Up: [[Story]] Created: 2025-10-27 The Brothers Grimm are Wilhelm (1786-1859) and Jacob (1785-1863), although they were so inseparable that they’re always referred to in the plural. There’s quite a mythology around their work of collecting and recording the fairy tales for which they are so famous. The mythology, in this case, is false, as Jillian Hess, author of the Substack publication *Noted*, learned when she examined the brothers’ notes. The story was that the brothers were collecting the orally told stories of the German people in order to preserve them because the oral tradition, and the people who used it, were dying out. It’s true that they wanted to preserve the stories of German people. This was at a time before Germany became a unified country and during the Napoleonic Wars when the state where the brothers lived had been taken over by the French. The brothers were staunch supporters of German nationalism. What isn’t true is that they wandered around collecting stories from the mouths of peasants in the fields. Rather, they talked to educated women, Dorothea Viehmann in particular, and wrote their stories based on what she told them and on books, including those in their 700 volume personal library. The changes they made to the stories they read and heard were to emphasize Christian morality by removing all sexual references and heightening the violence to show what would happen to children if the moral lessons were not obeyed. Interestingly, the fairy tales were not meant to be the Brothers Grimms’ most important project. That was supposed to be a German dictionary to which they devoted the latter half of their lives. The notes for their dictionary were a zettel (paper slips), each with an individual word, a quotation showing its use, and the source for the quotation. Unfortunately, Wilhelm died at the letter ‘D’ and Jacob at ‘F’ so the dictionary wasn’t finished in their lifetime. ![[Grimm zettel.webp]] This photo and more information about the brothers’ notetaking is [here](https://www.grimmwelt.de/en/).