Most people who read “the Grimms” today are reading the seventh and final edition, published in 1857. Almost no one is reading the first edition, published in 1812. The difference between the two is large enough to constitute, by some measures, a different book.

Over the 45 years between editions, Wilhelm Grimm (Jakob largely withdrew from editorial work after 1816) made roughly 4,300 documented changes to the texts of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen. Some were technical: smoothing inconsistencies between variants. Many more were ideological. They give us an unusually clear picture of what 19th-century German bourgeois readers wanted their folk tales to not say.

What disappeared

Three categories of material were progressively removed across the seven editions.

1. Maternal violence

The 1812 Hansel and Gretel has the children’s birth mother orchestrating their abandonment in the forest. By 1857 she has been replaced by a stepmother. Snow White’s antagonist undergoes the same revision: the queen who orders the huntsman to cut out the child’s heart is, in 1812, Snow White’s biological mother. By 1857, the stepmother displaces her.

Wilhelm’s notes are explicit about why: he found maternal violence “unedifying” and worried that it would distress children whose own mothers were reading the stories aloud. The substitution is one of the most consequential single editorial choices in the history of children’s literature. The stereotype of the “wicked stepmother” — a figure with limited ethnographic basis in the actual oral tradition — was essentially manufactured by Wilhelm Grimm between 1819 and 1857.

2. Sexual material

The 1812 Rapunzel notices she’s pregnant when her clothes start to fit too tightly. By 1857, the prince’s nightly visits and the resulting pregnancy are simply gone; Rapunzel is exiled for being foolish enough to mention the prince’s name. The 1812 Frog King ends with the princess sharing her bed with the frog, not (as in the sanitized version) flinging him at the wall — and the rather direct implication of consummation is dropped entirely after the third edition.

3. Catholic religious motifs

The Grimms were Protestant; their sources, especially in the Hessen region, were often Catholic. The first edition preserves miracles, saints, and Marian apparitions. By 1857, most of these have been generalized or removed.

What was added

Almost everything that adults today think of as “Grimm style” was added by Wilhelm between editions. The famous opening — Es war einmal (“Once upon a time”) — was systematized across stories that originally opened in a dozen different ways. The moral codas at the end of certain tales (“and this is what happens to people who do not listen to their parents”) are almost entirely Wilhelm’s invention; the source texts contain no such moralizing.

The cadence — the slightly archaic, slightly singsong rhythm that English speakers associate with “fairy tale voice” — is also a Wilhelm construction. It was modeled on the work of Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, both Romantic poets, both family friends. The “folk voice” of the Grimms is, ironically, a deliberate literary stylization of folk voice.

Why the editing mattered

Wilhelm was responding, in detail, to the changing market for the book. The 1812 edition was a scholarly project — annotated, dense, intended for folklorists. It did not sell well. By 1825 the Grimms had separated out a Kleine Ausgabe (“Small Edition”) aimed at children, with the most distressing tales removed entirely and the surviving stories softened. That smaller edition became the runaway bestseller. The 1857 large edition reflects 30 years of accumulated revision driven by what worked in the children’s version.

This is the part that should sit uneasily with anyone interested in the integrity of folk traditions. The Grimms started as ethnographers trying to preserve what they could of an oral tradition they (correctly) saw as disappearing. They ended as the most influential children’s-book editors in European history. The book that emerged in 1857 is, in many tales, a literary product shaped by Christian middle-class sensibility, not a record of what 18th-century Hessian peasants told their children at bedtime.

That doesn’t make 1857 worthless. It makes it a different artifact than 1812. Both are real. Neither, on its own, is “the Grimm tales.”

Reading the 1812 edition today

The Princeton bilingual edition (Zipes, 2014) is the most accessible English version. The Vanessa Joosen / Walter de Gruyter scholarly edition (2022) is the most thorough. If you read both editions of Snow White side by side, you will not encounter the same story. You will encounter two related but distinct works — one closer to the oral source, harsher and stranger, and one closer to a Victorian children’s book.

For bedtime, we tend to recommend the 1857 versions: they are gentler, and they’re what your child’s friends are reading. For curiosity, the 1812 versions are an extraordinary record of how much a story can change while still being called by the same name.

— Primary sources: Grimm, J. & W., Kinder- und Hausmärchen, 1st ed. (Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1812); 7th ed. (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1857). Critical edition: Joosen & Lathey, eds., De Gruyter, 2022.