SOURCE: "New Misconceptions about Old Folktales: The Brothers Grimm," in The Brothers Grimm and Folktale, edited by James M. McGlathery, University of Illinois Press, 1988, pp. 91-100.

In the following essay, Ward decries the lack of an objective scholarly evaluation of the Grimms' fairy tales.

One occasionally encounters the contention that the Brothers Grimm were guilty of manipulative deception when they added elements of cruelty to the tale of Cinderella that were not in their sources. The reference is typically to the bloody scene of the stepsisters cutting off their heels and toes in the attempt to make the slipper fit. I find this contention to be somewhat strange, for one merely needs to look up tale type 510 in the Aarne-Thompson index,¹ which leads one, in turn, to the monograph by Marian Roalfe Cox² that documents this motif in scores of variants disseminated from India to Iceland, so that...