The Religious Meaning of the Grimms’ Magic Fairy Tales



We remember, vaguely, Grimms’ Fairy Tales, by two brothers named Grimm — actually Wilhelm (1786-1859) and Jacob (1785-1863); a younger brother, Emil Ludwig, did the drawings for the German editions. These tales are indeed a “national Treasure of the German people.” They were influential in reestablishing the dignity of the German language itself over the French preferred by German aristocrats. Indeed, Chesterton, in his own introduction to Aesop’s Fables, remarked that “Grimms’ Fairy Tales were by far the greatest thing ever to come out of Germany.”

An Unforgettable Impression

So what is The Owl, the Raven, and the Dove: The Religious Meaning of the Grimms’ Magic Fairy Tales? Author G. Ronald Murphy, S.J., a professor of German at Georgetown, tells us that it began with his reading of Bruno Bettelheim’s The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales. But, in fact, the book began with Murphy’s own childhood.

“My first acquaintance with the work of the brothers Grimm made an unforgettable impression,” he explains. “It was a long time ago when I first saw Snow White in Disney’s film version.” Murphy’s interest in things German, no doubt belied by his un-Teutonic sounding Celtic name, is, however, of long standing. He has written a study of Brecht and two volumes on the ninth century Heliand, a narrative gospel designed to teach the Saxon warriors about Christianity.

One of the rather amusing things about this really wonderful book was the way that Murphy cited Bettelheim’s “psychological” interpretation of the fairy tales. He would invariably respond sympathetically to Bettelheim’s subjectivized comments. Murphy would then proceed to point out something more objective, more grounded in reality, than the theory by which Bettelheim was understanding the fairy tale. To be sure, as Murphy noted, Bettelheim himself had some suspicion of this greater depth, but it is important that Murphy carefully spelled out this difference. Fairy tales are too profound to be, as it were, “psychologized” away.

This book is a happy combination of first-rate scholarship and of personal narrative, almost itself a tale of discovery, if not at times a detective story. Murphy’s research took him to the Yale and Berlin libraries where collections of the Grimms are housed, to the Grimm museums in Kassel and Haldensleben, to Steinau, where they were born, to the cities, churches, and homes where the Grimms lived. Murphy reads their Bibles to find them unopened for decades; thereby, he suggests, without saying so, that previous scholars had been remiss in considering the deep spirituality of the Grimm brothers with its Old and New Testament sources.

He examines their earlier collections and rewritings; he photographs the scenes around their home that would give some picture of what landscape in the tales themselves might have looked like in the Grimms’ eyes.

Preserving the Core Truths

The book is primarily about Wilhelm Grimm. It is also a polemic with the astonishingly many books written about these fairy tales, books in particular that sought to downplay, oppose, or not notice their religious level. But Murphy also points out that the retelling of older tales from German sources was not unrelated to classic myths of the Greeks and Romans, to the Nordic sagas, especially to Parzifal, the great saga of the Holy Grail, even to Aladdin’s journey. The French and Italian versions are carefully examined and compared.

The core of the book is that the fairy tale has a long history reaching back into the origins of civilization, especially Germanic civilization. Certain tales are told over and over again in various languages from Chinese to Norse, Russian, Italian, Greek, and Saxon. Something is profoundly true in them. But as they are told again and again, even in the Grimm household, they acquire, as it were, more truth. The Grimm brothers sought to keep all the truth that was found in the old Germanic tales, some of which was already Christian, and retell the tale with a more definite, though subtle, Christian orientation. At times, fairy tales kept alive religious stories when the high culture ignored faith or even hated it.

During the course of his investigations, Murphy came across a Greek New Testament from which Wilhelm Grimm read daily. In it, he had copied out certain Scripture texts, texts that reveal the principles, as it were, of Wilhelm’s reading of Christianity. Murphy places these texts in an appendix in a proper intellectual order to show how they square with the contents of the fairy tales.

Moreover, we notice something strikingly “ecumenical,” as it were, in Murphy’s account of how the Grimms made every effort to preserve the core truths of classic Germanic, Greek, Latin, and Norse tales even when a Christian plot or imagery might be added.

No doubt, a certain “development of doctrine” appears in all of this. The Grimm genius saw that mankind was always concerned with certain basic problems whose solutions were better presented by tales in a Christian framework. This is done delicately but forcefully.

One of the provocative parts of this most interesting book is the polemic that Murphy, rather bluntly, carries on with interpretations of Grimms’ tales that fail to see this religious element in their work.

The Resurrection and the Life

Murphy does not cite those greatest theoreticians of fairy tales —Chesterton, Tolkien, and C.S. Lewis — neither does he refer to The Lord of the Rings or the Chronicles of Narnia, the real sequels to his thesis. In “The Ethics of Elfland” in Orthodoxy, Chesterton writes, “I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism; saying that everything is as it must always have been…. Now, the fairy-tale philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely because it might have been scarlet.” Unless we can see it might have been scarlet, we will hardly notice that it is green. The magic of the tales often corresponds with the magic of things more closely than do the theories of the scientists.

The resurrection, in some way, appears in almost every Grimm tale. Of it, J.R.R. Tolkien wrote in On Fairy-Stories, “There is no tale ever told that men would rather find was true…. For the Art of it has the supremely convincing tone of Primary Act, that is, of Creation. To reject it leads either to sadness or to wrath.”

At the end of Grimm’s underlined citation of John 11:25, “I am the resurrection and the life,” Murphy comments: “At the raising of Lazarus from the dead, Jesus’ identity as bringer of resurrection and life; related, I believe, to the resurrection of the heroine by the prince at the end of the Grimms’ tales.” The brothers Grimm would have liked Tolkien.

The owl, raven, and dove are three birds that constantly appear in these tales; they are ancient birds connected with wisdom, Wotan, and the Holy Spirit, and in Murphy’s reading of Grimms’ tales, they are not unconnected with each other. This book has that happy combination of scholarship, insight, and charm that makes it a guide to those tales that connect us with what we are.

The “sadness and the wrath” that Tolkien notices to come from the rejection of the most wonderful tale of all are indeed manifested in these tales that Murphy recounts so well. The book is not to be missed.



(This article originally appeared in Crisis, America's fastest growing Catholic magazine.)

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