Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm : A New English Version

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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.

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