The dark origins of Disney fairy tales - Claudia Schwabe

An evil stepmother demands a beautiful maiden’s lungs and liver;

a girl is ripped from a wolf’s stomach;

and sisters mutilate their feet to squeeze into a solid gold slipper.

During the early 1800s,

brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm gathered these unflinchingly gory details

from stories circulating around what’s now Germany.

But as the tales amassed widespread fame, they morphed dramatically.

The Brothers Grimm were born in Hanau in the 1780s.

At the time, Germanic lands didn’t yet exist

as the unified nation-state of Germany,

but were instead divided into small, independent princedoms.

And French forces exerted significant control over the region

as a result of Napoleon's expansionist aims.

Meanwhile, European Romanticism was beginning to flourish,

accompanied by movements to preserve national languages and traditions.

In their teens, the Brothers Grimm enrolled to study law at university,

and soon became interested in how local rules and customs

were embedded in folk stories.

It wasn’t long before they began undertaking their own

Romantic-nationalist project,

soliciting all manner of German folklore,

striving, they said, “to penetrate into the wild forests of [their] ancestors.”

Their aim was to foster a unifying sense of German cultural identity.

They idolized the idea of stories from the so-called “common man,”

which they viewed as evidence of a national “unspoiled imagination”

and “inner purity.”

In practice, much of what they collected came from middle and upper class sources,

and some stories had traceably transnational origins.

But the Grimms received material spanning songs, jokes, fables,

and magic fairy tales,

from books and educated young women, as well as a painter and a former soldier,

though they probably collected the most from the wife of a tailor.

They published their first volume, “Children’s and Household Tales,” in 1812.

But from the stepmother who serves her husband his own son for dinner,

to the man who murders his brother in order to marry a princess

and then gets drowned in a sack,

these stories were far from cozy.

In fact, originally, the stories were for adults,

and often dealt with difficult realities,

like parents abandoning their children in the woods due to poverty

and weary soldiers deserting the army.

The happier turns were often escapist fantasies from harsh circumstances,

like a princess who throws a frog she's forced to marry against a wall,

only to reveal a dashing prince.

The first two volumes the Brothers Grimm published

tended to reflect the horror and strangeness of the tales

they originally collected.

But many readers found their content disturbing, and they didn’t sell well.

However, an English version that was shorter, heavily illustrated,

and geared towards children, did.

And as their financial and family obligations grew,

the brothers began to edit more actively.

In 1825, the Brothers Grimm published a “Small Edition”

that incorporated illustrations

and was intended to appeal to newer, Romantic ideals of childhood

and more conservative, middle and upper class Christian sensibilities.

A gory tale of kids “playing” pig and butcher, for example,

didn’t make the cut.

Meanwhile, the original negligent biological mothers

of “Snow White” and “Hansel and Gretel”

transformed into wicked stepmothers in later editions,

helping reinforce traditional gender roles

framing biological mothers as virtuous, feminine, and nurturing.

And while at first Rapunzel was revealed to have been entertaining

her princely visitor when she becomes pregnant;

with revision, she simply let slip about him—

no out-of-wedlock sex implied.

The brothers also accentuated some retributive violence,

making for more cautionary tales.

For example, the Grimms’ earliest version of Cinderella

ends after she is whisked away in her prince’s carriage,

while their last version concludes with birds pecking out her stepsisters’ eyes.

Over their lifetimes, the brothers published seven editions of the tales,

which became increasingly popular as they deleted and added stories

while intensively editing them to fit more puritanical tastes

and amplifying narrative and descriptive details.

Additional adaptations by others saw the stories evolve further.

No longer would Snow White be revived by a stumbling pallbearer,

but a prince’s kiss,

and henceforth her witchy stepmother wouldn’t dance herself to death

in iron shoes on a scorching bed of coals.

In other words, they'd grow to be not quite so unconventional

or grim as their origins.