Nonetheless, like the dogged, resilient heroes of their tales, they persevered.

At the University of Marburg they came under the influence of a distinguished legal scholar, Friedrich Karl von Savigny, who studied German law in the context of its origins in the language and culture of the early Germanic peoples, inspiring the Grimms to apply the same methods to their studies in philology and literature. The brothers began collecting and transcribing old tales, believing that these remnants of a vanishing folk culture could offer some understanding of the origins of German poetry. The first volume of their collection was published in 1812, followed by a second in 1815. At first, the Kinder- und Hausmärchen sold modestly, but it went through seven editions during the Grimms’ lifetime, eventually becoming the all-time world best-seller in the German language, second in Germany itself only to the Bible.

After 1815 Jacob left most of the work on the tales to Wilhelm, but both brothers went on to become prodigious scholars, pioneers in the study of the grammar, history, and mythology of the Germanic languages, and in medieval studies. Jacob formulated “Grimm’s law,” a theory of consonant changes in the Germanic languages, and with Wilhelm began the great German dictionary that had reached the letter F at the time of Jacob’s death, and was finally completed only in 1961. All told, Jacob published twenty-one books, Wilhelm fourteen, and the two together eight, in addition to many volumes of essays, notes, and letters. Both Grimms worked as librarians, and both became professors at the University of Goöttingen. In 1837, when the new king of the state of Hanover dissolved parliament and required all state employees to swear allegiance to him, the Grimms declined to do so. They were fired and became known, along with five others who refused, as members of the “Goöttingen Seven.” Jacob was actually exiled from Hanover and was escorted to the border by an enthusiastic band of student supporters. In 1840 the brothers were appointed to the faculty of the University of Berlin.

Both Grimms were elected to the parliament established at the time of the revolution of 1848, but they withdrew from politics after the frustration of their hopes for German unification and democratic reform. They continued to live in the same household even after Wilhelm married and had children, and seem to have been inseparable until the death of Wilhelm in 1859; Jacob died four years later.

The first edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen had prefaces and scholarly notes, and was intended primarily for adults and for other scholars. It was the most ambitious and systematic collection of German folktales to have appeared, if not the first. The passion for folklore was one of the principal currents of German Romanticism, with its interest in origins and its love of the spontaneous and the natural. Moreover, the search for the roots of an authentic German literary and linguistic identity had intense political as well as cultural significance. When the Grimms began their research there was no unified German state and German lands were under French occupation; Jeéroôme Bonaparte, the younger brother of Napoleéon I, had established his court in the city of Kassel, where the Grimms then lived. In 1814, after the French defeat, Jacob was appointed secretary to the Hessian peace legation and went with it to Vienna, and later to Paris.

In the preface to the first edition, the Grimms celebrate the purely German and authentically oral and peasant origins of the tales. They had the good luck, they say, to find a village storyteller, Frau Viehmann, whose tales were “genuinely Hessian,” thus from a “rough-hewn” and relatively unchanged and isolated region.a The folktales, they write, “have kept intact German myths that were thought to be lost”; further search “in all the hallowed regions of our fatherland” would reveal other treasures. The German and oral roots are emphasized again and again: “Everything that has been collected here from oral traditions is (with the exception of ‘Puss in Boots’ perhaps) purely German in its origin as well as in its development and has not been borrowed from any sources.”

Actually, the character and provenance of the tales are much more complicated than this. As Jack Zipes explains in The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World (see “For Further Reading”), the Grimms did in fact get tales from peasants and lower-class people, but they also acquired them from other kinds of informants, including educated young women among their friends from upper-middle-class and aristocratic families. These women had heard some of their stories from peasant nannies or servants, but they had also read them in books and magazines. The Grimms themselves took “Jorinde and Joringel” and other tales from books; “The Juniper Tree,” written by the artist Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810), first appeared in a magazine. The use of something other than oral materials is hinted at in the rather confusing sentence above referring to “Puss in Boots.” At least one of the Grimms’ young women informants came from a French-speaking Huguenot family and would have known the celebrated fairy tales of Charles Perrault, published in 1697, including “Le Maôître Chat, ou le Chat botteé,” the Puss in Boots story. According to the German philologist and Grimm scholar Heinz Roölleke, even Frau Viehmann, the Hessian storyteller, was actually the daughter of an innkeeper, of partly French Huguenot ancestry, and thus not quite the echt German peasant portrayed by the Grimms (McGlathery, ed., The Brothers Grimm and Folktale).

Apparently troubled by these issues, the brothers return to them in the preface to the second edition, where they write, “We have reviewed everything that seemed suspicious, namely what might have been of foreign origin. . . . ” They threw out “Puss in Boots,” but retained other tales almost identical to those of Perrault—among them “Cinderella,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” and “Allerleirauh” (“Many Furs”), which is essentially Perrault’s “Peau d’aône” (“Donkey Skin”). The Grimms knew the earlier collections well and even allude explicitly in the preface to the tales of Perrault, Giambattista Basile (1575-1632), Giovan Francesco Straparola (c. 1480-1557), and the collection of medieval Welsh tales known as The Mabinogion.

Although all of these works long antedated their own, indicating that some of the tales they were collecting must have derived from these earlier “foreign” sources, the brothers seem to have convinced themselves that their versions were separate German tales that somehow resembled the “foreign” ones or were even their true originals. Trying to account for the “widespread diffusion of the German tales,” they write, “we find .