Though a scholar might publish this in, say, the Journal of American Folklore, nobody else would try to get anyone to read it.

The Grimms, however, changed more than the style of the tales. They changed the content. Their first edition was not intended for the young, nor, apparently, were the tales told at rural firesides. The purpose was to entertain grownups, during or after a hard day’s work, and rough material was part of the entertainment. But the reviews and the sales of the Grimms’ first edition were disappointing to them. Other collections, geared to children, had been more successful, and the brothers decided that their second edition would take that route. In the introduction, they dropped the claim of fidelity to folk sources. Indeed, they accurately said more or less the opposite: that, while they had been true to the spirit of the original material, the “phrasing” was their own. Above all, any matter unsuitable for the young had been expunged.

As with the rating committee of the Motion Picture Association of America, what they regarded as unsuitable for the young was information about sex. In the first edition, Rapunzel, imprisoned in the tower by her wicked godmother, goes to the window every evening and lets down her long hair so that the prince can climb up and enjoy her company. Finally, one day, when her godmother is dressing her, Rapunzel wonders out loud why her clothes have become so tight. “Wicked child!” the godmother says. “What have you done?” What Rapunzel had done goes unmentioned in the second edition. Such bowdlerizing went on for a half century. By the final edition, the stories were far cleaner than at the start.

But they were not less violent. The Grimms were told by friends that some of the material in the first edition was too frightening for children, and they did make a few changes. In a notable example, the first edition of “Hansel and Gretel” has the mother and the father deciding together to abandon the children in the woods. In later editions, it is the stepmother who makes the suggestion, and the father repeatedly hesitates before he finally agrees. Apparently, the Grimms could not bear the idea that the mother, the person who bore these children, would do such a thing, or that the father would readily consent.

This is an admirable scruple, but a puzzling one, because it is largely absent from other Grimm tales, many of which feature mutilation, dismemberment, and cannibalism, not to speak of ordinary homicide, often inflicted on children by their parents or guardians. Toes are chopped off; severed fingers fly through the air. A typical, if especially appalling, case is “The Juniper Tree.” As usual, there is a stepmother who hates her stepchild, a boy. He comes home one day and she asks him if he wants an apple. But no sooner does the boy lean over the trunk where the apples are stored than she slams the lid down and cuts off his head. Now she starts to worry. So she props up the boy’s body in a chair, puts his head on top, and ties a scarf around the neck to hide the wound. In comes Marlene, the woman’s own, beloved daughter. The girl comments that her stepbrother seems pale. Well, give him a slap, the mother says. Marlene does so, and the boy’s head falls off. “What a dreadful thing you’ve done. But don’t breathe a word,” the stepmother says. “We’ll cook him up in a stew.” Then the husband comes home and she serves him the stew. He loves it. “No one else can have any of it,” he says. “Somehow I feel as if it’s all for me.” You can hardly believe what you’re reading.

“Of course, people were much shorter back then.” Facebook

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You get used to the outrages, though. They may even come to seem funny. When, in a jolly tale, a boy sees half a man fall down the chimney, are you supposed to get upset? When you turn a page and find that the next story is entitled “How Children Played Butcher with Each Other,” should you worry? Some stories do tear you apart, usually those where the violence is joined to some emphatically opposite quality, such as peace or tenderness. In “The Twelve Brothers,” a king who has twelve sons decides that, if his next child is a girl, he will have all his sons killed. That way, his daughter will inherit more money. So he has twelve coffins built, each with a little pillow. Little pillows! For boys whom he is willing to murder!

In sum, the Grimm tales contain almost no psychology—a fact underlined by their brevity. However much detail Wilhelm added, the stories are still extremely short. Jack Zipes’s translation of “Rapunzel” is three pages long, “The Twelve Brothers” five, “Little Red Riding Hood” less than four. They come in, clobber you over the head, and then go away. As with sections of the Bible, the conciseness makes them seem more profound.

Since the Second World War, some people have argued that the violence of the Grimm tales is an expression of the German character. Louis Snyder, in his book “Roots of German Nationalism” (1978), has a whole chapter on what he sees as the Grimms’ celebration, and encouragement, of pernicious national traits: “obedience, discipline, authoritarianism, militarism, glorification of violence,” and, above all, nationalism. Of course, the Grimm tales were nationalist: the brothers hoped to make their young readers feel and be more German. But in the nineteenth century there were fervent nationalist campaigns in most European countries. That is how many Western empires fell. And though ethnic pride was the Nazis’ chief justification for their movement, that wasn’t necessarily the fault of ethnic pride. Nazism fed on many trends that, previously, had been harmless—for example, the physical-culture movement of the early twentieth century, the fad for going on nature hikes and doing calisthenics. This became a feature of Nazism—an argument for purity, strength, the soil—but it existed also in countries that fought the Nazis, including the United States.

Nevertheless, the Grimms are premier representatives of the nationalism that became Aryanism in the nineteen-twenties and thirties, and the Nazis were grateful to them. Hitler’s government demanded that every German school teach the Grimms’ book. After the war, accordingly, the Allies banned the Grimm tales from the school curricula in some cities. Still today, certain people, notably feminists, would like to move them to the back shelves of the library, because, so often, the villain is a woman, doing violence to girls, and also because the girls seldom resist. When, in “Snow White,” the heroine is being hunted down by the terrible queen-stepmother, she does almost nothing to save herself. Finally, she sinks into utter passivity, immobilized in a glass coffin, waiting for her prince to come. In the words of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in “The Madwoman in the Attic,” she is “patriarchy’s ideal woman.”

Gilbert and Gubar actually defend the wicked stepmothers, whose arts, they say, “even while they kill, confer the only measure of power available to a woman in a patriarchal culture.” That is, these women at least have some gumption, unlike the little Barbies they are trying to eliminate. Such feelings are widespread. On a rock at the edge of Copenhagen harbor sits a bronze statue of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid (who, unlike Disney’s, does not get her man). Over the years, her head has been sawed off repeatedly; she has been blasted off her rock with explosives. A dildo was once affixed to her hand, apparently in celebration of International Women’s Day. At the same time, some writers have recommended that the feminist critics look more closely at the Grimm collection. According to the novelist Alison Lurie, an expert on children’s books, it is primarily the most popular tales, especially the ones adapted by Disney, that feature the wilting violets. Others of the stories have spunky heroines.

But you do not have to be a member of any special political camp to object to the Grimm tales; you only need to be a person interested in protecting children’s mental health. After the Second World War, there was a powerful movement in the United States for realism and wholesomeness in children’s books. No more cannibal stews but, rather, “Judy Goes to the Firehouse.” (This is the trend that Maurice Sendak, to the outrage of many, bucked with “Where the Wild Things Are,” in 1963.) Writers reluctant to part with the Grimm tales suggested that we go on reading them to our children but point out the poisonous stereotypes they contain. Presumably, as your child is nodding off, you are supposed to give her a shake and tell her how the prince’s rescue of Snow White reflects the hegemony of the patriarchy. Other writers have proposed that we revise the tales again. Why not? Why should the Grimms have the last word? Jack Zipes, in his book “Breaking the Magic Spell” (1979), addresses “Rumpelstiltskin,” the story in which, as the Grimms tell it, a king offers to marry a miller’s daughter if she can spin straw into gold. She has no idea how to do this. A gnome, Rumpelstiltskin, offers to do the job for her. But, once she marries, he says, she must give him her first child. When, at the end, she reneges on the deal, he becomes so angry that he tears himself in two. With apparent sympathy, Zipes quotes a writer, Irmela Brender, who, saddened that Rumpelstiltskin is destroyed, when all he ever wanted was a little companionship, has proposed a version in which the miller’s daughter, instead of denying Rumpelstiltskin the baby, invites him to move in with the royal family: