Simple annals
SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER
The Brothers Grimm Ruth Michaelis-Jena (Routledge 55s)
`Me black coffin, and the bearers carrying yellow lemons and rosemary . . Lemons and rosemary are traditionally associated: they embellish roast pork; they combine in a hairy/ash. Rosemary has long been a funeral herb, carried, not for remembrance but to countervail the smell of churchyard mould; perhaps the lemons were carried as abettors. There is a great deal of botanical folklore waiting to be inquired into; mean- while it is tempting to speculate on their strange occurrence as a funeral garnish.
In the black coffin was Philipp Wilhelm Grimm, Amptmann of Steinau in Hesse and father of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm—but for whom one's mind might not swivel so easily from funerals to folklore. Jacob and Wilhelm were still children but their futures were decided on. Philipp Wilhelm intended them to study jurisprudence,' that solemn creaking vehicle which would convey them to the creditable status of Justiciary, Burger- master even. And as they were eminently `good' children, biddable and industrious, they would have obeyed his wishes. From the point of view of posterity the Amptmann of Steinau died in the nick of time.The family fell into poverty. A mother and an aunt, with six children to fend for, were too busy scrambling through the present to have much authority over the future; and though both the elder boys went to the Lyceum and duly on to the University, and were model pupils there, they developed ideas and inten- tions of their own.
Napoleon, too, to whom Europe owes more than it acknowledged or acknowledges, had a hand in preserving the Grimm brothers for folklore. The Napoleonic Code had replaced the Teutoburgerwald of Ger- man jurisprudence in which they had in- tended to make their careers. It was a fine pretext to loSk elsewhere. Jacob became librarian (with quite remarkable ease) to Jerome Bonaparte, King of Westphalia. Wilhelm studied mediaeval manuscripts. Sharing in the nationalistic romanticism which was overturning the sedate notions of the waning Enlightenment and looking back to the age of minnesingers, they were already collecting songs and stories of the past; these they offered to Brentano, joint-editor with von Arnim of Des Knabens Wunder- horn, a publication as crucial as Percy's Reliques.
'All that we have is yours,' wrote Wilhelm and a collaboration over the next volume of the Wunderhorn was adumbrated. But in regard to the offered Maerchen what was theirs became too exclusively Brentano's. He was a fantasist, seeing the bare folk narra- tive as a framework to clothe with his own inventions. These droll de seigneur proceed-
ings shocked the bourgeois integrity of the Grimm brothers. They set themselves to take down stories as though they were taking down evidence, preserving regional idioms, including unconsidered trifles such as pro- verbs and local sayings, recording nonsense- jingles without attempting to put sense into them. It is the practice of every folklorist nowadays; but whereas the modern folklorist singlemindedly pursues folklore, Jacob and Wilhelm were basically preoccupied with establishing the development of the German language and German literature. Writing down what they heard from country servants, nannies, pedlars, shepherds, farmhands, chil- dren, 'an old soldier who bartered his tales for sifts of discarded trousers', they listened for echoes of an earlier story-telling, echoes of the Nordic saga,-the Christian legend, of Orpheus and Osiris even. And when the Kinder-und Hausmaerchen came out in 1812 it was offered as a work of scholarship with notes and appendices.
It had a mixed reception. Romanticists de- plored the inelegance of the narratives, the burden of the annotations. Moralists thought the stories unsuitable for children. It was the children who decided. Scorning the erudition with their heels, they welcomed the rough, adventurous, vitaminous diet of what was unsuitable for them. True, being children of that date, they had the Old Testament— those nourishing plagues of Egypt, Jezebel, Simpson alias Sampson. But the Household Tales were brisker and could be enjoyed without impiety.
As itseemstous, the brothers had got there. To their contemporaries, they seemed to be continuing their journey along the plateau of respected eminence—so respected and emin- ent, indeed, that when Jacob, considered to be the ringleader in a professorial opposition to Ernest Augustus, King of Hanover, was sent into exile under an escort of dragoons, his students demonstrated in protest. They studied, they taught, they wrote, they pub- lished. Wilhelm edited early German texts, Jacob systematised German grammar (he was Grimm's Law, too), worked on a dic- tionary. They produced two more volumes of folk-stories; Jacob published legal treatises and Reynard the Fox. Apart from that brush with Ernest Augustus, their lives were tran- quil, industrious, brotherly.
There is not much here for an unfalsifying biographer. But the Grimm Brothers were members of the Grimm family. Their ad- mirably unfalsifying biographer has availed herself of this—which was undoubtedly of central importance to Jacob and Wilhelm. The fatherless children, scattered hither and thither, maintained a deep family affection, a mercury-like faculty of cohesion. Wars swept past them, dynasties fell, fashions changed, armies advanced and retreated: what was happening to other Grimms re- mained their chief concern, their most en- grossing topic. During the invasion of France, Ludwig Grimm in bivouac heard himself greeted by another soldier. 'Oh, what a joy, it was my brother Carl'. The word one scunners at, can only use in derision, Gemuethlichkeit, is redeemed into decency by their honest delight in a domestic circle.
Ruth Michaelis-Jena's rendering of this small-town, small-state domestic chronicle is enhanced by the domesticity of the illustra- tions, almost all by Ludwig Grimm, the artist of the family, and drawings of house- hold articles of the time:.baking-dishes, ink- stands, moulds for gingerbread cookies, 'a small hammer belonging to the Grimm family'. Her unostentatious research is so substantiating that by the end of the book I felt myself taking leave of Jacob as though I had known him: 'Uncle was always so cheerful that we were apt to forget his age. At times he was in very good spirits, as when last August we were preparing to travel to the Harz mountains, and he sat quite seriously at the dining-room table, wearing Mamma's straw hat with ribbons over his long white locks. And how happy he was when the weather was bad, and he did not have to go for a walk, but could sit at his desk from early morning till late at night.'
Previous page
