and although the tale ends happily, the sister is first exposed to the threat of her
brothers’ violence and her mother-in-law’s hatred.
Even before Wilhelm and Jacob published their collection, Albert Ludwig Grimm had
turned against Enlightenment children’s literature and had issued a call for a revival of
the tales like ‘Cinderella’, ‘Hansel and Gretel’, and ‘Snow White’ (‘Aschenpittchen’,
‘Hänsel und Gretel’, ‘Schneewittchen’) which he included in Kindermärchen (1808), his
collection of children’s fairy tales. In a later book, Linas Märchenbuch (1827), A.L.Grimm
scolded Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm for the ‘unchild-like style of their fairy tales’.
Eventually, fairy tales came to form the nucleus of German romantic children’s
literature: Wilhelm Hauff’s Märchen Almanacke (1822–1828), E.T.A.Hoffmann’s fairy
tales (especially the Nutcracker cycle) (Ewers 1984:195), and the fairy tales of Contessa
and Fouqué.
The runaway fairy tale bestseller of the mid-to-late-nineteenth century in Germany,
however, was Ludwig Bechstein’s Deutsches Märchenbuch [German Fairy-tale Book]
(1845 et seq.). Bechstein’s tales differed from contemporaneous collections of fairy tales
by his playful prose style, by the loving and unified families they depicted, and above all,
by the ethic of self-reliance they described in their characters and fostered in their
readers. Bechstein’s twelve brothers, for example, are overjoyed rather than inclined to
homicide when they find their sister in their midst. His fairy tales exemplified bourgeois
behavioural norms and social expectations, while Grimms’ Tales expressed values that
paralleled those of an agrarian proletariat. However, with the wholesale republication
and recirculation of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German chapbooks in
nineteenth-century Germany, the ethic of Grimms’ Tales was reinforced, and that of
Bechstein’s Deutsches Märchenbuch denigrated, with consequential results for German
children’s literature (Bottigheimer 1990:84–85; 1992:473–477).
In the late nineteenth century Grimms’ Tales began to dominate the fairy tale market
in German children’s literature. Their eventual hegemony owed much to newly developed
nationalist theories of pedagogy, but even after these were displaced in the mid-
twentieth century, Grimms’ Tales reigned supreme until they were attacked as
fundamentally flawed in the aftermath of German university unrest in 1968. They re-
emerged, however, with much of the stories’ primitive violence removed, a process that
had occurred twenty years before in West Germany’s then sister state, the German
Democratic Republic.
BritainEnglish Puritans had been deeply antipathetic to tales about fairies, which they
considered relics of pagan, pre-Christian thought. In their view, tales about fairies and
fairy tales were non-Christian in content and anti-Christian in intent. ‘And yet, alas!’
one committed Christian wrote, ‘how often do we see Parents prefer Tom Thumb, Guy of
Warwick, Valentine and Orson, or some such foolish Book ...Let not your children read
these vain Books... Throw away all fond and amorous Romances, and fabulous Histories
of Giants, the bombast Achievements of Knight Errantry’ (Fontaine 1708: vii).
Popular taste did not concur with Puritan antipathy, however, and when Tales of the
Fairies (1699) was published in England, and when Galland’s Mille et Une Nuits (12 vols,
TYPES AND GENRES 151