Stories are humanity’s greatest tools; with them, men and women manipulate those essential elements of experience—fears and hopes, faiths and terrors, worry, grace, wonderment—that otherwise are so intangible. Generations of storytellers have used these implements to widely differing purpose and effect, yet few have been such worthy craftsmen as the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm: Their tales hew hidden forests of psychology into cupboards of compact narrative, each one a Pandora’s box of fateful apprehensions. Except for the Bible, it’s hard to imagine a book so rooted in our collective subconscious as the Grimms’ Children’s and Household Tales, the first edition of which, containing eighty-six tales, was issued in 1812 (the last, containing more than two hundred, appeared in 1857). Trained as philologists and lexicographers, the Grimms collected the tales they would retell with both passion and professional precision, fashioning an understanding of how popular culture shaped national identity as well as instituting methods of collection and organization that would provide the foundation for the future field of folklore studies.
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