Innocent Tales for Innocent Children?: Johann Gottfried Herder's Image of the Child and the Grimms' Fairy and Household Tales

Abstract

Innocent Tales for Innocent Children? Johann Gottfried Herder's Image of the Child and the Grimms' Fairy and Household Tales It is no wonder that scholars have seen in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Fairy and Household Tales of 1812 the culmination of Johann Gottfried Herder's program for the collection of oral literature.1 Like Herder before them, the Grimms envisioned the fairy tale as a genre for children and as educational material, they regarded it as the remnants of ancient myth, and they invoked a stereotypical female figure as the teller of tales. The most seductive argument, however, is based on the fact that the Grimms' first edition of their collection of fairy tales appeared at Christmas, and that their friend Achim von Arnim presented it to his wife, Bettina—to whom, together with their son, it was dedicated-on Christmas eve. In his essay, "Tales and Novels," of 1802, Herder had called for a collection of fairy tales for children. "A pure collection of fairy tales, intended for the heart and soul of children, endowed with all the riches of magical scenes as well as with the perfect innocence of a youth's soul," Herder proclaimed, "would be a Christmas gift for the young world of future generations, for precisely in this holy night, the horrors of the ancient primeval world were banished through the radiance of a child, who destroyed the power of evil demons."2 Herder added in a footnote that such a collection would be appearing at Christmas in 1802, but he died shortly thereafter, no collection having in the meantime appeared. It was the Grimms, it seems, who answered his call.3 The relationship between Herder's conception of a collection of tales appropriate for children, and that which the Grimms produced, however, is not so straightforward. Herder was interested in new, adapted, and revitalized tales. He explains: "It is now time for us to lay new meaning into old tales, and to use the best ones with true understanding."4 The Grimms did not claim to have achieved such a goal; on the contrary, Wilhelm Grimm, in his prefaces to the collections, claimed to present tales from Germany's oral tradition, without addition, deletion, or embellishment.5 In the preface to the second volume of their collection, Grimm actually describes in detail the word-for-word transcription of oral recitations by a peasant raconteur.6 On the other hand, there are discrepancies between the Grimms' claims and their practices. Although as yet there is no clear consensus regarding the extent to which the Grimms may have intended to deceive their audience, it is safe to say that simply comparing the Grimms' manuscripts to each subsequent version of the Fairy and Household Tales reveals substantial editing from one edition to the next.7 Perhaps in the end they did, then, fulfill Herder's demand. ,And yet the story is more complicated, for the images of the child that Herder, and later the Grimms, presentin juxtaposition with the tales they described and published, respectively-is 205 doubly ironic. It provides, in all its irony, an interesting perspective on the long-held association between children and fairy tales. As was absolutely typical of his characterizations of the phenomena of human culture with which he concerned himself, Herder turns, at the outset of his discussion of the tale, to its origin: "We awaken into the world in astonishment; our first sensation, if not fear, is wonder, curiosity, astonishment. What is all of this around me? How did it come to be? ... So asks, unaware of itself, the childlike mind."8 The questioning spirit that Herder invokes finds its answers, as he proceeds to proclaim, in tales. Thus the genre arose in order to fill a need, and the oldest tales were, accordingly, "explanations of nature."10 Wonder, then, surprise, and astonishment at the world around the human being, is the human trait that begets the genre. Wonder, as Herder establishes after having argued in favor of its significance, is the faculty of a childlike mind. If it is not a child who, at the very origin of the tale, summons it into existence, the image of...