“many of our beloved fairy tales were first told as brave flirts”

January 13, 2023 5:30 AM

Young women were the true originators of the Grimms’ Tales is a short essay by Christine Lehnen about the tellers of the stories that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published, most of whom were not the old wives of popular imagination, but young women of their acquaintance. A Case Study in Editorial Filters in Folktales: A Discussion of the Allerleirauh tales in Grimm [pdf] by Cay Dollerup, Iven Reventlow, and Carsten Rosenberg Hansen, is a scholarly comparison between the version by one of these women, Dorothea ‘Dortchen’ Wild, and other versions. Wil is also discussed extensively in an interview with author Nick Jubber on the Grimm Reading podcast [Apple Podcasts link]
posted by Kattullus (5 comments total)

Fascinating, I had no idea! Thank you for posting this.
posted by bigendian at 6:12 AM on January 13, 2023 [3 favorites]

Christine Lehnen's essay is great--thanks! It's also interesting to me that 15 years earlier but just 75 miles away from Kassel, GutsMuths had published "Die Erzähler, oder das Geschichtemachen," a storytelling game for schoolchildren with multiple rules variants. And many other storytelling games were circulating around the same time.

What's interesting to me is not the distant possibility Dortchen Wild and others were familiar with these games and just making up stories the way the games suggest--although, as in the essay, the games for adults did involve mixed company and often romantic tension, which Rousseau appreciated but Goethe didn't.

It's rather that the situation for unpublished storytelling is just a lot more complicated than "'ideal tales' told in an authentic folk tradition" (per the second link) vs. Brentano and others' "free and poetic rendition[s]" (i.e. "literary" tales also being written in German from 1792 to 1808 by women like Ludovica Brentano Jordis, Benedikte Naubert, Sophie Tieck Bernhardi von Knorring, Karoline von Günderrode, and Bettina von Arnim).

People did a lot with stories at the time without necessarily publishing them. Hoping to find an "authentic" primordial tradition seems fine, I guess, but if you can't prove one, there's still so much left to appreciate about what people definitely were doing.
posted by Wobbuffet at 6:50 AM on January 13, 2023 [13 favorites]

What I want to read now is the essay that draws an arrow from the young women doing the work of creating Grimm's tales, to the young women doing the work of creating AO3.
posted by mittens at 8:32 AM on January 13, 2023 [16 favorites]

Not to abuse the edit window: The other thing I wanted to say was, the work I always bring up in discussions of fairy tales is the chapter "Peasants tell tales" from Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre. To this day there is still an element of "I bet there's a darker reading to these stories--perhaps even a FREUDIAN reading," and Darnton does a good job, I think, of sweeping all that away and saying, none of this was subtext, the darkness and sensuality were always right there on the surface, until the stories were cleaned up for polite consumption. We love to scandalize each other with stories, why would we think our ancestors were any different?
posted by mittens at 8:41 AM on January 13, 2023 [10 favorites]

Great post, thank you. I hadn't heard of the Grimm Reading podcast, subscribed.
posted by riddley at 4:12 PM on January 14, 2023 [1 favorite]