Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales by Valerie Paradiz

Author:Valerie Paradiz [Paradiz, Valerie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Autobiography, Biography, Fantasy, Folklore, History, Non-Fiction
ISBN: 9780786738533
Google: 69c_DgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 1422351688
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 1905-06-27T00:00:00+00:00

Puzzled, the shepherd decides to show the king the amazing bone that tells riddles; but the king immediately understands the bone’s message and sentences the two murderous brothers to death by drowning. Justice is served, and the story closes with the skeleton of the youngest brother exhumed and buried again in the proper place, his “lovely grave inside the churchyard.” The power of the fairy tale to express core human emotions such as guilt, hatred, greed, and anger swirled about Wilhelm as he allowed Dortchen to touch with her story the wounded places in his own sad relationship with Ferdinand.

By the summer of 1812, Ferdinand gave up on their home in Kassel and decided to move to Munich to live with the youngest brother, Ludwig. At first, his departure was like a death in the family, and it tormented Jacob and Wilhelm with feelings of loss and failure. Even Ferdinand’s pigeons refused to eat any longer, and the brothers found themselves forced to sell the birds off, “the most beautiful” of them, Jacob lamented in a letter to Arnim, fetching “only a penny.” In spite of the sadness, however, it was as if “a stone [had] been lifted from our hearts,” Jacob told Arnim. “We hadn’t been—I don’t know for how long—able to eat at the table in joyful demeanor.”11

The whole affair left a rift between the brothers that, like the dark moral of a fairy tale, cursed them for many years. In 1814, Wilhelm wrote to Arnim about his thoughts on the matter: “I possess the kind of anger and pity for [Ferdinand] that I have for the foolish virgins in the Bible. He misses the boat—and complains about it afterward.”12 The story of “The Singing Bone” teaches that brotherly strife leads to irreparable damage and injustice in the family, and, like the characters in the very tales they were editing, the brothers Grimm were not invulnerable to the truths about human nature that the stories unforgivingly expressed.

Ferdinand’s departure from Kassel had occurred during the most extreme economic crisis Europe had known since Napoleon had crowned himself emperor. France’s escalating war budget and its army’s bloated bureaucracy had depleted every resource—money, food, and manpower—across the entire European continent. Ever since the brothers had launched the fairy tale project in 1807, Bonaparte’s demands for new recruits to the Grand Army had escalated to such a point that no country could realistically satisfy them. In Westphalia alone, the numbers of infantry battalions, cavalry squadrons, and artillery batteries soared during the very years that the Wilds and Hassenpflugs were busily gathering stories, and by 1811, Jerôme Bonaparte’s kingdom was facing bankruptcy and the loss of its most productive men. In November that year, as Dortchen Wild was contributing some of her most compelling tales to the collection, Westphalia was forced to pay the costs of 35,000 troops quartered there, causing the national debt to soar from 60 million francs to more than 200 million.13

Life trudged on, and with Ferdinand gone, the brothers found they could return to their research with renewed attention.

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