once upon a time

Dorothy Viehmann, Henriette Dorothea Wild and the Brothers Grimm

---

In the second edition of their collection of fairy tales, Wilhem and Jacob Grimm asked their brother Ludwig to engrave Dorothy’s portrait (image via Wikimedia Commons)

The Frog Prince. The Goose Girl. The Twelve Brothers. Rumpelstiltskin.

These legendary Brothers Grimm tales may not have originated with the brothers themselves, but rather with Dorothy Viehmann, an elderly peasant, and Henriette Dorothea Wild, the mild-mannered girl next door. Some scholars estimate the brothers contributed only a handful of stories to their first collection:

Erase the image of the brothers hacking through primordial forests, knocking on cottage doors, and chasing after every village crone. It was a loose sisterhood of women who collected the vast majority of the tales, led by the Grimms’ upper-class friends and relatives — more Virginia Woolf than Mother Goose — who were steeped in local lore and fancier French and Italian folktales.