Grimms' Fairy Tales

Collected by two linguists

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were librarians and scholars of language, interested in how German had changed over the centuries and in the stories ordinary people told. They gathered folk tales from friends, neighbors and storytellers and published the first volume of their Children’s and Household Tales in 1812. Jacob later gave his name to Grimm’s law, which describes how sounds shifted in the Germanic languages, and the brothers began a great dictionary of German. The collection here includes “Hansel and Gretel”, “Rapunzel”, “Rumpelstiltskin”, “Little Red-Cap” (Red Riding Hood), “Snowdrop” (Snow White), “Ashputtel” (Cinderella), “The Frog-Prince”, “Briar Rose” and dozens more.

Why it works for learners

Fairy tales are built for memory. They use repetition (three brothers, three tasks, three nights), fixed phrases (once upon a time, happily ever after) and a small, recurring world: forest, king, queen, witch, wolf, castle, bread, gold, apple. Each tale is short, often just a few pages, and many are darker than the films.

There’s even a tale for you. In “The Three Languages”, a count despairs of his son because, after three years of study, the boy has learned only what dogs, birds and frogs say. It turns out to be exactly what he needs.

Which level to start at

A2 is ideal; the language is simple and the patterns are strong. B1 keeps more of the detail and the stranger tales. Learners of German have an extra reason to read the Grimms in German, the language they were collected in. Each tale makes a good sitting in sentence-by-sentence mode, with audio and a translation for every line.

Read next

• Andersen’s Fairy Tales, the stories Andersen made up himself
• The Arabian Nights, tales within tales from the East
• The Adventures of Pinocchio, an Italian fairy tale at novel length