The Fairy Tellers, page 15
By the time Jacob had written the appeal, they had already collected dozens of tales. Dortchen’s mother and her older sister Gretchen were two of their earliest sources, but Dortchen’s involvement would eclipse the rest of her family. She was especially active in the two years leading up to the publication of the first volume of the Children’s and Household Tales, from her recitation of ‘Rumpelstiltskin’ on 10 March 1811 to ‘All-Kinds-of-Fur’ on 9 October 1812, a mere two months before the first volume was published. She was still very young at this stage (which explains why she didn’t emerge even earlier in the project). When she narrated her earliest known tales to the Grimms she was fifteen, and by the time she told her version of ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, in 1811, she was seventeen. Not that she was much younger than the others. Jacob was twenty-two when the first volume was published, Wilhelm twenty-one; many of their sources were teenagers.
Which brings us back to the salons. Reminiscing many years later, Ludwig Hassenpflug, who eventually married Lotte Grimm and whose sisters contributed many iconic tales, wrote: ‘we always met there in their apartment in the Marktstrasse next to the Wild apothecary and spent very cheerful evenings there.’ This is a significant and often overlooked aspect of the project: the stories were told in a social context, in meetings between young unmarried men and women. Wilhelm and Jacob weren’t scratching their quill pens as the tales were being told. The transcriptions were made later (‘in the summer house’, ‘in the garden’, according to the annotations that Wilhelm scribbled in the margins of an early proof). When the tales were initially narrated, the brothers were hosts and compères, encouraging the girls to entertain them with their tales.
‘We have tried to grasp and interpret these tales as purely as possible,’ insisted Jacob and Wilhelm in their preface to the first published edition: ‘No incident has been added or embellished and changed.’ When we read tales like ‘The Six Swans’ or ‘All-Kinds-of-Fur’ in the first edition, we are tantalisingly close to Dortchen’s original recitals. ‘You can really hear the teller and their personality’, says Jack Zipes, translator of the Grimms and a longstanding interpreter of their tales. Reading these early versions, we are eavesdropping, as far as it’s possible, on a girl spinning tales to a boy more than two centuries ago.
On 19 January 1812 Dortchen told Wilhelm some tales ‘by the oven in the garden house’ belonging to her married sister Hanne in Nentershausen, thirty-three miles from Kassel. There, in a little hut with just a porcelain stove to keep them warm, she narrated ‘The Six Swans’, ‘Sweetheart Roland’ and ‘The Singing Bone’. Given how rarely his poor health allowed him to travel, Wilhelm’s journey to Nentershausen suggests that he placed considerable value on Dortchen, or on her tales, or both. Lutheran modesty notwithstanding, it’s hard to imagine there wasn’t some kind of sexual undercurrent flowing between them as they sat together in the summer house: an unchaperoned girl aged eighteen and a boy aged twenty. And given their tastes, the grisly details (a bone singing the fate of a murdered brother, drops of speaking blood deceiving a witch, the flower-stitching mute princess smeared with blood by her vindictive mother-in-law) wouldn’t necessarily have stifled that feeling. As for the treetop striptease in ‘The Six Swans’, we can only imagine frail Wilhelm’s racing heart rate as he tried to keep his quill steady!
For anybody in doubt that loins were being stirred while lines were being scrawled, here’s the clincher: why was it only Dortchen who told her tales in the intimate settings of those summer houses? The conclusion is more than just a supposition. Dortchen had admitted her crush on Wilhelm in a letter to his sister Lotte,FN3 and the feeling was reciprocated, for they ended up sharing their lives together. But before the marriage knot could be tied, they would have to pass a few obstacles – as with any tale worth the telling.
How to Survive a Flop
The Grimms collected more than two hundred tales, from a wide range of sources. These included a retired dragoon watch master who exchanged his stories for trouser leggings, an old woman in a poorhouse in Marburg and a friend who was told the tale of ‘The Crows’ while serving at the Danish frontier, by a fellow soldier who was shot dead the next day.
There were many contributors, each with an intriguing background of their own. But if we zoom in on the most iconic stories, the ones for which the Grimms are remembered today, we find two families at the heart of the collection. These were the Wilds, Dortchen’s family, and the Hassenpflugs. The latter were three sisters – Marie, Jeanette and Amalie – who between them provided twenty-eight stories for the first edition, including ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Snow-White’. The family’s storyteller-in-chief was Marie. A frail girl with dark eyes and delicate Beidermeier ringlets, she had a habit of fainting and a knack for telling grisly tales involving lots of amputated limbs. In Wilhelm’s words, she ‘has something quite charming and intelligent about her’.
Daughters of a court judge and government official, the Hassenpflugs were Huguenots whose ancestors had fled France during the persecution of the Protestants under Louis XIV. Along with their French heritage and language (which they spoke at dinner times), they had brought with them the French contes de fées, especially the stories of Charles Perrault and the Baroness d’Aulnoy, and many of their stories were adapted from those French versions, relocating them in German forests and adding extra dollops of blood.
Here is the stinging irony at the heart of the Children’s and Household Tales: many of the most popular tales, in a collection consciously gathered ‘to salvage what was left of the priceless national resources’, in the words of Jacob Grimm, ‘still in the hands of the German folk’, were indebted to the very nation whose occupation had given that project so much urgency. Small wonder the brothers spared so little credit for this important storytelling family.
If they had to point out their sources, old village women made more sense. After all, weren’t these the people mentioned in their appeal? In that respect, ‘Old Marie’ looks like a clear candidate for attention. Real name Marie Muller, she was a widow in her sixties who lived with the Wilds in their house behind the Golden Sun. A pious Lutheran, who encouraged the girls to pray whenever there was a thunderstorm, she kept birds under her bed to fend off the vermin and had a penchant for storytelling. ‘From her,’ wrote Dortchen’s son Hermann, ‘the first volume of the tales got its most beautiful tales . . . One instantly felt that Dortchen and Gretchen probably only broadcast what Old Marie had taught them.’ Dortchen had an especially close relationship with Marie. Many years later, when the old nurse was on her deathbed, she was summoned for one last visit. Dortchen travelled through a perilous winter to reach her, and according to her daughter Auguste, ‘the old woman was so indescribably happy that it brought her back to life’.
The absence of ‘Old Marie’ from the brothers’ annotations suggests that Hermann was probably right, and her stories were retold through Dortchen rather than being narrated directly to the Grimms. Besides, the brothers had their own ‘Mother Goose’ figure – a villager to whom they devoted a detailed description in their second volume (published in 1815). Dorothea Viehmann was a tailor’s widow from nearby Niederzwehren who occasionally visited Kassel to sell fruit and vegetables. ‘She preserves the old traditions firm in her memory,’ wrote Wilhelm, ‘a gift, as she says, not granted to everyone and which many cannot retain. Withal she recreates her stories deliberately, surely, and in an unusually lively manner, taking pleasure herself in them; at first quite freely, then, if one desires, more slowly, so that after some practice one can take down her words.’
Viehmann’s stories were more representative of folk literature than those of the younger women – stories like ‘The Clever Farmer’s Daughter’, ‘Faithful Johannes’ and ‘The Little Peasant’, which illustrate the practical wisdom of the working classes. Some of her stories were more surreal, such as the extraordinary ‘Hans My Hedgehog’, in which a man with the bottom half of a human and the top half of a hedgehog plays bagpipes up a tree, rides a rooster, besieges a couple of castles, stabs a princess with his quills and marries another one. Viehmann’s stories are often remarkable, but they aren’t the ones for which the Grimms became famous.
Setting her contributions alongside the Hassenpflugs’ and Dortchen’s invites a striking suggestion. Had the Grimms followed through on their programme, collecting ‘earthy’ tales from the ‘folk’, they would have produced a fascinating, authentic collection. But they wouldn’t have become synonymous with fairy tales, and their stories would never have taken hold around the world. Young storytellers like Dortchen and Marie Hassenpflug were telling stories they had already enjoyed listening to. They gave the collection the popular appeal of stories that had already been vetted for entertainment value – by themselves.
No wonder the brothers were hoping for great success when the Children’s and Household Tales were published in December 1812. But in the course of three years only nine hundred copies were sold. And they didn’t even have the consolation of widespread critical acclaim. Following a pattern you may have noticed, the critics tucked in with their knives ready-sharpened. The collection was ‘real junk’, declared the classicist Heinrich Voß; and according to the historian Friedrich Rühs, it contained ‘the most pathetic and tasteless material imaginable’. Although there was a sprinkling of more encouraging remarks, even some of the Grimms’ closest collaborators were down on the book. Clemens Brentano, who had helped launch their story-collecting project, described the narration as ‘negligent and slovenly’ in a letter to a mutual friend: ‘If the pious editors wanted to satisfy themselves, they should have preceded every story by a psychological biography of the child or of the old woman who at all events related it badly.’
It shows the brothers’ resilience that they were able to respond to this glut of negativity. They did so by bringing out a second volume in 1815 and a second edition in 1819. They smoothed out the rough edges of the tales and stripped away some of the more controversial elements (such as the extramarital sex in ‘Rapunzel’ and the unpunished incestuous predation in ‘All-Kinds-of-Fur’). Wilhelm was the chief architect of these changes, using his poetic skills to soften the tales and make them shine. Surely now, the brothers would reap their reward?
But despite all their efforts, sales of the second edition were even worse – only 137 copies were sold in the first year. It was a disaster, and it must have been hard to see how they could come back from it. From a commercial point of view, the Grimms were on the fast track to oblivion.
The Tale of All-Kinds-of-Fur
A king promises his dying wife he will never marry again unless he finds a woman who matches her beauty and her golden hair. But after several years have passed, he realises there’s only one person who fits the bill: his daughter. To the shock of his councillors, and the distress of his daughter, he announces that he’s going to marry her.
To hold off the dreaded day, his daughter demands various presents, each of them apparently impossible: a dress as gold as the sun, another as silver as the moon, and another as bright as the stars; as well as a cloak made out of a thousand different kinds of fur. However, the king is determined, and manages to fulfil her demands. There’s only one thing for it: she will have to flee.
Packing her dresses inside a nutshell, covering her face in soot and wearing her cloak of all-kinds-of-fur, the princess hides in a forest. She is found by some passing huntsmen and taken to work in the kitchens of a palace, where she sweeps the floor and rakes the ashes, living a life of miserable drudgery.
But one day a feast is held. The girl, now known as ‘All-Kinds-of-Fur’ for the cloak she wears, cleans her face and puts on her dress as gold as the sun. She attends the feast and dances with the king. He wants to know her name, but she flees before he can find out, and returns to the kitchen. Still, she cannot avoid the king’s attention. His suspicion is roused by the delicious soup she cooks; although when he summons her, she is unrecognisable in her soot and furry cloak, and insists that she is only good for throwing boots at.
If she hid away in the kitchen, perhaps she’d avoid him, but she can’t resist dancing. When another feast takes place, she puts on her dress as silver as the moon; and at a third feast she wears her dress as bright as the stars. Each time, she escapes before the king can find out her name. But on the third occasion he slips a ring onto her finger, and when she’s back in the kitchen, he summons her once again. Although she denies she’s anybody special, he spots the ring and pushes her cloak aside, so that ‘the golden hairs came flowing out’. And so All-Kinds-of-Fur becomes the queen and they live happily ever after.
Chapter 11
The Apothecary’s Daughter
Life under military occupation is hell. Dortchen never forgot the chanting of the French soldiers: ‘Watch out farmer, I’m coming to take your cows and calves with me, and maybe I’ll take you too!’ When Napoleon suffered defeat to the Russians in 1812, losing half a million men in the carnage, liberation was short-lived. The Cossacks swept into Kassel, striding around town in bearskin coats, playing military airs on their mouth organs. Dortchen remembered the tunes so accurately she was able to play them on her piano many decades later. But the Cossacks were no more welcome than the French. Quarters were demanded in the Wilds’ house, and the soldiers bunked down on straw mattresses, terrifying the family with the fires they sparked to repair their boots, and the casual way they dropped the smouldering stumps in the straw.
But for all the discomforts of occupation, it was amongst her own kin that Dortchen suffered the most. Here’s a telling fact: all her sisters married between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, except for Dortchen, who was thirty-two. Her younger sister Mimi was called upon to sing to visitors, Gretchen was admired for her beauty, and Lisette, who spoke the best French, acted as interpreter with the occupiers. Meanwhile, Dortchen lived in their shadows. She loved to listen to the sound of rain and the crunching of wheels on the cobbles outside, enjoyed reading and was known for her friendliness to the elderly.
Her mother, Dorothea, had a ‘mild, cheerful’ temperament, and Dortchen’s memories of her were warm. When she died in 1813, Dortchen imagined the sun would never rise again. But now she had to look after her father, which could be a thankless task. She recalled that he was ‘often grumpy’. This appears to have been an understatement: so notorious was his temper that her mother used to warn the girls of ‘bad weather’ when he was on the warpath. Judging by Dortchen’s reminiscences, he was a complex character. He was generous to the poor, accepting payment in kind from those who didn’t have ready money, and distributing alms every Sunday from his living-room door; and he had a playful side, whether making animal designs out of sugar paper or drawing figures for his children with chalk.
His generosity was an expression of pride, but so was his rigid possessiveness. Socialising outside the family was off the table, and so reluctant was he to grant his daughters permission for excursions that they stopped asking him. While her other sisters chafed against his commands, and all found a way out of home, Dortchen stayed put. Certainly no rebel, she followed her father’s draconian commands, caring for him with her characteristic diligence until he died on Christmas Day 1814. There was one exception to her obedience: however much he disapproved of the Grimms (she recalled that ‘he didn’t want to know about them, who were too learned for him and also considered mocking’), she carried on visiting them.
Dortchen’s release from her father’s clutch sets the scene for the opening chapter of The Wild Girl (published in 2013), a fictionalised account of Dortchen’s life by the novelist Kate Forsyth, which imagines her as a victim of paternal abuse. ‘I was rocked back on my heels,’ said Forsyth, when I asked what it was like to come across Dortchen’s story. ‘I couldn’t believe this young woman who had been so integral to the gathering of the tales, who had told so many of my favourite tales, and then ended up marrying Wilhelm, I just couldn’t believe this story hadn’t been told.’
Delving into her research, Forsyth studied the chronology, putting together a timeline of Dortchen’s tale-telling before any scholar had done so, and in the process connected the tales with Dortchen’s life. At the heart of this story was ‘a tension between this sweet, gentle young woman and her telling these tales that contain a lot of violence and darkness and I think heartbreak as well’. This led Forsyth to the conclusion that Dortchen was a victim of sexual abuse, driven into an abyss of silence and self-loathing by her father. In her imagining, the tale of ‘All-Kinds-of-Fur’ (about a young woman escaping her incestuous predatory father) became a keystone.
The stories narrated by Dortchen certainly have some peculiar fathers. There’s the greedy miller in ‘Rumpelstiltskin’, who endangers his daughter by boasting she can spin straw into gold; the woodcutter in ‘Hansel and Gretel’, who leads his children into the forest to abandon them; not to mention the incestuous father in ‘All-Kinds-of-Fur’. ‘The stories we tell’, as Forsyth puts it, ‘are illuminating of our lives. Something drives us, connects us to these stories.’ Dortchen’s are the stories you’d expect from a young woman afraid of leaving home, who felt she had to stay long after her siblings had flown the nest. And despite all the strange and callous fathers who feature in these stories, only one of her heroines willingly escapes: the princess in ‘All-Kinds-of-Fur’, who disguises herself in a cloak of many furs to flee her father’s predation. At least, so we assume. There’s an unsettling lack of clarity in Dortchen’s original version: does she end up with another king, or has she returned to her incestuous father?
Macabre as they may be, Dortchen’s tales are certainly not pleasure-free zones. Many are spiced with humour, such as the short tale ‘Sweet Porridge’, in which a magic cooking pot keeps producing porridge until it engulfs a whole town and ‘whoever sought to go back into the town had to eat his way through’. Visual gags overlap with surreal imagery – the ridiculous costume of brightly coloured feathers worn by the escaping heroine of ‘Fitcher’s Bird’, the paper dress the heroine of ‘The Three Little Men in the Wood’ is forced to wear as she goes strawberry picking in wintertime, the ‘little house made of bread with cake for a roof and pure sugar for windows’ in ‘Hansel and Gretel’, which has evolved over time into the iconic gingerbread house. Dortchen’s tales have a knack for presenting images that stay with the reader long after we’ve finished turning the pages.
