Even as a schoolboy, Jacob Grimm was well acquainted with how language can be used to make one feel at home, or an outsider. As the country mouse at school, one of his teachers would always address him in the third person er rather than the more respectful Sie used for all his city classmates. He never forgot it. He missed the walks to nearby villages with his father, and seeing the country folk go about their lives, from work to play, through a haze of tobacco smoke and bright sunshine, before everything changed.
At university, the Grimms luckily met the Romantic poet Clemens Brentano, who asked for their help collecting folk songs and poetry. That began directing their love of family, of homeland and heritage, towards a study of native German oral tradition. The brothers were particularly interested in stories, sorting through the cultural rubble and debris that, up until then, no one had really cared about to write down.
The Napoleonic Wars made this a time of great political and social turbulence. The German-speaking realm was fractured, and many German scholars, Jacob and Wilhelm among them, were driven by nationalism to preserve a quickly disappearing German heritage. At the heart of this was the German Romantic movement, with its emotional longing for authenticity.
The Romantics believed this truth could be found in the simpler words and wisdom of the common people, by hearkening back to a nostalgic, glorified past.
For the Romantics, this purity was expressed in Naturpoesie or folk poetry. As ethnologist Regina Bendix points out, it was hard for the cultural curators of Naturpoesie—the proto-hipster intellectuals of the day—to reconcile what they thought was the truest kind of poetry with the lower classes, especially the urban poor. So the good folk that created and shared this oral tradition in their own words, isolated and preserved by scholars, severed from their social context, were really idealized, imaginary folk somewhere in the misty, even medieval past, not unlike in a fairytale, full of terror and beauty that was far removed from the present day.
To reach the authenticity of German folklore and language meant reaching as far back as you could to discover its essential origins. This is what the Brothers Grimm did as they set about collecting as many tales as they could, in the vernacular, all over the country, no matter how violent, offensive, or grim.
In those days, the fairytales that were fashionable in upper class social circles were written to be literary or moral teaching moments, such as the tales of Charles Perrault. The Grimm brothers thought this kind of sanitized French style to be more fakelore than folklore, with the language, artificially literary, clearly written to be read by the educated classes.
Their novel approach was to include folktales as a kind of Naturpoesie, and to write them down not just for literature, but for science. Privacy Policy Contact Us You may unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the provided link on any marketing message.
Instead, they were among the first to set down a rigorous methodology of the collection and research of oral tradition , in which copious notes were kept of the speakers, the places and times. Careful comparisons were made between different versions of tales the Grimms were told. The Lazy Spinning Woman. Die faule Spinnerin. Fair Katrinelje and Pif Paf Poltrie. The Fox and the Horse. Der Fuchs und das Pferd. Die zertanzten Schuhe. Iron Hans. Der Eisenhans. Knoist and His Three Sons.
Includes an episode of type , Sailing in a Bottomless Boat. Type A, Praying to the Statue's Mother. The Little Lamb and the Little Fish. Simeli Mountain. Going Traveling. Up Reisen gohn. The Little Donkey. Das Eselein. The Ungrateful Son. Der undankbare Sohn. The Rooster Beam. Der Hahnenbalken. The Old Beggar Woman. Die alte Bettelfrau. The Three Lazy Ones. Die drei Faulen. Type , The King, the Abbot, and the Shepherd.
The Star Talers. Die Sterntaler. The Stolen Farthing. Der gestohlene Heller. Choosing a Bride. Die Brautschau. The Hurds. Die Schlickerlinge. A Riddling Tale. The Clever Servant. Der kluge Knecht. Similar to type B, The Fool as a Housekeeper. Lazy Heinz. Der faule Heinz. Der Vogel Greif. Lean Lisa. Die hagere Liese. Type , Air Castles. Includes an episode of type , Counting Imagined Wealth. Das Waldhaus. Lieb und Leid teilen. Compare type , Imitating Animal Sounds.
The Duration of Life. Die Lebenszeit. Types and , Men, Animals, and the Span of Life. Categorized under two different numbers by Aarne-Thompson. Death's Messengers. Die Boten des Todes. Includes an episode of type , Loading a Beam Crosswise on a Wagon. Eve's Unequal Children. Die ungleichen Kinder Evas. The Nixie in the Pond. Die Nixe im Teich. The Gifts of the Little People. According to biographers, Jacob was deeply distraught after the death of his brother, with whom he had held a close bond throughout his life.
Some claim their collection has only been outsold by Shakespeare and the Bible. University-trained philologists the study of language in historical texts and librarians, Jacob and Wilhelm published more than fairy tales. They wrote books about mythology and published scholarly works on linguistics and medieval studies. They also worked on compiling an ambitious German dictionary, although both brothers died before they were able to finish the entry for the letter F. Learn little-known facts about the man behind the theory of evolution.
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