The Women Who Saved the Fairy Tales

In 1813, a widowed fruit seller named Dorothea Viehmann sat down with the Grimm brothers and began telling them stories she had learned as a child in her father's tavern. She was in her fifties, poor, and unremarkable to look at. But her mind was, in the words of the brothers themselves, "a folktale sponge." Over the course of a single summer and fall, she dictated the tales that would become the backbone of the second volume of Grimm's Fairy Tales—stories like "The Devil's Sooty Brother," "The Devil's Three Golden Hairs," and "Hans the Hedgehog." Two years later, she was dead. If the Grimms had arrived just a little later, her stories—and countless others like them—would have vanished forever.

The Nationalist Project Behind the Fairy Tales

The Grimm brothers were not simply collectors of charming bedtime stories. Their mission was political. In the early 1800s, Germany was not a unified nation but a patchwork of squabbling principalities, all vulnerable to the expanding French Empire under Napoleon. When French troops occupied the Grimms' hometown of Kassel in 1806, the brothers watched their language, customs, and identity being overrun. They felt, as Aaron Mankey puts it in this episode of Lore Legends, "as though their identity had been taken from them."