3 ms·

I thought it was well known that they collected existing tales rather than writing their own?

• irrational 8y ago
  That was my understanding too. Is it plagiarism if they were totally upfront about what they were doing?
  • pandesmos 8y ago
    And not only that, it’s always been my understanding that there was a major motivation of preservation. To record the spoken tales before they were lost.
• buovjaga 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_Grimm#Methodology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brothers_Grimm#Methodology Quote: "According to scholars such as Ruth Bottigheimer and Maria Tatar, some of the tales probably originated in written form during the medieval period with writers such as Straparola and Boccaccio, but were modified in the 17th century and again rewritten by the Grimms. Moreover, Tatar writes that the brothers' goal of preserving and shaping the tales as something uniquely German at a time of French occupation was a form of "intellectual resistance" and, in so doing, they established a methodology for collecting and preserving folklore that set the model followed later by writers throughout Europe during periods of occupation."