Read Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version Online
Authors: Philip Pullman
Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm: A New English Version
FAIRY TALES FROM THE BROTHERS GRIMM
A New English Version
BY PHILIP PULLMAN
VIKING
Published by the Penguin Group
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First American edition
Published in 2012 by Viking Penguin,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Retelling and introduction copyright © Philip Pullman, 2012
All rights reserved
Published in Great Britain as
Grimm Tales: For Young and Old
by Penguin Books Ltd.
“The Book of Ephraim” from
The Changing Light at Sandover
by James Merrill. Copyright © 1980, 1982 by James Merrill. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Kinder- und Hausmärchen. English.
Fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm : a new English version / [edited by ] Philip Pullman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-101-60103-7
1. Fairy tales--Germany. 2. Pullman, Philip, 1946- I. Grimm, Jacob, 1785-1863. II. Grimm, Wilhelm, 1876-1859. III. Title.
GR166.K5613 2012398.20943--dc232012027181
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
CONTENTS
FAIRY TALES FROM THE BROTHERS GRIMM
The Frog King, or Iron Heinrich
The Cat and the Mouse Set Up House
The Boy Who Left Home to Find Out About the Shivers
Little Brother and Little Sister
The Three Little Men in the Woods
The Mouse, the Bird and the Sausage
The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs
Six Who Made Their Way in the World
One Eye, Two Eyes and Three Eyes
INTRODUCTION
Fed
Up so long and variously by
Our age’s fancy narrative concoctions,
I yearned for the kind of unseasoned telling found
In legends, fairy tales, a tone licked clean
Over the centuries by mild old tongues,
Grandam to cub, serene, anonymous.
. . . So my narrative
Wanted to be limpid, unfragmented;
My characters, conventional stock figures
Afflicted to a minimal degree
With personality and past experience –
A witch, a hermit, innocent young lovers,
The kinds of being we recall from Grimm,
Jung, Verdi, and the commedia dell’arte.
So writes the American poet James Merrill at the opening of ‘The Book of Ephraim’, the first part of his extraordinary long poem
The Changing Light at Sandover
(1982). Discussing the way in which he hopes to tell a story of his own, he singles out two of the most important characteristics of the fairy tale, as he sees it: the ‘serene, anonymous’ voice in which it’s told, and the ‘conventional, stock figures’ who inhabit it.
When Merrill mentions ‘Grimm’, he needs to say no more: we all know what he means. For most Western readers and writers in the past two hundred years, the
Kinder- und Hausmärchen
(
Children’s and Household Tales
) of the Brothers Grimm has been the fountain and origin of the Western fairy tale, the greatest collection, the most widely distributed in the largest number of languages, the home of all we feel to be unique in that kind of story.
But if the Grimm brothers hadn’t collected all those tales, no doubt someone else would have done. Others were already doing something similar, in fact. The early nineteenth century was a time of great intellectual excitement in Germany, a time when scholars of law, of history, of language were examining and arguing about what it meant to be German in the first place, when there was no Germany as such but instead three hundred or so independent states – kingdoms, principalities, grand duchies, duchies, landgraviates, margraviates, electorates, bishoprics and so on, the fragmented detritus of the Holy Roman Empire.
The facts of the Grimm brothers’ lives are not remarkable. Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859) were the eldest surviving sons of Philipp Wilhelm Grimm, a prosperous lawyer of Hanau in the principality of Hesse, and his wife Dorothea. They received a classical education and were brought up in the Reformed Calvinist Church. Clever, diligent and serious-minded, they aimed to follow their father into the legal profession, in which they would no doubt have distinguished themselves; but his sudden death in 1796 meant that the family, which now included six children, had to depend on the support of their mother’s relatives. Their aunt Henriette Zimmer, a lady-in-waiting at the prince’s court in Kassel, helped Jacob and Wilhelm to find places at the
Lyzeum
or high school, where they each graduated at the head of their class. But there was little money, and when they attended the University of Marburg they had to live very frugally.
At Marburg they fell under the influence of Professor Friedrich Carl von Savigny, whose idea that law grew naturally out of the language and history of a people and should not be arbitrarily applied from above turned the Grimms to the study of philology. Through von Savigny and his wife Kunigunde Brentano, they also made the acquaintance of the circle around her brother Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, who married Brentano’s other sister, the writer Bettina. One of the preoccupations of this group was German folklore. Their enthusiasm for this subject resulted in von Arnim and Brentano’s
Des Knaben Wunderhorn
(
The Youth’s Magic Horn
), a collection of folk songs and folk poetry of all kinds, the first volume of which appeared in 1805 and immediately became popular.
The Grimm brothers were naturally interested in this, but not uncritically: Jacob wrote in a letter to Wilhelm in May 1809 of his disapproval of the way in which Brentano and von Arnim had treated their material, cutting and adding and modernizing and rewriting as they thought fit. Later, the Grimms (and Wilhelm in particular) would be criticized on much the same grounds for the way they treated their source material for the
Kinder- und Hausmärchen
.
At all events, the decision by the Grimm brothers to collect and publish fairy tales was not an isolated phenomenon, but part of a widespread preoccupation of the time.
The sources they depended on were both oral and literary. One thing they did not do was walk the countryside, seeking out peasants in their fields and cottages and taking down their stories word by word. Some of their tales were taken directly from literary sources; two of the finest,
‘The Fisherman and His Wife’
and
‘The Juniper Tree’
, were sent to them in written form by the painter Philipp Otto Runge, and reproduced by the Grimms in the Low German dialect Runge wrote them in. Much of the rest came in oral form from people at various levels of the middle class, including family friends, one of whom, Dortchen Wild, the daughter of a pharmacist, Wilhelm Grimm eventually married. After two hundred years, it’s impossible to say how exact their transcriptions were, but the same is true of any collection of folk tales or songs before the age of tape recording. What matters is the vigour and zest of the versions they published.
The Grimm brothers went on to make great and lasting contributions to philology. Grimm’s Law, formulated by Jacob, describes certain sound-changes in the history of Germanic languages; and the brothers together worked on the first great German dictionary. In 1837 came what was probably the most dramatic incident in their lives; together with five other university colleagues, they refused to take an oath of allegiance to the new king of Hanover, Ernst August, because he had illegally dissolved the constitution. As a result they were dismissed from their university posts, and had to take up appointments at the University of Berlin.
But it was the
Kinder- und Hausmärchen
for which their names are mostly remembered. Their first edition was published in 1812, and the collection went through six further editions (Wilhelm, by this stage, doing most of the editorial work) till the seventh and final one of 1857, by which time it was immensely popular. It shares its eminence only with
The
Arabian Nights
: the two of them are the most important and influential collections of folk tales ever published. Not only did the collection grow bigger, the tales themselves changed as the nineteenth century went past, becoming in Wilhelm’s hands a little longer, in some cases more elaborate, occasionally more prudish, certainly more pious than they were to begin with.
Scholars of literature and folklore, of cultural and political history, theorists of a Freudian, Jungian, Christian, Marxist, structuralist, post-structuralist, feminist, postmodernist and every other kind of tendency have found immense riches for their study in these 210 tales. Some of the books and essays I’ve found most useful and interesting are listed in the Bibliography, and no doubt they and others have influenced my reading and retelling in ways I’m not conscious of.
But my main interest has always been in how the tales worked
as stories
. All I set out to do in this book was tell the best and most interesting of them, clearing out of the way anything that would prevent them from running freely. I didn’t want to put them in modern settings, or produce personal interpretations or compose poetic variations on the originals; I just wanted to produce a version that was as clear as water. My guiding question has been: ‘How would I tell this story myself, if I’d heard it told by someone else and wanted to pass it on?’ Any changes I’ve made have been for the purpose of helping the story emerge more naturally in my voice. If, as happened occasionally, I thought an improvement was possible, I’ve either made a small change or two in the text itself or suggested a larger one in the note that follows the story. (An example of this happens with the story
‘Thousandfurs’
, which seems to me only half finished in the original.)
‘Conventional stock figures’
There is no psychology in a fairy tale. The characters have little interior life; their motives are clear and obvious. If people are good, they are good, and if bad, they’re bad. Even when the princess in
‘The Three Snake Leaves’
inexplicably and ungratefully turns against her husband, we know about it from the moment it happens. Nothing of that sort is concealed. The tremors and mysteries of human awareness, the whispers of memory, the promptings of half-understood regret or doubt or desire that are so much part of the subject matter of the modern novel are absent entirely. One might almost say that the characters in a fairy tale are not actually conscious.
They seldom have names of their own. More often than not they’re known by their occupation or their social position, or by a quirk of their dress: the miller, the princess, the captain, Bearskin, Little Red Riding Hood. When they do have a name it’s usually Hans, just as Jack is the hero of every British fairy tale.
The most fitting pictorial representation of fairy-tale characters seems to me to be found not in any of the beautifully illustrated editions of Grimm that have been published over the years, but in the little cardboard cut-out figures that come with the toy theatre. They are flat, not round. Only one side of them is visible to the audience, but that is the only side we need: the other side is blank. They are depicted in poses of intense activity or passion, so that their part in the drama can be easily read from a distance.
Some of the characters in fairy tales come in sets of multiples. The twelve brothers in the story of that name, the twelve princesses in
‘The Shoes that were Danced to Pieces’
, the seven dwarfs in the story of
Snow White
– there is little, if anything, to distinguish one from another. James Merrill’s reference to the
commedia dell’arte
is apposite here: the
commedia
character Pulcinella was the subject of a famous set of drawings by Giandomenico Tiepolo (1727–1804), depicting him not as a single character but as a swarm of identical nitwits. In one drawing there may be a dozen or more Pulcinellas all trying to make soup at the same time, or gazing in astonishment at an ostrich. Realism cannot cope with the notion of multiples; the twelve princesses who all go out every night and dance their shoes to pieces, the seven dwarfs all asleep in their beds side by side, exist in another realm altogether, between the uncanny and the absurd.
Celerity
Swiftness is a great virtue in the fairy tale. A good tale moves with a dreamlike speed from event to event, pausing only to say as much as is needed and no more. The best tales are perfect examples of what you do need and what you don’t: in Rudyard Kipling’s image, fires that blaze brightly because all the ashes have been raked out.
The opening of a tale, for example. All we need is the word ‘Once . . .’ and we’re off:
Once there was a poor man who couldn’t support his only son any more. When the son realized this, he said, ‘Father, it’s no use my staying here. I’m just a burden to you. I’m going to leave home and see if I can earn a living.’
A few paragraphs later, he’s already married a king’s daughter. Or this:
Once there was a farmer who had all the money and land he wanted, but despite his wealth there was one thing missing from his life. He and his wife had never had any children. When he met other farmers in town or at the market, they would often make fun of him and ask why he and his wife had never managed to do what their cattle did regularly. Didn’t they know how to do it? In the end he lost his temper, and when he got back home, he swore and said, ‘I will have a child, even if it’s a hedgehog.’
The speed is exhilarating. You can only go that fast, however, if you’re travelling light; so none of the information you’d look for in a modern work of fiction – names, appearances, background, social context, etc. – is present. And that, of course, is part of the explanation for the flatness of the characters. The tale is far more interested in what happens to them, or in what they make happen, than in their individuality.
When composing a tale of this sort, it’s not always easy to be sure about which events are necessary and which are superfluous. Anyone who wants to know how to tell a tale could do much worse than study
‘The Musicians of Bremen’
, both a nonsensical little yarn and a masterpiece, in which the narrative carries not one unnecessary ounce. Every paragraph advances the story.
Imagery and description
There is no imagery in fairy tales apart from the most obvious. As white as snow, as red as blood: that’s about it. Nor is there any close description of the natural world or of individuals. A forest is deep, the princess is beautiful, her hair is golden; there’s no need to say more. When what you want to know is what happens next, beautiful descriptive wordplay can only irritate.
In one story, however, there is a passage that successfully combines beautiful description with the relation of events in such a way that one would not work without the other. The story is ‘
‘The Juniper Tree’
, and the passage I mean comes after the wife has made her wish for a child as red as blood and as white as snow. It links her pregnancy with the passing seasons:
One month went by, and the snow vanished.
Two months went by, and the world turned green.
Three months went by, and flowers bloomed out of the earth.
Four months went by, and all the twigs on all the trees in the forest grew stronger and pressed themselves together, and the birds sang so loud that the woods resounded, and the blossom fell from the trees.
Five months went by, and the woman stood under the juniper tree. It smelled so sweet that her heart leaped in her breast, and she fell to her knees with joy.
Six months went by, and the fruit grew firm and heavy, and the woman fell still.