Who Were The Brothers Grimm?

“Once upon a time,” an old peasant woman began, “there was a queen whose husband had been dead for many years, and she had a beautiful daughter.”

A young man named Wilhelm Grimm listened attentively to the woman’s story. The woman had likely heard it when she was a young child from her own mother. It was a German fairy tale called “The Goose Girl.” The fairy tale is about a magical charm, a horse who can speak, an evil servant, and a princess who seems doomed to a life guarding geese for a king who believes she is a peasant.

Wilhelm had traveled out into the countryside of Germany to meet Dorothea Viehmann and listen to her stories. She told him thirty-five tales—and Wilhelm wrote them all down, word for word.

It was 1813, and Wilhelm and his older brother, Jacob, were in the middle of a big project. The brothers had just published their first book together, a collection of German fairy tales, and now they were working on a second volume.

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Excerpted from Who Were the Brothers Grimm? by Avery Reed
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