Bavarian fairy tales going viral? Last week, the Guardian reported that five hundred unknown fairy tales, languishing for over a century in the municipal archive of Regensburg, Germany, have come to light. The news sent a flutter through the world of fairy-tale enthusiasts, their interest further piqued by the detail that the tales—which had been compiled in the mid-nineteenth century by an antiquarian named Franz Xaver von Schönwerth—had been kept under lock and key. How astonishing then to discover that many of those “five hundred new tales” are already in print and on the shelves at Widener Library at Harvard (where I teach literature, folklore and mythology) and at Yale, Stanford, and Berkeley.

Schönwerth—a man whom the Grimm brothers praised for his “fine ear” and accuracy as a collector—published three volumes of folk customs and legends in the mid-nineteenth century, but the books soon began gathering dust on library shelves. In 2010, over a hundred of the fairy tales culled from the archive were published by the Schönwerth champion Erika Eichenseer, under the title Prinz Rosszwifl. So the Guardian’s news wasn’t exactly new. To be sure, those tales have not yet been translated into English, and many stories remain in manuscript form. But there are enough of them available now to satisfy our curiosity: are they radically different from the fairy tales we know?

Schönwerth’s tales have a compositional fierceness and energy rarely seen in stories gathered by the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault, collectors who gave us relatively tame versions of “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Snow White,” “Cinderella,” and “Rapunzel.” Schönwerth gives us a harsher dose of reality than most collections. His Cinderella is a woodcutter’s daughter who uses golden slippers to recover her beloved from beyond the moon and the sun. His miller’s daughter wields an ax and uses it to disenchant a prince by chopping off the tail of a gigantic black cat. The stories remain untouched by literary sensibilities. No throat-clearing for Schönwerth, who begins in medias res, with “A princess was ill” or “A prince was lost in the woods,” rather than “Once upon a time…”

Though he was inspired by the Grimms, Schönwerth was even more interested than they were in documenting the oral traditions of Bavaria. He hoped to preserve remnants of a pagan past and to consolidate national identity by capturing in print rapidly fading cultural traditions, legends, and customs. This explains the rough-hewn quality of his tales. Oral narratives famously neglect psychology for plot, and these tales move with warp speed out of the castle and into the woods, generating multiple encounters with ogres, dragons, witches, and other villains, leaving almost no room for expressive asides or details explaining how or why things happen. The driving question is always “And then …?”

Our own culture, under the spell of Grimm and Perrault, has favored fairy tales starring girls rather than boys, princesses rather than princes. But Schönwerth’s stories show us that once upon a time, Cinderfellas evidently suffered right alongside Cinderellas, and handsome young men fell into slumbers nearly as deep as Briar Rose’s hundred-year nap. Just as girls became domestic drudges and suffered under the curse of evil mothers and stepmothers, boys, too, served out terms as gardeners and servants, sometimes banished into the woods by hostile fathers. Like Snow White, they had to plead with a hunter for their lives. And they are as good as they are beautiful—Schönwerth uses the German term “schön,” or beautiful, for both male and female protagonists.

Why did we lose all those male counterparts to Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and the girl who becomes the wife of the Frog King? Boy heroes clearly had a hard time surviving the nineteenth-century migration of fairy tales from the communal hearth into the nursery, when oral storytelling traditions, under the pressures of urbanization and industrialization, lost their cross-generational appeal. Once mothers, nannies, and domestics were in charge of telling stories at bedtime; it seems they favored tales with female heroines.

Even more importantly, the Brothers Grimm, who were responsible for establishing the folklore canon we have today in Anglo-American cultures, may have been wary of telling stories of persecuted boys, having suffered much in their own early lives. It is no accident that we refer these days to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm almost as if they were a couple. The brothers lost their father at a young age and worked hard to educate themselves and to keep their fragile family intact. They studied law together and worked side by side for decades, taking notes, copying manuscripts, editing texts, and famously creating index card entries for their monumental dictionary of the German language. Is it any surprise that they might have found tales about quarreling brothers or male-sibling rivals less than congenial? Schönwerth’s collection reminds us that fathers are constantly sending no-account sons into the world to seek their fortune and that they are generally relieved to rid themselves of an extra mouth to feed. Brothers stand in a relationship of rivalry, fighting over farms or kingdoms and betraying each other in ways that hark back to the Biblical cruelties of Joseph’s brothers.

The briskness of Schönwerth’s style is clear in a tale like “King Goldenhair.” The adventures of the fair-haired prince bring together bits and pieces from “The Frog King,” “Snow White,” and “The Water of Life” to create kaleidoscopic wonders. The tale reminds us of the wizardry of the words in fairy tales, their worlds of shimmering beauty and enchanting whimsy. Who can avoid feeling the shock effects of beauty when Prince Goldenhair enters “a magical garden awash in sunlight, full of flowers and branches with gold and silver leaves and fruits made of precious stones”? Or when a dung beetle turns into a prince after a girl spares his life and invites “creatures small and large, anything on legs” to dance and leap at the wedding. Equally charming is the story about Jodl, a boy who overcomes his revulsion to a female frog and, after bathing her, joins her under the covers. In the morning, he awakens to find himself in a sunlit castle with a wondrously beautiful princess. Here at last is a transformation that promises real change in our understanding of fairy-tale magic, for suddenly we discover that the divide between passive princesses and dragon-slaying heroes may be little more than a figment of the Grimm imagination.

Sleeping Beauty print circa 1876, courtesy Hulton Archive/Getty Images.