Legends 90: Set Aside

Aaron Mahnke (0:12)

We are living in the age of information. Our generation has access to institutional knowledge like never before. With a touch of a button, we can get the answer to any question, or the solution to any problem. It's all right there at our fingertips.

But that wasn't always the case. For most of human history, knowledge was difficult to come by. Education was guarded by the elites. And if you wanted to know something, you had to go dig through the library shelves yourself. That is, if you were literate and had access to books. And even those repositories of learning weren't guaranteed. From the destruction of the Library of Constantinople to the Chinese Cultural Revolution and everything in between, humans have a nasty habit of wiping centuries of written records off the map in no time flat. Which is why, for most of history, information has passed down with people's voices, songs, plays, storytelling. All of it was oral. That is the only way that people could make knowledge accessible to the masses, or for that matter, participate in sharing their own knowledge with their community. And sure, it might not have been as fast or as accurate as the modern-day computer, but it worked. There's just one problem with it, though. If it wasn't written down, those stories eventually vanished.

Needless to say, when something from that oral era was preserved and passed down, it was a very big deal. And of course, it also created a treasure trove of some truly legendary tales.

I'm Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore Legends.

They didn't come up with all those fairy tales on their own. From day one, their mission was to record, not to create. And for the Grimm brothers, there was one single purpose in mind, to create a unified culture for all German-speaking peoples. You see, at the time, Germany wasn't Germany. Not yet, anyway. Instead, it was a loosely connected group of nation states, all cobbled together like puzzle pieces that didn't fit the best. It was quite the geopolitical conundrum. On the one hand, there were a whole bunch of German princes trying to run their individual states like little kingdoms. Sometimes they helped each other, and sometimes they bickered. It was a lot of chaos. And on the other hand, there was the looming possibility of empire. The Napoleonic wars were raging, and Napoleon himself had set his sights on the German states. The French troops actually succeeded in occupying the Grimm brothers' hometown of Kassel in 1806 And then suddenly the streets were flooded with a new language, new customs, and foreign faces. The brothers felt as though their identity had been taken from them.

It was, to them, a wake-up call. No matter what happened to Germany, whether it was shattered into pieces by squabbling princes or united under a central foreign government, the Grimms felt that they would have to watch their nation's history and culture disappear. And so they created a third option. They wanted to foster a national German identity that couldn't be swayed by ever-shifting European politics. If the German states had a shared, preserved culture, then they would be one step closer to being a unified people. Although we have to call that what it is. Nationalism, right? And often, a pretty rabid form of it at that. To turn their dream into reality, the Grimm brothers began to collect folktales from across the German states. Before the brothers, most folktales and fairy tales were told around campfires, at bedtime, and during long workdays. They were so tightly woven into every household's daily tasks that you couldn't separate them from the household itself. And because of that, close to 90% of the brothers' sources were women. And one of those women was named Dorothea Wiemann. The brothers met her in 1813 while they were working on their second book of fairy tales. For her part, Dorothea was a widowed mother in her 50s who sold fruit at the market to support her family. Looking at her, you would never suspect that she was a storytelling genius. But she'd been honing those skills since she was a little girl. Her father had owned a tavern, and Dorothea had spent her childhood listening to patrons tell their best tales by the light of the fire. These stories were rough around the edges and sometimes a bit crude, but they made a lonely tavern feel like home for weary travelers. So at some point, she started telling these stories to her own children, and eventually her audience expanded to include the daughters of a local pastor, a pastor who just so happened to be friends with the brothers Grimm. And after a while, he realized that he needed to introduce them to Dorothea.