. . precisely these tales, throughout Europe, thus revealing a kinship among the noblest peoples.” Here, in their eagerness to praise the superiority of northern Europeans, they appear to be ignoring some obvious non-European sources, such as The Thousand and One Nights, the famous collection from Arab, Persian, and Indian sources, in which, to cite just one example, “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” contains elements that will later appear in the Grimms’ “Simeli Mountain.”

In the preface to the second edition, the Grimms emphasize the “accuracy and truth” of their methods and condemn others who embellish folk materials. Yet they acknowledge their own editorial efforts: “Fragments have been completed, many stories have been told more directly and simply, and there are very few tales that do not appear in improved form.” Moreover, stories that “complemented each other” have been combined—sometimes producing, it must be said, awkward results. The Grimms also put into the stories rhymes and proverbs to give the sense of real peasant storytelling. Yet they write, “We did not add anything from our own resources,” but only sorted out “what is pure, simple, and yet intact from what is inauthentic.” “Authenticity,” then, was not a quality intrinsic to the tales as recorded, but rather an ideal to be striven for, something to be created in order to give the tales their true character.

The same kind of self-contradiction characterizes the Grimms’ attitude toward “certain matters.” As the tales became popular with children, parents complained about references to sex and other bodily functions. In the first edition, the brothers dismiss such criticism on the grounds that everything in the tales is natural: “Nature itself . . . has let these flowers and leaves grow in these colors and shapes.” In the second edition, however, after positing “the innocence . . . of a straightforward narrative that does not conceal anything wrong by holding back on it,” they go on to say, “nonetheless, in this new edition, we have carefully eliminated every phrase not appropriate for children.” Over the course of successive editions, many erotic and excremental references were cut out or toned down. In the first edition, for example, the donkey in “The Table, the Ass, and the Stick” emits gold from both ends, but later the gold comes only out of its mouth. In the first edition, after her nightly frolics with the prince, Rapunzel notices that her clothes are getting tighter; later editions delete any reference to this suspicious weight gain. The process of revision and editing to make the stories less offensive, more coherent, more “authentic,” and so on, went on continuously, beginning with the first handwritten transcriptions from oral sources until the final edition of 1857. In their attempt to find and record the authentic voice of the German folk—“the value of a voice speaking directly to the heart”—the Grimms seem to have ended up with all the ambiguities of writing.

The whole idea of a purely oral tradition of the tale has in fact been questioned. The French stories that made their way into the Grimms’ volumes were certainly written. They came, via Perrault and others, out of the French conte, a sophisticated mode of storytelling that had been a pastime and jeu d’esprit in aristocratic salons in France since the late seventeenth century. Some of these stories were invented by their upper-class authors, but others were acquired from peasant nurses and servants. It seems that tales passed in and out of print in France, as in the German lands and elsewhere. Just as upper-class writers heard tales from illiterate tellers and embellished and published them, so lower-class people heard stories from books, modified them, and passed them on, until eventually they made their way once again into print.

The distinction between oral and “literary” material is thus not clear. Nor is there a clear distinction between the conte de feées, the fairy tale that dealt mostly with aristocratic characters and marvelous events, and the folktale, with its real-life setting of farm and village. The Grimms’ collection contains tales of both kinds and many that are mixed, with the forest, which is both natural and full of mystery, functioning as a kind of intermediate space between the real world of peasants and farm animals and the fantastic realm of talking beasts and enchanted castles.

Whether oral or written, the modes of transmission and dispersal of the tales remain somewhat obscure. How do the same tales or motifs turn up in widely separated cultures? The farther these motifs are pursued through time and space, the more tangled the lines of possible influence and transmission. The German Sanskrit scholar Theodor Benfey proposed in 1859 in his preface to the Panchatantra, a collection of Indian tales, that the European tales had originated in India and spread from there. This theory of “monogenesis” was challenged in 1893 by French philologist and medievalist Joseph Beédier, who argued for “polygenesis,” the independent origins of tales found in different parts of the world. In the latter case the remarkable re semblances among tales from different times and places would have to be accounted for by fundamental similarities in the physical and psychological patterns of human life across cultures.

In the blurred logic of their prefaces, the Grimms seem to be struggling with all of these problems, and with the ambiguous and heterogeneous nature of their material. In their search for the purity and simplicity of the German oral tradition, they found both less and more than they sought. The tales—natural “flowers and leaves” supposedly plucked from pristine country lanes—turn out in many cases to be complex hybrid blooms whose genetic structure and inheritance are still not fully understood.

The study of folk and fairy tales has given rise to many theories and schools of interpretation.