Once upon a time in Germany: the Grimms’ legacy of revenge and gory redemption
It might help if we stopped calling them ‘the Brothers Grimm’, which always makes them sound like characters in one of their fairy tales. We don’t talk about ‘the Sisters Brontë’, after all. In reality, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm have been described, very accurately, as ‘visionary drudges’. The Children’s and Household Tales, the first edition of which was published in 1812, was only a part of their grand project to establish a German cultural and linguistic identity. The brothers were primarily philologists, concerned with the meaning and history of words, and their investigation of German folk culture, narratives, myths and legends was rooted in an austere examination of language. Household
