Fairy Grandmothers: Images of Storytelling Events in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Willem De Blécourt

doi:10.18352/bmgn-lchr.544

Abstract

Typical nineteenth‐century German images of elderly female storytellers capture them in the act of relating Märchen to young children. When these images reached a mass public, they reinforced the idea of a timeless female oral tradition. As researchers of oral tales hardly ever recorded any actual female storytellers, the images belonged for the most part to a romantic myth of Germanyʹs past. Towards the end of the century, artists started to produce more realistic paintings of female storytellers. This coincided with the growing popularity of fairy‐tale books which were indeed mostly read to children by women.

Highlights

Typical nineteenth-century German images of elderly female storytellers capture them in the act of relating Märchen to young children
The Storyteller in the Journal During the last quarter of the nineteenth century the German illustrated family journal Die Gartenlaube published a number of prints which had storytelling as their subject
I will primarily document the latter, and juxtapose it with descriptions of the practice of storytelling. What this eventually reveals about the worldviews of the artists, their clients, or the editors and readers of Die Gartenlaube, has to remain oblique, or at least tentative

Summary

Willem de Blécourt

FAIRY GRANDMOTHERS : Images of Storytelling Events in Nineteenth-Century Germany. Typical nineteenth-century German images of elderly female storytellers capture them in the act of relating Märchen to young children. The painter after whose work the final print in the series was made, Emil Adam (1843-1924, a cousin of Julius) followed the convention of featuring a woman narrator in his Im Märchenbanne (Enchanted by Stories) Adam, depicted her as a nun and set her in a meadow, in the shade of a bush, with a building in the background. In the Egyptian scene adults are among the listeners; as far as can be concluded from the brief descriptions, in the mind of the artists and their (unknown) patrons, German tales were only told by women to children This idea was held by a large section of the Gartenlaube readers

The Grimms in the Picture

The Märchen in the Book

The Idea in the Image

The Symbol in the Nation

Works cited