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Imagine Steinhau... a little town in Germany... in the late eighteenth
century... where there lived a people, now long dead, who
talked and walked and danced and sang upon this Earth...
And in that town there lived two brothers Grimm.
Jacob was a scholarly, shy type, small and slender with sharply
cut features. Wilhelm was taller, with a softer, fuller face.
He was very sociable and fond of all the arts. Their father,
a lawyer and judge, died in 1796; then, with their mother’s
passing 12 years later, the then 23-year-old Jacob was left with
the responsibility of raising his five younger brothers and a
sister. Which he did.
Eventually, the brothers followed in their father's footsteps
and went to study law at the University of Marburg, class of ‘06,
1806, with all intention of entering civil service. But fate
intervened in the form of the most dominant figure of the age
-- Napoleon. Considering himself Charlemagne’s heir, Napoleon
sent his armies to ravage Europe in an attempt to take it all,
leading ultimately to his ill-fated invasion of Russia in June,
1812. 500,000 soldiers went in. Less than 20,000 came out.
THE BEGINNING
The chaos, death, and war surrounding them changed the direction
of the Grimm brothers’ lives. When they graduated, instead
of practicing law, they began to wander the countryside, collecting
folk tales -- not even for themselves at first, but for their
friends, Clemens Brentano and Arnim von Achim, who were writing
a book of folk tales of their very own.
The folk tale is a wondrous thing -- what parents tell their
children and their children one day tell theirs. But it changes.
It’s a living, breathing life form. When people travel,
their stories go with them like ghosts in the night, and when
they find new homes, the stories change with them as well.
When people write down a fable, they’re just taking a
snap shot of what it looks like at that moment, at that time,
hearing it from that one story teller.
Encouraged by Arnim von Achim, the Grimms decided to do just
that -- take their own snap shots. Folk tales had been collected
and published countless times before the Grimms did it, even
in Germany recently by their friends. But the Grimms wanted the
real thing -- the real common people’s folk tales. For
them, the folk tale was the true poetry of the people, telling
who they were -- unaltered, with their simplicities, beauty,
boorishness, and sheer and utter randomness.
They went tirelessly from church to church, village to village,
beer hall to beer hall collecting stories from family, friends,
lovers, and strangers. They invited story tellers to their own
homes and wrote down tale after tale.
THE FIRST EDITION
The Grimms’ Collection of 198 stories was finally published
as Kinder-und Hausmarchen (Nursery and household Tales), stories
for children and adults, in 1812, the same year as Napoleon’s
disastrous retreat from Russia -- these stories are filled with
starving, desperate soldiers. It did not do well.
Many people found the tales too crude and without a clear story
or morals, ironically the same problems many have with them today.
One critic at the time wrote that the few good stories were overshadowed
by large quantities of “the most pathetic and tasteless
material imaginable.”
Of course, the Critic who wrote that is now long dead. But,
then again, so are the Grimms. And all the people who originally
told these stories.
Faced with the prospect of a not entirely successful book, the
Grimms did what any intelligent writer would do. They rewrote.
They put out seven editions in their lifetimes. They put new
stories in, took some out, and changed some of the ones that
remained, all in an attempt to make them more palatable. Like
for Snow White, it’s the girl’s natural mother who
succumbs to murderous jealousy, not the stepmother, and tries
to kill her in the first two editions.
So the Grimms cleaned the stories up. They made the characters
more likable, their motives stronger, their actions clearer,
the endings more moral, and gave the stories a more consistent
style and tone. Ironically, what some do when they adapt them
today. Ironically, what the Grimms said they were trying to avoid.
And, ironically, with these changes, the book caught on. Which
is why we’re now doing a show of Grimm fables and not Achim
von Arnim’s.
END OF STORY.... END OF LIVES...
And how did it end for the Grimms? Did they live happily ever
after? Well, I’d like to think so. They became renowned
as great scholars. In 1840, the Brothers accepted an invitation
from the King of Prussia to be lecturers at the University of
Berlin and began their most ambitious enterprise, the Deutsches
Wörterbuch, an enormous German dictionary. When they had
died, they had only gotten to the letter F.
Wilhelm passed away in 1859. Jacob, his lifelong friend, became
a recluse after his brother’s death and died four years
later. They are buried together in Berlin -- respected, admired,
and presumably loved, but certainly not forgotten.
Because they left us with a wonderful gift -- the hopes, dreams,
thoughts, and fears of a people that otherwise we would have
never known. Grimm froze them for us in that moment of time.
A moment we have attempted to share, humbly, with you, tonight.
So who were these people who originally told these stories?
These now long dead ghosts? I don’t know, but if we’re
quiet... maybe we can hear them... and what they’re saying
in the tales of their lives.
- George Larkin
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