasies of the hungry or of those who sweat in the kitchens to make the food happen.

But the tales also display a simple delight in the weird and surprising, the kind of thing that makes a child laugh uncontrollably for no obvious reason. These surprises might have threat and pleasure in equal quantities, as when a hare says to a girl: ‘Sit down on my tail and come with me to my little hut.’ And she does. Then the hare asks her to cook some green cabbage and millet while he goes off to invite the wedding guests. This time the hare isn’t a prince. He’s just a hare who has abducted the girl. So the girl makes a doll substitute of herself and skedaddles home to her mother.

And so, beyond and above the limited social spaces in which the folk tale has to operate, these are stories that offer you – and even educate you in – the rhythm of storytelling, where part of the joy is more or less knowing what’s going to happen in advance but still being delighted when it happens because there are usually surprises along the way. Many of the Grimm tales include ‘helper’ figures, who tell the heroines or heroes how to complete a trial. These are quite often dwarfs, but are sometimes talking deer or birds or old women. They will explain to each of three sons or daughters exactly what’s going to happen: turn left by the dragon, don’t steal its purse, keep on going up the glass mountain, then use your magic hat to summon an army to help you against the griffin who’ll try to stop you. The first son will turn right and get eaten, the second son will steal the dragon’s purse and get burned to a crisp or otherwise cursed, and the third son (I am a third son so I really like this bit) will drive off the griffin and crack the key to the story and probably get the princess despite being a miller’s son. These moments where the story is explained in advance are like a walk-through for a video game, and part of the pleasure in play, whether in words or in video form, is that you do it wrong a couple of times, even though you know how to do it right, and then finally you crack it. It’s the rhythm of repeat, the surprising turning into the predictable, that generates the pleasure; turn left (wrong); turn right (wrong); go straight ahead (right). Then double click the A button to cut off the dragon’s magic claw and save the princess or liberate the kingdom.

A world of options around a predetermined outcome is what makes a story. So if you have a hero who gathers together a team of characters with Marvel comics superpowers (a very fat man with an insatiable appetite, a guy with telescopic vision and a super-archer who can shoot out a wren’s eye at a range of ten miles), you know that there will be one trial where the fat man helps out by eating everything and another where something tiny at a great distance is identified by the guy with the telescopic vision so that the archer can skewer it. Although you kind of know, as part of the potential unfolding grammar of the story, that something like each of these events has got to take place, you don’t know exactly what it will be. The fat guy may have to eat an entire mountain of bread or drink a lake, rather than just chewing through a feast; or the sharp-eyed guy may use his superpower to spot a magic ring that’s making the hero fail in his task and will tell the archer to shoot it off the hero’s hand. Within bounds, the storyteller can more or less decide on the balance between fulfilling and thwarting expectations. A hare can be a prince. Or a hare can be a hare. The only rule of a tale is that everything gets used, even apparently superfluous details – though you’re allowed entirely superfluous ogres because ogres are cool. It’s a world of wishes and wonders, in which there are patterns and there are departures from patterns, but the pattern is finally all. But then the predictable gets overturned by the unpredictable. When you read ‘There once was a poor man who had four sons,’ you think: ‘No no no never; it has to be three.’ But sometimes there are four. Just because there are.

This combination of following a conventional pattern and simultaneously subverting it is probably why people have been so eager to write back against the folk tale, and why folk tales tend not to mind too much. They are like their own heroes in that you can beat them up and they still come out on top because their map of conventions is both resilient and reversible. To take a brilliant instance, Angela Carter’s ‘The Bloody Chamber’ has the mother of Bluebeard’s final victim gallop up in cowboy style at 11.59 to rescue her daughter from her wife-slaying husband. To think of this retelling as a counter-version to the traditional horror of the murderous male and the passive female victim, which heroically resists or simply inverts the gender stereotypes of folk tales, is enticing but a bit too simple. Folk tales often tug their reteller in surprising directions. They are self-versioning, in that they constantly play off and against expectations and provide patterns for others to follow. They also have a kind of resilience, which means that adaptations of them will often reveal things that the author of the new version might not want to be there, or perhaps might only unconsciously want to be there. The uneasy but repeated fascination with sexual humiliation in many of Carter’s versions of folk tales, for instance, is probably not quite the explicit content she would have wanted to put in them, and has sometimes made her readers squeamish; but the story of Bluebeard is strong enough not to let a queasy pleasure in being one cause of your own suffering go away however hard a rewriter might try to eradicate that queasiness. Why unlock the chamber you know is forbidden and which you suspect must be bloody unless some part of you wants to be hurt?

Versions of the Grimms’ tales often let awkward hidden truths from the lives of their adapters leech through. Günter Grass – who did not reveal until 2006 that he had in his youth been a member of the Waffen-SS – was a persistent adapter of the tales. As Schmiesing notes, the Grimms’ stories about Thumbling – the tiny tailor’s son who can rob from robbers, get swallowed by a cow and end up in a sausage and still escape – feed into the diminutive figure of Oskar Matzerath in Grass’s Tin Drum, in which a tiny hero comes to embody a national history that encompasses National Socialism and marches right on through its horrors. It is almost as though the Grimms’ tale is being made simultaneously to reveal and conceal the thing about Grass’s past, as well as about the history of the nation, which he does not want fully to own. The Grimms’ construction of these curious stories as ‘folk’ tales has not just licensed their transformation but has more or less mandated that transformation. Transforming them is allowed because ‘folk tales’ are ‘common’ in their ownership and perhaps even archetypal in their significance. But transforming them is not a neutral writerly act. They are (supposedly) expressions of the mind of the folk, and so could be regarded as manifestations of a wider national ideal or maybe even an underlying collective view of the world. Hence transforming them might be a way of changing through the work of the imagination what the world thinks about gender or class relations – or even just what it thinks about toads. But the tales have the strength that comes from (probably) being the products of more than one mind, and from having been rolled around and misremembered over and over again. That means they rise above biography; but it also means they have enough surprises and depths to them that they can bite back, or make you encounter things about yourself that you might want to repress when you try to retell them.