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About this episode
Little Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White: ancient German folk tales, passed down by old peasant women at the spinning wheel? Not quite. In the first episode of our five-part Grimm series, we ask who actually told the Brothers Grimm their fairy tales. We follow a manuscript that traveled through a Trappist monastery in Alsace all the way to Geneva, watch Heinz Rölleke bury a star witness who never existed, and look behind the most famous portrait in German fairy-tale history.
📚 Sources and Further Reading
Heinz Rölleke (ed.): Die älteste Märchensammlung der Brüder Grimm. Synopse der handschriftlichen Urfassung von 1810 und der Erstdrucke von 1812. Cologny-Genève: Fondation Martin Bodmer, 1975. → The standard edition of the Ölenberg manuscript, setting the 1810 manuscript beside the 1812 first edition. Replaced the older Lefftz edition.
Heinz Rölleke: “Die ‘stockhessischen’ Märchen der ‘Alten Marie’. Das Ende eines Mythos um die frühesten KHM-Aufzeichnungen der Brüder Grimm.” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift N.F. 25 (1975), pp. 74–86. → The article that dismantled the “Old Marie” attribution and identified Marie Hassenpflug as the contributor. (German)
Heinz Rölleke: Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm. Eine Einführung. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2004. → Concise overview of how the collection came about, who contributed and how the texts were edited. (German)
Joseph Lefftz (ed.): Märchen der Brüder Grimm. Urfassung nach der Originalhandschrift der Abtei Ölenberg im Elsaß. Heidelberg: Winter, 1927. → The first complete edition of the Ölenberg manuscript. Superseded by Rölleke 1975, but important for the history of research. (German)
Holger Ehrhardt (ed.): Dorothea Viehmann. Kassel: Euregio, 2012. → Collected volume on Viehmann’s life and tales, with contributions by Heinz Rölleke and others, including an essay on French influences in her stories. (German)
Holger Ehrhardt: “Ein übersehenes Märchen von Dorothea Viehmann.” Fabula 64 (2023), no. 3–4, pp. 243–281. → Argues that “The White Bride and the Black Bride” goes back to Viehmann, based on newly found early manuscripts. (German)
University of Kassel: press release on the discovery of 54 previously unknown early Grimm manuscripts, December 2023. → Background on the new manuscript finds. (German)
Hans-Jörg Uther: Handbuch zu den Kinder- und Hausmärchen der Brüder Grimm. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2008. → Standard reference on every tale in the collection, its sources and versions. (German)
For English-language readers: Jack Zipes’ translation of the 1812/1815 first edition, “The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm” (Princeton University Press, 2014), includes the tales later removed, such as Bluebeard and Puss in Boots.
The Ölenberg manuscript can be viewed in digitized form at e-codices, the Virtual Manuscript Library of Switzerland.