I've read that the Grimm brothers actually softened some of their source material up, in that they were getting stories like "And then her mother--" and they were like, "Surely not! This must have been a stepmother."
Not quite. Bear in mind that the collection originally WASNT intended for kids. The first edition, published when the Napoleonic Wars were still going on, btw, was a folklore collecting project and very much part of the whole burgeoning national identity via culture seeking spirit of the era by two scholarly geeks. In said first edition, there are indeed no evil stepmothers but evil mothers. (Including Snow White's, btw.) Now, evidently, it became clearer and clearer that the majority of people bying these fairy tales weren't fellow geeks but mothers with children, and they were writing protesting mail, not just but also about how frightening evil mothers were. And so you get Wilhelm Grimm revising the second edition (published post Napoleon) so that all the evil mothers have now become evil stepmothers. (Jacob Grimm didn't care about the mothers vs stepmothers question, but he revised them linguistically, possibly because having worked for Jerome Bonaparte directly when Hesse was occupied, he had things to prove, so out went terms like "Prinz" and "Prinzessin" and in came "Königssohn" and "Königstochter" (a deliberately German archaic sounding term which no one ever used before Jacob Grimm coined it, but which became very popular for fairy tales thereafter.) Seriously, the difference between first and second edition is one big clean up of French derived terms - where Little Ret Riding Hood originally has a "bouteille" (sic) of red wine for her grandmother in her basket, she now has a solid German "Flasche", and so forth. So: Jacob did the language job, Wilhelm exchanged evil mothers for evil stepmothers and, while he was at it, also edited out stuff like Rapunzel's pregnancy as the giveaway for the sorceress. But the first edition did have all those evil mothers.
Not edited out, because apparently no one had a problem with it: the considerable violence. Hacked off limbs (Cinderella), being drowned in hot lead, dancing to your death in shoes of hot iron (Snow White) - that kind of thing survives all revisions. Until Disney.
I'm also now seriously questioning the conspiracy book, which I was unable to assess very much because of godawful font and general German-reading-slowness problem. Yes, the author said the anecdote was unverified, and yes, they said it was consistent with Christian's personality (which is true! that's why you started suspecting him as author!)--but why are you using this book at all??? It forces me to question your judgment, author.
Absolutely. Even a mid 19th century author should be able to discard this kind of story as entertaining fairy tales.
Re: Mirror mirror on the wall: Who's the evilest of them all? cont'd
Ahh, thank you, I had been wondering about that for years! For not the first or last time I'm glad we have an actual student of literature in salon. :)
by two scholarly geeks
Whom I mostly know thanks to their work on historical linguistics.
Absolutely. Even a mid 19th century author should be able to discard this kind of story as entertaining fairy tales.
And now I'm wondering whether the "König Moltke" moniker goes back to anything other than this book, because right now I have three sources for that claim:
- 20th century romanticizing biographer Barz - John Brown's propaganda - A mid-19th century book that thinks that John Brown is a perfectly fine source to cite
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Re: Mirror mirror on the wall: Who's the evilest of them all? cont'd
Not quite. Bear in mind that the collection originally WASNT intended for kids. The first edition, published when the Napoleonic Wars were still going on, btw, was a folklore collecting project and very much part of the whole burgeoning national identity via culture seeking spirit of the era by two scholarly geeks. In said first edition, there are indeed no evil stepmothers but evil mothers. (Including Snow White's, btw.) Now, evidently, it became clearer and clearer that the majority of people bying these fairy tales weren't fellow geeks but mothers with children, and they were writing protesting mail, not just but also about how frightening evil mothers were. And so you get Wilhelm Grimm revising the second edition (published post Napoleon) so that all the evil mothers have now become evil stepmothers. (Jacob Grimm didn't care about the mothers vs stepmothers question, but he revised them linguistically, possibly because having worked for Jerome Bonaparte directly when Hesse was occupied, he had things to prove, so out went terms like "Prinz" and "Prinzessin" and in came "Königssohn" and "Königstochter" (a deliberately German archaic sounding term which no one ever used before Jacob Grimm coined it, but which became very popular for fairy tales thereafter.) Seriously, the difference between first and second edition is one big clean up of French derived terms - where Little Ret Riding Hood originally has a "bouteille" (sic) of red wine for her grandmother in her basket, she now has a solid German "Flasche", and so forth. So: Jacob did the language job, Wilhelm exchanged evil mothers for evil stepmothers and, while he was at it, also edited out stuff like Rapunzel's pregnancy as the giveaway for the sorceress. But the first edition did have all those evil mothers.
Not edited out, because apparently no one had a problem with it: the considerable violence. Hacked off limbs (Cinderella), being drowned in hot lead, dancing to your death in shoes of hot iron (Snow White) - that kind of thing survives all revisions. Until Disney.
I'm also now seriously questioning the conspiracy book, which I was unable to assess very much because of godawful font and general German-reading-slowness problem. Yes, the author said the anecdote was unverified, and yes, they said it was consistent with Christian's personality (which is true! that's why you started suspecting him as author!)--but why are you using this book at all??? It forces me to question your judgment, author.
Absolutely. Even a mid 19th century author should be able to discard this kind of story as entertaining fairy tales.
Re: Mirror mirror on the wall: Who's the evilest of them all? cont'd
by two scholarly geeks
Whom I mostly know thanks to their work on historical linguistics.
Absolutely. Even a mid 19th century author should be able to discard this kind of story as entertaining fairy tales.
And now I'm wondering whether the "König Moltke" moniker goes back to anything other than this book, because right now I have three sources for that claim:
- 20th century romanticizing biographer Barz
- John Brown's propaganda
- A mid-19th century book that thinks that John Brown is a perfectly fine source to cite