German Folklore: Darker and stranger than the Brothers Grimm suggested
German folklore is one of the richest and most varied in Europe, and like French folklore it has been significantly shaped by a single literary collection — the Brothers Grimm’s Kinder und Hausmärchen of 1812 — that domesticated and sanitised a tradition considerably darker than the versions that became canonical. The real Sleeping Beauty does not simply sleep. The real Cinderella involves considerably more violence. The real Hansel and Gretel is a story about genuine childhood terror rather than a moral fable with a tidy resolution.
Behind the Grimm collection is a tradition that includes Wotan riding through winter storms with his army of the dead, a scholar who sold his soul for twenty-four years of knowledge and pleasure and was torn apart when the time was up, 130 children who disappeared from Hamelin in 1284 and whose fate has never been explained, and a Bavarian chimera that Bavarian taxidermists still sell stuffed specimens of to tourists in Munich. The articles below cover the full range.
Germany sits at the centre of European folk tradition geographically and culturally. The Germanic languages and the peoples who spoke them spread across an enormous area of Europe, carrying their supernatural beliefs with them, and the creatures and figures of German folklore appear in variant forms across Scandinavia, the Netherlands, England, and beyond. The Kobold gave English the word goblin through Norman French. The Nixe appears in various forms across the Germanic world. Wotan’s Hunt rides in versions from Germany to Iceland.
The Brothers Grimm were scholars as well as collectors, and their work was part of a genuine nineteenth century effort to document a folk tradition they believed was disappearing. What they collected, even in its edited form, preserved stories that would otherwise have been lost. What they edited out was often the most interesting part. The articles on this site go back to the unedited versions.