Authors: Kate Forsyth
The Wild Girl (67 page)
It was Herman Grimm, Wilhelm and Dortchen’s son, who had helped identify Old Marie as a key source of stories. He wrote in 1895:
Dortchen also got her trove from another source. Above the Wilds’ nursery in the apothecary building, with its many hallways,
stairways, floors and rear additions, through all of which I poked through myself as a child, was the realm of ‘Old Marie’ … One feels immediately that Dortchen and Gretchen only recounted what had been impressed upon them by Old Marie.
Most early biographies of the Grimm brothers do not hesitate to credit Old Marie with telling such tales as ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘The Maiden With No Hands’ and ‘The Robber Bridegroom’.
However, in 1980, a German scholar called Heinz Rölleke reissued the 1857 edition of the
Kinder-und-Hausmärchen
– the final and definitive version – with a new appendix in which he listed all the contributors and their tales. He removed Marie Müller’s name and replaced it with Marie Hassenpflug, Lotte Grimm’s sister-in-law. Rölleke had examined the Grimm brothers’ diaries and realised that, on many occasions, the brothers had been visiting the Hassenpflug household on the date on which those tales had been transcribed. Since the Hassenpflugs were of French descent, this also explained why so many of the stories told by the mysterious ‘Marie’ were versions of Charles Perrault’s well-known French tales.
Most Grimm scholars now agree with Rölleke’s conclusions, and Old Marie is no longer credited as a key storyteller. Indeed, some go so far as to say that she never existed at all, and was invented to allow the Grimms to pretend that they had collected stories from old peasant women instead of young, well-educated, middle-class ladies.
However, I am inclined to believe some, if not all, of Herman Grimm’s recollections of what his mother had told him. Someone told Dortchen a great many stories, and it seems unlikely to have been her mother, who only contributed two tales to the collection, both of them short and rather silly.
So I have allowed Old Marie a place in this story, both as a warm and loving servant and as a teller of stories, spells and old superstitions. She tells Wilhelm two stories. The first, ‘Little Snow-White’, is now usually credited to Marie Hassenpflug. However, it is known that Jakob first sent a version of this tale to Karl von Savigny in 1808, a year before the Grimms
met the Hassenpflugs. It is entirely possible, then, that it was Old Marie who told the tale.
The second, ‘The Maiden With No Hands’, is thought to have been told by Marie Hassenpflug on 10th March 1811. However, I have given this terrible, heartbreaking story to Old Marie to tell, primarily for dramatic reasons, but also because it does not have a French source and is unlike any other stories told by the young, elegant and well-brought-up Marie Hassenpflug. Rölleke himself has admitted that Old Marie may have been the source of some of the stories.
Another small liberty I have taken with known historical fact is allowing Dortchen to visit the Marburg storyteller in the poorhouse and transcribe two tales from her: ‘Aschenputtel’ and ‘The Golden Bird’. It is not known who transcribed these tales, although it was said to have been done with the help of the warden’s wife.
Writing
The Wild Girl
was intense, challenging and, at times, very difficult. The story worked its way into my dreams and gave me terrible nightmares. The opening scene with Dortchen dancing by herself in a snowy, twilit forest, with ravens flying over, was inspired by one of these dreams. Some of the darker scenes later in the book also came to me in my sleeping moments, and I had to force myself to write them as a form of exorcism, to rid myself of Dortchen’s terrors.
Luckily for me, I have a very loving and supportive family, and they allowed me the space and time I needed to brood over this story and find its shape and rhythm. Particular thanks need to be said to my long-suffering husband, Greg, and my children, Ben, Tim and Ella, for letting me go to Germany on my own to research this book, and for many burnt offerings in the place of dinner. I also need to thank my sister, Belinda, who gave me many books on German history, helped me with my shaky attempts at translation and let me talk about the book at any given opportunity.
To my wonderful, tirelessly working agents – Tara Wynne at Curtis Brown Australia and Robert Kirby at United Agents in the UK – and to the fabulous team at Allison & Busby – Susie Dunlop, Lesley Crooks, Sara Magness, Chiara Priorelli and Sophie Robinson – I cannot thank you enough. Thank you also to Christina Griffiths, for designing the gorgeous cover.
Most of the excerpts from the tales told by Dortchen Wild to Wilhelm Grimm were translated from the German by me, so any mistakes are all mine. At all times, I tried to draw upon the earliest known versions of the tales – those recorded in the 1808, 1810 and 1812 manuscripts – since these were closest to the original oral source. I am also grateful to the excellent fairy tale website at the University of Pittsburgh, found at
www.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm.html
and run by the American folklorist and writer D.L. Ashliman, which contains many variants of the tales, including links to the German originals.
I also need to thank Dr Cay Dollerup, the Danish fairy tale scholar, who wrote the definitive research on ‘Allerleirauh’ or ‘All-Kinds-of-Fur’ in
A Case Study of Editorial Filters in Folktales: A Discussion of the ‘Allerleirauh’ Tales in Grimm,
which examined in great depth the first version of the tale, told by Dortchen Wild to Wilhelm Grimm on 19th October 1812, only a few days before the typesetting of the first volume of
Kinder-und-Hausmärchen
. He was also kind enough to answer numerous questions via email, as did Professor Jack Zipes and Professor Ruth B. Bottigheimer.
To write this book, I had to read many books and articles – and many, many fairy tales! I cannot list them all here but I must mention a few that were utterly invaluable to me:
Fairy Tales: A New History
by Ruth B. Bottigheimer;
Grimms’ Bad Girls and Bold Boys: The Moral and Social Vision of the Tales
by Ruth B. Bottigheimer;
One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and their Tales,
by John M. Ellis;
The Reception of Grimms’ Fairy Tales: Responses, Reactions, Revisions,
edited by Donald Haase;
The Brothers Grimm: Two Lives, One Legacy
by Donald R. Hettinga;
The Brothers Grimm
by Ruth Michaelis-Jena;
The Owl, the Raven and the Dove: The Religious Meaning of the Grimms’ Magic Fairy Tales
by G. Ronald Murphy;
The Brothers Grimm and Folktale
, edited by James M. McGlathery;
Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales,
by Valerie Paradiž;
Paths Through the Forest: A Biography of the Brothers Grimm
, by Murray B. Peppard; ‘Why Not “Old Marie” … or Someone Very Much Like Her? A Reassessment
of the Question about the Grimms’ Contributors from a Social Historical Perspective’ in
When Women Held the Dragon’s Tongue and other Essays in Historical Anthropology
by Hermann Rebel;
Brüder Grimm Kinder-und-Hausmärchen: Die handschriftliche Urfassung von 1810
with commentary by Heinz Rölleke;
The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales
by Maria Tatar;
The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World
by Jack Zipes; and
Brothers Grimm: The Complete Fairy Tales
, translated and annotated by Jack Zipes.
Finally, I need to thank my German translator, Barbara Barkhausen, who helped me greatly with my research, and, last but definitely not least, Irmgard Peters – a direct descendant of Rudolf Wild – who translated Dortchen’s memoir and Wilhelm’s diaries for me, plus gave me many small details of family oral history passed down through the generations, including the fact that Rudolf had ginger whiskers.
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K
ATE
F
ORSYTH
is the bestselling author of more than twenty books, ranging from picture books to poetry to novels for both children and adults. She has won numerous awards and been published in fourteen countries around the world. She is a direct descendant of Charlotte Waring, the author of
A Mother’s Offering to her Children
, the first book for children ever published in Australia. She lives by the sea in Sydney with her husband, three children, a rambunctious Rhodesian Ridgeback, a bad-tempered black cat, and many thousands of books.
Bitter Greens
The Wild Girl
Allison & Busby Limited
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London W1T 6DW
www.allisonandbusby.com
First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2013.
This ebook edition published by Allison & Busby in 2013.
Copyright © 2013 by K
ATE
F
ORSYTH
The moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–0–7490–1398–1
