The Authors

The Grimm Brothers, Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859), were German academics, linguists, cultural researchers, lexicographers and authors who together specialized in collecting and publishing folklore during the 19th century (Wikipedia, 18/04/2015). They were very interested in safeguarding traditional stories that were only on the narrated form. They began to invite some other storytellers, friends and relatives, to their home to tell them traditional and “Stories from Past Time” tales. After that, they began to transcribe these traditional stories from northwest of Europe. 

At the beginning, the words employed were very crude, with sexual undertones and full of violence. After getting accusations from different sectors of society by the steadfastness and the cruelty described into the tales, Grimm brothers had to polish the language to make it more enticing to a bourgeois audience, sexual elements were eliminated and Christian elements were added. They finished to reducing, modifying or removing some sections of the tales, and after 1819 Wilhelm began writing for children, adding entirely new tales or adding new elements that were often strongly didactic than existing tales.