A Bicentennial Trio: Reading the Kinder- und Hausmärchen in the Context of the Grimms’ Deutsche Sagen and Edition of Der arme Heinrich ANN SCHMIE SING Univ ersity of Color a do The Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen have garnered widespread popular and scholarly fascination in the over two hundred years since the collection first appeared in two volumes in 1812 and 1815. The continuing interest in the collection was most recently on display in 2012, when the bicentennial of the first volume was celebrated in Germany and abroad. The Deutsche Post marked the occasion with a postage stamp that portrayed silhouettes of well-known characters from the Grimms’ fairy tales superimposed onto the title page of the 1812 volume. A commemorative 10 Euro silver coin was also issued, bearing the profiles of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm and, on the coin’s edge, the inscription «Und wenn sie nicht gestorben sind-…» Grimm scholars gathered in Kassel and Lisbon for academic conferences celebrating 200 years of the Grimms’ fairy tales, and Google greeted the bicentennial with a Little Red Riding Hood-themed doodle. These and other popular and academic tributes celebrated a work that enjoyed seven editions in the Grimms’ lifetimes, has been translated into approximately 170 languages, and in 2005 was designated a UNESCO «Memory of the World» heritage document. 1 While the Grimms’ fairy-tale collection has become an irreplaceable part of world cultural heritage, other works edited by the Grimms have had a much more limited impact. The Grimms’ Deutsche Sagen (1816/ 1818) is a case in point. Only one edition was published during the Grimms’ lifetimes, with the second appearing posthumously in 1865 and the third and fourth editions in 1891 and 1905, respectively. The Grimms’ plans to supplement their two volumes of legends with a third volume of scholarly commentary (similar to the third volume of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen) never came to fruition, although in some respects Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Mythologie has been seen as taking the place of the third volume (Röhrich, Sage und Märchen 44). Some legends in the Deutsche Sagen - for example those about William Tell, Lohengrin, Luther at the Wartburg, Frederick Barbarossa in A Bicentennial Trio 355 the Kyffhäuser, and the Pied Piper of Hamlin - are still reasonably wellknown, at least in Germany, yet they have not taken hold in the collective consciousness in the same way that many of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen tales have, and in some cases these legends are remembered today primarily because they have figured into other literary or musical works. Moreover, scholarly interest in the Deutsche Sagen has been rather narrower and more sporadic than that expressed in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Folklorists and Grimm scholars have examined the Kinder- und Hausmärchen from a variety of theoretical perspectives: for example, recent scholarship includes edited volumes on queer approaches to the Grimms’ fairy tales (Turner and Greenhill) and the international reception of the tales (Joosen and Lathey), as well a monograph that studies the Kinder- und Hausmärchen through the lens of disability studies (Schmiesing). By contrast, scholarship on the Deutsche Sagen remains largely limited to investigating the Grimms’ source material and models for the legends (Bluhm and Hölter; Uther, «Curiositäten»), interrogating their notion of the genre distinctions between Sage and Märchen (Röhrich; Seidenspinner), or probing the reception of the collection in the years immediately after its publication (Uther, «Die ‹Deutschen Sagen›»). Scholars have only infrequently given consideration to thematic congruities between the Deutsche Sagen and the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Rölleke, «Johannes»; Zipes, «The Grimm German Legends» 166), or between the Kinder- und Hausmärchen and other works by the Grimms (Kamenetsky 81-91). The fact that Germanophone scholars have carried out almost all the scholarship on the Deutsche Sagen is further evidence of the more limited international appeal of the collection, and indeed the first translation of the collection into English did not appear until 1981, although it was translated into Danish, French, and Romanian in the nineteenth century. In view of these and other factors, it is inconceivable that the 2016 bicentennial of the first volume of the Deutsche Sagen will elicit a degree of celebration anywhere comparable to that of the 2012 Kinder- und Hausmärchen bicentennial. Other works on folklore or medieval literature by the Grimms have received still less scholarly attention and have had virtually no impact on popular culture. These include their journal Altdeutsche Wälder (1813-1816) and their selection of tales from Thomas Crofton Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland (published as Irische Elfenmärchen in 1826), as well as editions of medieval works such as the Hildebrandslied and the Wessobrunner Gebet (published in one volume in 1812), Hartmann von Aue’s narrative poem Der arme Heinrich (1815), and the songs of the Elder Edda (1815). Jacob and Wilhelm published all of these works jointly, but each 356 Ann Schmiesing brother also published his own individual philological projects during the early decades of the nineteenth century. There is, to be sure, no case to be made that the Deutsche Sagen or other Grimm works should be given the same critical or popular attention as the Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Together with the fairy tales, however, the Deutsche Sagen and several of their other publications represented what the Grimms regarded as the fruits of their efforts to collect, research, edit, and preserve Volkspoesie. Reading the fairy tales in isolation from other Grimm works, as scholars have often done in the voluminous secondary literature on the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, obscures the breadth of the Grimms’ scholarly project and ignores the intertextuality of their various publications. In this essay, I draw attention to this intertextuality by considering the Kinder- und Hausmärchen alongside not only the Deutsche Sagen but also the Grimms’ edition of Hartmann von Aue’s medieval narrative poem Der arme Heinrich (1815), which included Wilhelm’s translation of Hartmann’s text and a lengthy afterword. Although the Grimms’ edition led to renewed interest in Hartmann’s story of the leprosy-stricken Heinrich in the nineteenth century, it has been virtually ignored by Grimm scholars. To the extent that it has been studied at all in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it has mainly been looked at by medievalists interested in the reception of Hartmann’s work. Reading the three works together yields insights into the Grimms’ scholarly project in the second decade of the nineteenth century, particularly with regard to their editorial practices, their treatment of gender roles, their expression of nationalist sentiment, and - in light of their rebranding of Hartmann’s courtly poem as a Volksbuch - their conception of Volkspoesie. I will discuss each of these topics in brief and in so doing point to the rationale for exploring them further. The intertextuality among the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, the edition of Der arme Heinrich, and the Deutsche Sagen is heightened by the fact that the Grimms conceived of and worked on all three projects at around the same time. In their correspondence with each other, Jacob and Wilhelm at times refer to the Kinder- und Hausmärchen in the same passage in which they mention either the edition of Der arme Heinrich or their plans for the Deutsche Sagen. In a letter of November 10, 1815, for example, Jacob seems to assign equal importance to the Kinder- und Hausmärchen and the edition of Der arme Heinrich when he asks Wilhelm whether Goethe has said anything to him about the fairy-tale collection and whether Wilhelm has given Goethe a copy of Der arme Heinrich (Briefwechsel 466). Whereas Jacob exudes confidence in both works, Wilhelm’s later admission that he did not discuss either work with Goethe suggests his awareness that Goethe regarded A Bicentennial Trio 357 medieval German literature as inferior to the literature of classical antiquity and preferred literary adaptations of folk motifs to the Naturpoesie that the Grimms had presented in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (cf. Kamenetsky 21). In any case, two weeks before Jacob’s inquiry regarding Goethe, Jacob had also written to Wilhelm concerning the idea of publishing a volume of legends, an idea that the Grimms had first formed in 1808 around the time that they were beginning to collect fairy tales. In a passage that points to his belief in the continuity and cognateness of various manifestations of Volkspoesie, Jacob emphasizes the frequent similarity of subject matter in legends and fairy tales. Observing that a depiction of a field of flax that is mistaken for a pool of water appears both in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen tale «Der Hahnenbalken» and in a legend from Lombardy, he sees even this trivial detail as evidence for his view that Volkspoesie is complete in itself and requires no supplementation: «Beweist aber nicht das merkwürdige, ungeahnte und durch die Wahrheit der Volkspoesie erfreuende Wiederfinden der kleinsten Züge für meinen alten Satz: daß man in den Volkssagen und Märchen von heute gar nichts zusetzen müsse? » (Briefwechsel 462). Jacob’s use of trivial details such as the field of flax to substantiate his often wide-reaching claims concerning Volkspoesie is a typical feature of his methodology, and one which has been criticized not only by contemporary figures such as August Wilhelm Schlegel but also in more recent scholarship. As a linguist and mythographer, Jacob believed that just as ancient languages could be reconstructed by studying their surviving modern descendants, so, too, could scholars reconstruct Germanic mythology by studying surviving manifestations of folk culture such as ballads, folktales, fairy tales, medieval Germanic literature, and legends. Summarizing some of the weaknesses in this belief and in the methodology Jacob used to support it, Tom Shippey notes «the eclecticism, the silent selection of what fits a theory and the even more silent rejection of what does not, as well as the silent editing of modern fairy-tales themselves» (24). Nevertheless, to view the Kinder- und Hausmärchen in the context of the Grimms’ other scholarly works and editions is not to endorse the Grimms’ at times dilettantish assemblage of trivial details drawn from multiple sources as they seek to prove their views on Volkpoesie; instead, a contextual reading recognizes the influence that their views on Volkspoesie - and with this their work on specific folk and medieval texts - often exerted on their interpretations of particular motifs, symbols, or themes that appear in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen. This influence is particularly significant in view of the origins and editorial history of the 201 tales and ten religious legends for children that appear in the standard seventh edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen. An indi- 358 Ann Schmiesing vidual tale in the Grimms’ collection typically combined or was influenced by multiple oral and/ or written sources, and the bulk of the tales did not come directly from the Volk but from well-educated young women. 2 In mixing two or more variants of the same tale or in choosing one variant over another, the Grimms aspired to restore what they regarded as an organic wholeness to their tales. Nevertheless, in editing their tales the Grimms also imbued them with their own nineteenth-century bourgeois cultural values. Numerous scholars have traced the manner in which their emendations reveal their patriarchal view of women, their Christian worldview, and their desire to inculcate proper behavior in children (see for example Bottigheimer; Tatar; Zipes, The Brothers Grimm). These emendations can largely be attributed to Wilhelm, both because he was the main editor of the collection from the second volume of the first edition on and because he was more interested in enhancing the tales’ bourgeois appeal, whereas Jacob was more scientific in his approach to editing (Zipes, The Brothers Grimm 30- 32). In addition to changing many individual tales in their collection through editorial intervention, the Grimms also added and subtracted tales from the collection as a whole, such that a total of around 240 different tales appeared in the course of the seven large editions (Große Ausgaben) and ten abridged editions (Kleine Ausgaben) of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Rölleke, Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm 37). Because most of this editing took place in the compilation of the first edition and between the first and second editions, the intertextuality of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen with the Grimms’ other scholarly projects in the second decade of the nineteenth century becomes particularly noteworthy. In their preface to the Deutsche Sagen, the Grimms draw attention to the affinity between the fairy tale, the legend, and history, noting that the three forms «nebeneinander stehen und uns nacheinander die Vorzeit als einen frischen und belebenden Geist nahezubringen streben» (Deutsche Sagen 7). 3 Of this trio of genres, the fairy tale and legend have the most in common, they declare, and the two genres are often intermixed. In an attempt to establish genre distinctions between the two, they call the fairy tale more poetic and the legend more historical; assert that the fairy tale is at home everywhere in Germany while the legend is more regional, especially since it is by nature bound to a particular place and/ or legendary figure; and point out that the legend is often intertwined with the folksong while the fairy tale has retained certain features or motifs from the Germanic heroic epic. The fairy tale gives us a child-like worldview, they further conclude, while the legend is more serious and reflective. Scholars have been skeptical of the distinctions that the Grimms draw between the fairy tale and the legend, with Lutz A Bicentennial Trio 359 Röhrich rightly claiming that these distinctions actually create more puzzles than they solve (Sage und Märchen 44-45) and Jack Zipes concluding that clear distinctions between the two genres remain difficult to articulate («The Grimm German Legends» 165). Zipes is among the few scholars who have looked beyond questions of genre to point to the characters and incidents common to both the Deutsche Sagen and the Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Indeed, characters such as Frau Holle, witches, elves, dwarfs, monstrous births, changelings, and giants populate both collections. But arguably the most striking point of similarity pertains not to the content of the two collections itself but to the manner in which this content was chosen and shaped by the Grimms. In suggesting a point of comparison between the legends and the fairy tales, for example, Zipes finds that the Grimms’ «distinctly patriarchal leanings influenced their choice of subject matter, and they often reshaped legends and tales to correspond to their male conservative notions of sexuality and middle-class morality» («The Grimm German Legends» 164). As several Grimm scholars have shown, the many editorial interventions the Grimms, and in particular Wilhelm, made in the fairy tales they collected had the effect of making women more passive and dependent on men. This is most notable in tales such as «Rumpelstilzchen,» «Aschenputtel,» and «Das Mädchen ohne Hände,» though there are many more examples (cf. Zipes, Fairy Tale as Myth 49-59 and The Brothers Grimm 171-72; Bottigheimer 57-70). But despite Zipes’s suggestion, scholars have rarely, if at all, referred to the Deutsche Sagen in their exploration of gender roles in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen or attempted to ascertain the degree to which portrayals of women in the two collections dovetail or diverge. There are many ways in which a study of the Deutsche Sagen might yield insights into the portrayal of gender roles in the Grimms’ works; for example, there are numerous portrayals of «wild» women, women transformed into snakes by curses, and ghostlike women. Studying the representation of these figures may enhance our understanding of some of the allegedly «deviant» women in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Other congruities emerge when we compare the Kinder- und Hausmärchen to Der arme Heinrich. Although Rüdiger Krohn does not discuss portrayals of women in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, he has observed that the Grimms planned to donate money received from subscriptions to their edition of Der arme Heinrich to a women’s association in Kassel, and he concludes that this gesture was possibly meant «to assert the traditional concept of sex roles that assigns the role of subservience and pious sacrifice to women, and to see in the girl, who is occasionally called mín gemahel (my spouse) by Heinrich, the model of an unselfish wife» (228). The subservi- 360 Ann Schmiesing ence, piety, and self-sacrifice Krohn points to in Der arme Heinrich are of course also model traits of «good» women in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, as tales such as «Die Sterntaler,» «Die sechs Schwäne,» and «Aschenputtel» show (and these traits also appear in the Deutsche Sagen in legends such as «Das Fräulein von Boyneburg» and «Die Spinnerin am Kreuz»). To what extent, then, was the Grimms’ patriarchal reshaping of gender roles in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen tales influenced by their study of and fascination with medieval texts such as Der arme Heinrich, and vice versa? Were they attracted to Der arme Heinrich in some part because it portrays the piety, altruism, and self-sacrificing qualities that they expected of women and emphasized in their selection and editing of Kinder- und Hausmärchen tales? The element of self-sacrifice in Der arme Heinrich is in any case pertinent not just to gender roles in the Grimms’ fairy tales and legends, but also to the nationalist sentiment voiced in all three works. Although the Grimms were not zealous nationalists, they appeal to the Volk in their foreword to Der arme Heinrich, where they describe their edition as a «Bearbeitung eines alten, in sich deutschen, Gedichts» and celebrate Der arme Heinrich as a work for patriotic Germans in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars (Hartmann von Aue: Der arme Heinrich n.p.). They further speak of Hessians who had held up their swords and proclaimed that Hessian blood would defend the fatherland against the French. Maintaining that seven years of suffering have now purified the German lands, they relate that they had initially conceived of their edition of Der arme Heinrich as «ein geringes Opfer»-- an allusion to the maiden’s willingness to sacrifice her life for Heinrich (Hartmann von Aue: Der arme Heinrich n.p.). In a provocative extension of this analogy, they describe the French occupation as akin to the leprosy Heinrich suffers from and must be cured of: «Jetzt hat sich unser gesammtes Vaterland in seinem Blut von dem französischen Aussatz wieder geheilt und zu Jugend-Leben gestärkt» (ibid.). Although in somewhat milder form than in the foreword to Der arme Heinrich, the Grimms also convey their nationalist sentiments in the preface to the Deutsche Sagen. For example, they share their hope that the legends will be welcome to readers «schon als lautere deutsche Kost» and express their belief, «daß nichts mehr auferbaue und größere Freude bei sich habe als das Vaterländische. Ja, eine bedeutungslos sich anlassende Entdeckung und Bemühung in unserer einheimischen Wissenschaft kann leicht am Ende mehr Frucht bringen als die blendendste Bekanntwerdung und Anbauung des Fremden» (17). Compared with their comments regarding Der arme Heinrich and the Deutsche Sagen, the Grimms’ preface to and packaging of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen are considerably less nationalistic. As has often been pointed out, the Kinder- und Hausmärchen are not titled A Bicentennial Trio 361 «Deutsche Kinder- und Hausmärchen,» in part because the Grimms recognized the potential foreign influence on some of their tales, such as those told by informants with Huguenot ancestry, as well as the existence of many European variants for the tales in their collection (see for example Ward 367). Nevertheless, the Grimms extol the virtues of the Hessian peasantry in their preface to the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, and it is significant in view of their nationalist outlook during and after the Napoleonic Wars that Jacob Grimm later observed that the first preface to the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, dated October 18, 1812, was completed exactly one year before the Battle of Leipzig. 4 In the preface to the second edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, published in 1819, the Grimms also note that they omitted tales that were too foreign in origin. This expurgation of foreign content at times overlaps with their expurgation of the allegedly courtly influences on their texts. Jan Ziolkowski has insightfully shown that the Grimms’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen tale «Das Eselein,» based on the Latin Asinarius poem, provides an example of «what they judged to be a fairy tale tainted by the highly literary form in which it had been preserved» (202). To bring the tale back to what the Grimms believed was its origins as Volkspoesie, they went about removing its erotic aspects, references to classical mythology and poets, and features that struck them as too highbrow or courtly (226-29). While the Grimms viewed Hartmann von Aue as a poet who preserved rather than adulterated the tradition behind Der arme Heinrich, their views on Asinarius and Der arme Heinrich are similar in that in both cases they rebrand what actually was courtly literature as Volkspoesie. The central feature of the Grimms’ edition of Der arme Heinrich was Wilhelm Grimm’s translation of the Middle High German poem into modern German prose. The Grimms claimed when they first announced their intent to publish an edition of Der arme Heinrich that «Eine Uebertragung in die heutige Sprache wird diese altdeutsche Sage zu einem allgemein lesbaren Volksbuch machen» (Wilhelm Grimm, Kleinere Schriften 4: 504). The justification for this reconceptualization of Der arme Heinrich as folk literature lay in the Grimms’ theory that the work was based on older tales and folk beliefs that Hartmann had merely gently reshaped. They thus devote much of their afterword to demonstrating that aspects of Der arme Heinrich can be found in various fairy tales, legends, heroic epics, and folk beliefs. For example, they see in the title character’s name a connection with the many characters in fairy tales and folk literature named Heinrich, Hans, Hänsel, or Hanswurst. Since Der arme Heinrich portrays Heinrich as a leper who is told that only the blood of a virgin who willingly sacrifices her life for his can 362 Ann Schmiesing save him, it is not surprising that many of the Grimms’ references to fairy tales relate to depictions of disease and cure. Later in the story, such a virgin is willing to sacrifice herself, but Heinrich intervenes before her heart can be cut out and he is later miraculously cured by God and marries the maiden. Although no sacrifice actually takes place, the Grimms seek to ground Hartmann’s depiction of sacrificial blood as a cure for leprosy in folk beliefs pertaining to blood cures. Thus they point to the Kinder- und Hausmärchen tale «Fitchers Vogel» and the closely related «Blaubart,» asserting that Blaubart’s strangely-colored beard is meant to symbolize illness and claiming that his murdering of women, like the sorcerer’s murdering of women in «Fitchers Vogel,» is an attempt to cure his illness with their blood. The comparisons of «Fitchers Vogel» and «Blaubart» with Der arme Heinrich not only fit into the Grimms’ strategy of situating Hartmann’s work within an existing folk tradition, but also yield insights into their interpretations of these Kinder- und Hausmärchen tales. In the afterword to Der arme Heinrich, the Grimms also study blood brotherhood as a concept in the Middle Ages and in their own time, and here they give as examples the first-edition Kinder- und Hausmärchen tale «Die Brüder Wassersprung» and the tale «Die Goldkinder»; a handwritten comment in the margin of their personal copy of their edition of Der arme Heinrich also refers to the tale «Der treue Johannes» (Hartmann von Aue: Der arme Heinrich 189). 5 These various comments, handwritten or printed, are direct testimony to the connections the Grimms see between particular Kinder- und Hausmärchen tales and Hartmann’s work. However, they also shed light on what the Grimms may have associated with other Kinder- und Hausmärchen tales not mentioned here. For example, as I have argued elsewhere, the study of blood brotherhood in their afterword yields insights into the tale «Bruder Lustig,» which first appeared in the second edition of the fairy tales, published in 1819. 6 The Grimms’ frequent references to fairy tales and folk beliefs in their afterword to Der arme Heinrich are thus integral to their efforts to read Der arme Heinrich as a Volksbuch instead of as a work of courtly literature. As Krohn notes with reference to the Grimms’ afterword to Der arme Heinrich, «[t]he diligently assembled and extensive data are meant to demonstrate that with all its courtly veneer Hartmann’s text merely represents a course of a specific tradition that can be traced back to ancient, autochthonous roots» (226; see also Rautenberg 122-28). Krohn further suggests that Wilhelm Grimm’s translation resulted in a nineteenth-century «stylistic assimilation» of Der arme Heinrich, insofar as the work became «combinable in various ways with other, genuine chapbooks, and its recasting as a primer of an unselfish spirit of sacrifice made Hartmann’s tale increasingly suitable A Bicentennial Trio 363 for education, especially - but not only - that of a youthful public» (227). By emphasizing the work’s Germanness, portraying it as originating in Volkspoesie, and transforming its themes of disease and cure into a metaphor for the rejuvenation of Germany after the Napoleonic Wars, the Grimms thus assimilated Hartmann von Aue’s medieval work into a nineteenth-century German cultural outlook. Just as the Grimms believed that Der arme Heinrich represented a careful editing and shaping of existing folk material by Hartmann von Aue, so, too, did they see their own editorial work as that of gently nurturing the Volkspoesie that they had collected. In the preface to the second edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, Wilhelm explains that some shaping and reshaping must necessarily occur in the transmission of poetry, for without this even a loyal transmission of a story would be «etwas Unfruchtbares und Abgestorbenes» (Kinder- und Hausmärchen: Ausgabe letzter Hand 1: 23); indeed, this accounts for why each region and each storyteller tells the same tale somewhat differently. 7 He continues, however, to praise editors who gently enable their work to grow and unfold like a plant while denigrating editors who view editing as an exercise in tying and gluing pieces of a text together. The editor or author who unnecessarily polishes or reworks a tale becomes like Midas, insofar as every tale he touches turns to gold and cannot nourish us. For his part, Jacob was even harsher in his judgments concerning editors’ unrestrained interventions and authors’ literary adaptations of folk material. As we have seen, in the letter in which he tells Wilhelm of the legend and fairy tale that both revolve around a field of flax mistaken for water, Jacob concludes that Volkspoesie is complete in itself and need not be incorporated into literary adaptations. Because of his belief in the inner completeness of Volkspoesie as issuing from the collective voice of the people, he proceeds to pass harsh moral judgment in the letter on authors such as Clemens Brentano who have engaged in the reworking of folk motifs: «Die Lüge ist stets unrecht, selbst im Dichten,» he pronounces, and continues, «Die Erdichtung des Stoffes in Romanen und Liedern ist immer sündlich und führt zu nichts» (Briefwechsel zwischen Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm aus der Jugendzeit 462). This passage is strikingly similar to the Grimms’ pronouncement in the preface to the Deutsche Sagen concerning the adulteration of Volkspoesie: «Die Lüge ist falsch und bös […]. In den Sagen und Liedern des Volks haben wir noch keine gefunden» (Deutsche Sagen 10). Moreover, as in the preface to the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, they proceed to differentiate between interventions that falsify Volkspoesie and those that aid in its natural self-regeneration, stating of the latter, «dawider, daß manches abfalle in der Länge der Zeit, wie einzelne Zweige und Äste an sonst 364 Ann Schmiesing gesunden Bäumen vertrocknen, hat sich die Natur auch hier durch ewige und von selbst wirkende Erneuerungen sichergestellt» (Deutsche Sagen 10). Just as they regard editors who engage in the too radical polishing of fairy tales as Midas-like in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, in the Deutsche Sagen they characterize the results of radical reworking of legends as «überfeine Speisen» that the «Volk» will reject (10). In light of such pronouncements, it is ironic that, in response to criticisms of the first edition of the fairy tales by Brentano and others, the Grimms subsequently modeled their editorial practice more on Brentano’s method of restoring and reconstructing texts, as Heinz Rölleke has shown (Rölleke, Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm 57-66). Moreover, Wilhelm in particular would substantially edit the tales in the Kinder- und Hausmärchen over the seven editions that appeared in their lifetimes, in particular between the first and second editions, and the results do not always correspond with the high ideals they set in their preface to the collection. As for the Deutsche Sagen, the main criticism regarding the Grimms’ editing of the legends they collected was the unevenness of their interventions. Some texts were substantially reworked from the source material, while others were left virtually untouched. 8 Although it is the least known of the three texts examined here, the edition of Der arme Heinrich is perhaps the most interesting with regard to the question of which editorial interventions were felt to nurture the text and which to adulterate it or, put differently, which editorial interventions were seen as necessary to keep a text from dying out and which were believed to do the opposite by killing off its original essence. The Grimms (rather naively) saw in Hartmann von Aue not a courtly poet, but an author who faithfully transmitted folk material with a minimum of intervention; similarly, they wished to see in their own editorial enterprise a continuation and recapturing of what they believed to be the essence of German Volkspoesie. Wilhelm’s translation was meant to effect a rejuvenation of Der arme Heinrich, a work that had sunk into obscurity not only because of its medieval language but also because of what was regarded as its repellant subject matter and its outdated spiritual worldview (Krohn 224). Similarly, in the prefaces to the Kinder- und Hausmärchen and the Deutsche Sagen, the Grimms highlight their aim of preserving fairy tales and legends at a time when the transmission of Volkspoesie is dying out. The preface to the fairy tales begins with the image of a storm that has destroyed an entire planting of crops except for a few stalks protected by a hedge; similarly, only a small corpus of fairy tales has survived into modernity, they suggest, and this corpus must be preserved before the few storytellers who retain the tales in their memory A Bicentennial Trio 365 die out. In the Deutsche Sagen, the Grimms describe the impact of factors such as war and migration on Volkspoesie, noting that their collection represents only the meager remains of a once great hoard of ancient German folk literature. To what extent, then, did the Grimms effect the preservation and rejuvenation of fairy tales, legends, and medieval works to which they aspired? Although of far less impact than the fairy tales, the Grimms’ legends spawned numerous literary and artistic adaptations, as Taylor Starck showed almost one hundred years ago in his study of the Grimms’ legends as a source for nineteenth-century German ballads and as Donald Ward has shown more recently in the epilogue to his translation of the Deutsche Sagen (2: 379). More importantly, the legend collection had a profound impact on the field of folklore studies, with Ward counting over 500 collections of legends published in German between 1850 and 1950 (2: 380). As for Der arme Heinrich, although the work had been translated into modern German already in the eighteenth century, it was the Grimms’ translation and edition in 1815 that made the story popular in the nineteenth century. Among the various editions and adaptations that appeared in the decades after the publication of the Grimms’ edition is Adelbert von Chamisso’s ballad «Der arme Heinrich» (1838), which Chamisso dedicated to the Grimms. In the first of the five opening stanzas that form this dedication, Chamisso sentimentally describes Jacob and Wilhelm as masters, «die den Garten mir erschlossen,/ Den Hort der Sagen mir enthüllt,/ Mein trunk’nes Ohr mit Zauberklängen/ Aus jener Märchenwelt erfüllt» (Sämtliche Werke 1: 586). Here, the Grimms are in effect substituted for Hartmann von Aue (who goes unmentioned) as the creative spirit behind Chamisso’s rendering. Moreover, Chamisso interweaves the Grimms’ work on the fairy tale, legend, and Der arme Heinrich in thanking them for uncovering the «Hort der Sagen» for him, for filling his ears with the sounds of the «Märchenwelt,» and of course for acquainting him with Hartmann’s work. Whereas Chamisso implicitly considers the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, Deutsche Sagen, and edition of Der arme Heinrich together in this stanza, it is only the first of these that has continued to garner widespread acclaim in the twenty-first century, as demonstrated most recently in the bicentennial celebrations of 2012. Although the Kinder- und Hausmärchen appear in splendid isolation today, at the time of the collection’s first publication it was one of several projects to which the Grimms devoted themselves in their pioneering work on comparative mythology and folklore. An intertextual reading of the fairy tales, legends, and Der arme Heinrich sheds light on the Grimms’ preoccupation with attempting to reconstruct Germanic mythology and folk belief 366 Ann Schmiesing through the study of existing manifestations of Volkspoesie, as well as on their desire to edit in a manner that would distill rather than corrupt the essence of their texts. The trio of works examined here, however, also offers evidence of the inevitable mark the Grimms left on their texts as they decided which fairy tales or legends to include in a collection; intermixed different variants of the same fairy tale or legend; or imbued the texts with their own notions of gender roles or of cultural nationalism. As the bicentennial anniversaries of lesser-studied Grimm works such as Der arme Heinrich and the Deutsche Sagen approach in the coming years, it is worth pausing to consider the roles that these works played, together with the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, in the Grimms’ scholarly project in the second decade of the nineteenth century. Notes 1 In addition to the seven editions of the «Große Ausgabe» of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, the Grimms published ten editions of the «Kleine Ausgabe,» which contains a selection of 50 tales from the large edition. 2 For an overview of the manner in which the Grimms collected and edited their tales, see Zipes, The Brothers Grimm 25-64. 3 The Grimms also mention Der arme Heinrich in their preface to the Deutsche Sagen, including it in a list of German legends that do not appear in their collection, «weil sie in dem eigenen und lebendigeren Umfang ihrer Dichtung auf unsere Zeit gekommen sind» (Deutsche Sagen 23). 4 See Friedrich Panzer’s foreword to Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm: Vollständige Ausgabe in der Urfassung 51. 5 See the Grimms’ personal copy of their edition of Der arme Heinrich in the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (Nachlass Grimm No. 105). 6 In Disability, Deformity, and Disease in the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, I argue that the concept of blood brotherhood could explain why it is only after eating a lamb’s heart that Bruder Lustig starts to call his companion «Bruderherz» (a companion who, unbeknownst to him, is actually St. Peter in disguise; see 71-72). In this essay, my analysis of the Grimms’ references to Kinder- und Hausmärchen tales in their afterword to Der arme Heinrich extends the analysis I present there. 7 Wilhelm refers to his authorship of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen preface in a letter to Savigny (Briefe der Brüder Grimm an Savigny 188). In a further nod to his authorship, the prefaces to the first and second editions of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen appear in the edition of Wilhelm’s Kleinere Schriften that was published posthumously between 1881 and 1887. 8 For overviews of the principal criticisms of the Grimms’ editing of the Deutsche Sagen, see Uther, «Curiositäten» 125, and Uther, «Die ‹Deutschen Sagen›.» A Bicentennial Trio 367 Works Cited Bluhm, Lothar, and Achim Hölter. «Die ‹Quedlinburger Sammlung›: Eine quellenkritische Untersuchung zu Grimms Deutschen Sagen.» Fabula 30.3-4 (1989): 257-70. Bottigheimer, Ruth B. Grimms’ Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales. New Haven: Yale UP, 1987. 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