wikipedia | The Grimms believed that the most natural and pure forms of culture were linguistic and based in history.[2] The work of the Brothers Grimm influenced other collectors, both inspiring them to collect tales and leading them to similarly believe, in a spirit of romantic nationalism, that the fairy tales of a country were particularly representative of it, to the neglect of cross-cultural influence.[7] Among those influenced were the Russian Alexander Afanasyev, the Norwegians Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, the English Joseph Jacobs, and Jeremiah Curtin, an American who collected Irish tales.[8] There was not always a pleased reaction to their collection. Joseph Jacobs was in part inspired by his complaint that English children did not read English fairy tales;[9] in his own words, "What Perrault began, the Grimms completed".
W. H. Auden praised the collection during World War II as one of the founding works of Western culture.[10] The tales themselves have been put to many uses. Adolf Hitler praised them as folkish tales showing children with sound racial instincts seeking racially pure marriage partners, and so strongly that the Allies of World War II warned against them;[11] for instance, Cinderella with the heroine as racially pure, the stepmother as an alien, and the prince with an unspoiled instinct being able to distinguish.[12] Writers who have written about the Holocaust have combined the tales with their memoirs, as Jane Yolen in her Briar Rose.[13]
Three individual works of Wilhelm Grimm include Altdänische Heldenlieder, Balladen und Märchen ('Old Danish Heroic Songs, Ballads, and Folktales') in 1811, Über deutsche Runen ('On German Runes') in 1821, and Die deutsche Heldensage ('The German Heroic Saga') in 1829.
The Grimm anthology has been a source of inspiration for artists and composers. Arthur Rackham, Walter Crane and Rie Cramer are among the artists who have created illustrations based on the stories.
History | During the Third Reich, the Nazis adopted the Grimms’ tales for propaganda purposes. They claimed, for instance, that Little Red Riding Hood symbolized the German people suffering at the hands of the Jewish wolf, and that Cinderella’s Aryan purity distinguished her from her mongrel stepsisters.
Although the brothers Grimm toned down the sex in later editions of
their work, they actually ramped up the violence. A particularly
horrific incident occurs in “The Robber Bridegroom,” when some bandits
drag a maiden into their underground hideout, force her to drink wine
until her heart bursts, rip off her clothes and then hack her body into
pieces. Other tales have similarly gory episodes. In “Cinderella” the
evil stepsisters cut off their toes and heels trying to make the slipper
fit and later have their eyes pecked out by doves; in “The Six Swans”
an evil mother-in-law is burned at the stake; in “The Goose Maid” a
false bride is stripped naked, thrown into a barrel filled with nails
and dragged through the streets; and in “Snow White” the wicked queen
dies after being forced to dance in red-hot iron shoes. Even the love
stories contain violence. The princess in “The Frog King” turns her
amphibian companion into a human not by kissing it, but instead by
hurling it against a wall in frustration.
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