ABSTRACT
The appearance of the two volumes of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and Houshold Tales) by the Brothers Grimm in 1812 and 1815 marked not only the publication of one of the true bestsellers of the world, approaching the international and multilingual dissemination of the Bible, but also the beginning of a large global scholarly field commonly referred to as folk narrative research. While scholars of the nineteenth century assembled significant national and regional fairy tale collections that paralleled those of the Grimms, serious investigations into the origin, dissemination, nature and function of these texts also began to appear in a steady flow that has not ebbed. 1 In fact, interest in fairy tales has increased considerably in the past three decades, and obviously the bicentennial celebration of the births of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm marked a high tide not only in scholarship on their fairy tale collection and their philological, folkloric, mythological, legal, and literary endeavors 2 but also in research concerning the fascinating question of what their work and in particular “their” fairy tales mean to people in modern technological societies.
