Their father died when they were young, they struggled with their widowed mother to survive in a country in turmoil, and left home to lodge with their aunt in an unfamiliar city. One year apart in age, and very close, the Brothers Grimm slept in the same bed when they were children; afflicted with various ailments and misfortunes, they continued to work together, side by side, at their huge tasks of cultural archaeology — the German Dictionary, the corpus of German legends and lore — through the decades of upheavals brought about by the rise of Napoleon.

This unrest often affected them directly, costing them their jobs, forcing them to move from place to place. They took each other by the hand and, like orphans in a fairytale, wandered into the deep dark forest and picked up stories they found strewn across their path — about captive children and clever fools, magic talking animals and cooking pots, enchanted castles and glass mountains, about spells and charms that turn boys into ravens, princesses into beggars, and vice versa.

The Grimms were Romantics, and their long labour on Children’s and Household Tales, from the first volume of 1812 to the last in l857, was an act of passionate identification, a cultural monument of modern nationalism, and a series of protests against the ravages Germany was suffering, comparable to Victor Hugo’s epic spectaculars and Verdi’s insurrectionist operas.

But the Grimms had little interest in chronicling events as they had occurred: they concentrated on “a document of our hearts”. Like their compatriot Novalis, like Blake and Wordsworth, they identified with the child-like faculty of wonder, and projected it on to their vision of the common people, or Volk. After the first edition was banned, they countered: “Children can read the stars without fear, while others, so superstition has it, insult angels by doing the same thing.”

A. S. Byatt, in her introduction, continues this line of argument: “The tales collected by the Grimms,” she writes, “are old, simpler, and deeper than the individual imagination.” She praises them because “one of the true qualities of the real fairytale is that it does not ‘have a design on you’.”

Yet the Grimms did have a palpable design on the reader, a writerly design, and the Tales’ lasting popularity bears witness to its success. The brothers were brilliant impersonators, tuned in to the human appetite for innocence and experience, for horrors and wonders, for consolation and promise, all presented as the fount of artless, universal mythic wisdom. Their stories are famously full of deadpan cruelty, and rarely does a plot offer any reason or excuse for the savagery.

“Motiveless malignancy”, in Coleridge’s fine phrase, rules. This defining fairytale tone was crystallised by the Grimms: “The robbers tore off her fine clothes, put her on the table, chopped her beautiful body into pieces, and sprinkled them with salt.”

The Grimms claimed: “No details have been added or embellished and changed.” But as many critics have discussed, the Grimms’ informants mostly weren’t peasants or crones in woodcutters’ cottages murmuring primordial lore over their cooking pots. The tales drifted in on the currents of the sea of stories, from the East, the Middle East, the Mediterranean, as well as more local, northern shores. Orature is not a low, class-bound genre of storytelling, but the core of imaginative activity which produces literature as we know it.

The editor, Maria Tatar, describes vividly how the Grimms edited, altered, censored and expanded, and how, after 1819, Wilhelm became the sole compiler — and indeed author. In Hans Dum, a young man had the power to wish a girl pregnant; Rapunzel originally asks the old woman why — after clandestine meetings with the prince — her clothes are getting tighter. Wilhelm emended both passages as unsuitable for children. Tatar contrasts a paragraph from an oral narrative taken down in his notes with the delightful published version, Fundevogel. The original dictation is pretty unreadable. She has consequently treated the whole body of the stories as a literary work, and chosen her 37 tales from the most expanded literary variants in the final edition of l857.

All the favourites are here: Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Mother Holle, Furrypelts, The Goose Girl, etc. But there are also some lesser known tales: of the poor wretched girl sent out in a dress made of paper to gather strawberries in the woods in the depths of winter, of the queen who is turned into a duck but comes back at night in her true form to nurse her baby. I was sorry some of the most eerie and weird and metamorphic stories have been left out, like The White Snake, in which the hero eats a little piece of the snake and finds he can listen in on the language of animals.

She has appended a group of eight problem stories for discussion. One of these is very close to the urban myth (still in circulation) which tells of one child who, playing make-believe butchers, hurts another; then, when the mother goes for help, her baby drowns in the bath and the victim bleeds to death.

The “Annotated” fairy books series are sumptuously illustrated. In this one, Arthur Rackham’s warty witches and giants loom, interspersed with images from Walter Crane, Wanda Gag, and Kay Nielsen’s hyper-elegant Art Nouveau graphics. They turn the series into luxury gift books like Folio Society editions, whereas the notes in the margins connect them to Norton’s highly useful Readers (including Tatar’s own, very fine Classic Fairy Tales). In this annotated Grimm Brothers, however, the notes are erratic and frequently banal, undecided about whom they are addressing (sometimes young children, sometimes students), and making haphazard stabs at psychoanalysis, nature mysticism, structuralism, film studies, with the odd philological comment and perfunctory mention of Margaret Atwood, Anne Sexton, Günter Grass, and Angela Carter, only a few of the writers who have drawn deep on the tales.

Tatar’s translations go far towards making up for this; apart from a few rather grating American turns of phrase (“pesky critter”, “getting the creeps”) and some awkward scansion and rhyming, they are bright, spirited renderings, and, read aloud, can inspire that sharp fairytale pleasure at impending danger, as when the witch’s voice crackles: “Nibble, nibble where’s the mouse? Who’s that nibbling at my house?”

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