Daily Fact: Did the Brothers Grimm create their fairy tales? 🧚

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Original photo by one AND only/ Shutterstock The Brothers Grimm didn't create their own fairy tales. The cultural impact of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales, originally published in 1812 as "Kinder- und Hausmärchen," or "Nursery and Household Tales," is hard to overstate. Two centuries after its publication, the tales have been the creative backbone for hundreds (perhaps thousands) of films, TV shows, plays, and works of art — whether as direct adaptations or loose inspirations. But although you're probably familiar with stories like "Little Red Riding Hood," "Rumplestiltskin," and "Sleeping Beauty," you may not know that German linguists Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm didn't actually create the narratives themselves. Instead, they compiled tales that had been passed down through the oral tradition, some for perhaps thousands of years. The two brothers began interviewing family and friends to collect the tales while they were still teenagers studying at the University of Marburg. After publishing their first collection of 86 tales, the brothers delivered a second edition three years later with an additional 70 tales. The seventh and final edition in 1857 featured 211 tales. Originally, the stories weren't meant for children — many were violent, sexual, or otherwise R-rated. Instead, the Grimms intended for the tales to be an excavation of cultural heritage, and they first introduced them as scholarly work. But as literacy rates climbed in the 19th century, subsequent editions edited out a lot of the original tales' brutality in order to appeal to wider audiences, especially children. Today, many kids become acquainted with the Grimms' fairy tales through Walt Disney, who used the tales as far back as 1922 for some of his earliest animations. But Disney is far from the only one inspired by the Grimms — more recently, their work has provided the narrative fuel for Stephen Sondheim's musical Into the Woods, Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre TV series, 2020's fantasy-horror film Gretel & Hansel, and NBC's aptly named television show Grimm, to name just a few folklore-filled examples.   In the Brothers Grimm's "Cinderella," the fairy godmother character is a tree. In the Brothers Grimm's "Cinderella," the fairy godmother character is a tree.

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Disney's first full-length animated film, "__," is based on a Grimm tale. Disney's first full-length animated film, "__," is based on a Grimm tale. Numbers Don't Lie Approximate number of language and dialect translations of Grimm's fairy tales 160 Number of 1988 Tony awards won by Stephen Sondheim's "Into the Woods" 3 Year Disney released "Tangled," based on the Brothers Grimm's Rapunzel 2010 Number of episodes of the TV show "Grimm," a fantasy police procedural based on Grimm fairy tales 123 The Brothers Grimm's other great work was a German dictionary. While history remembers them as saviors of the folktale, in their own time the Brothers Grimm were widely respected medievalist scholars and German linguists. In fact, they were so respected that the predictable patterns of phonetic changes from Proto-Indo-European language (the theorized common ancestor of all modern languages) to Germanic tongues are now known as "Grimm's Law." But their most ambitious work was creating Deutsches Wörterbuch ("The German Dictionary"), which they began working on in 1838. Originally estimating that it'd only be four volumes long, Jacob eventually revised that number to seven and thought they'd need about 10 years to complete it. Instead, it took more than a century for all 32 volumes to finally appear in print — the last in 1961. Of course, the Brothers Grimm didn't live to see the end of their ambitious project. When Jacob Grimm died in 1863, four years after his brother Wilhelm, he had only finished up to the letter "F." His final word was "frucht," meaning "fruit."   You might also like Mermaids, Centaurs, and More: Mythological Creatures 101 Woven into tapestries, glittering from stained-glass windows, or starring in our favorite stories, mythological beasts such as unicorns and dragons have been a part of many cultures for centuries. But where did they come from, and how did they capture our collective imagination? Thank you for supporting our advertisers. They help keep Interesting Facts free!

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