The Grimm Brothers

Fairy tales are the essential reading for young children as well as grown-ups all over the world. It’s fun for children and, at the same time, can teach them valuable lessons of life and morality they will be able to use throughout their lives. For adults it’s also a fun reading, which can help them immerse into the childhood world and experience all those feelings all over again. At the same time both adults and children like to read fairy tales from other countries to be able to learn the culture of a foreign country and moral standards, important to them. You won’t be able to find a person, who has never read a fairy tale and a great deal of these fairytales popular nowadays were written by two brothers - Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm.

However, the main goal of two brothers was not to entertain all the coming generations of girls and boys, men and women. They were linguists, who were intensively interested in culture of their country of birth - Germany and wanted to collect and preserve the most vulnerable, but extremely valuable its part - the folklore. Their adult years came by in the years, when interest to own culture become very popular in Europe and writers and poets all over Europe started to include the element of folklore in their writings. Brothers shared this tendency and not only gathered old fables and legends, but published them as book, making the whole reading world of Europe acquainted with German tales.

First book of Children’s and Household Tales was published in 1812 and included 86 tales. By 1857 the number of tales included reached 200. They were complemented by 11 legends. Since then the edition was re-published thousands of times and was translated into around 160 languages. However, Grimms’ Fairytales are not that close to the initial editions anymore. They were edited multiple times to make the stories less violent and more suitable for kids. Old German tales did not have happy ends and often ended brutally and bloody. The tales in their modern edition were later adapted on screen multiple times, even by Disney, with added power of happy endings. It is yet to find out, if we had a right to transform the legacy of Grimm Brothers like that - however, their work lives in books and films all over the world and their main goal - to preserve the unique German folklore - was fullfilled.