The Stories of the Brothers Grimm The brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, collected their well-known stories from the oral tradition of the Germanic people. Their work went through many revisions before becoming the text we know today as Grimm’s Fairy Tales. When the brothers lived, their books were quite popular. Their compatriots bought almost as many of them as they did the Bible. Like the Bible, some of the stories are violent and crude, containing antisemitism and assumptions about gender roles and social stratification that we, in twenty-first-century America, may find offensive. This is true of folklore around the world. The oral history of a culture does not shrink from…