Snip, snap, snout,
     This tale’s told out.

Let us examine the folk-tale generally as to its literary form.  The folk-tale originally did not come from the people in literary form.  The tale was first told by some nameless primitive man, who, returning from some adventure of everyday life, would narrate it to a group of his comrades.  First told to astonish and interest, or to give a warning of the penalty of breaking Nature’s laws, or to teach a moral lesson, or to raise a laugh, later it became worked up into the fabulous stories of gods and heroes.  These fabulous stories developed into myth-systems, and these again into household tales.  By constant repetition from one generation to another, incidents likely to happen in everyday life, which represented universal experiences and satisfied common needs of childhood, were selected and combined.  These gradually assumed a form of simplicity and literary charm, partly because, just as a child insists on accuracy, savage people adhered strictly to form in repeating the tale, and because it is a law of permanence that what meets the universal need will survive.  The great old folk-tales have acquired in their form a clearness and precision; for in the process of telling and re-telling through the ages all the episodes became clearly defined.  And as irrelevant details dropped out, there developed that unity produced by one dominant theme and one dominant mood.  The great old folk-tales, then, naturally acquired a good classic literary form through social selection and survival.  But many of the tales as we know them have suffered either through translation or through careless modern retelling.  Many of the folk-tales take on real literary form only through the re-treatment of a literary artist.  Mrs. Steel, who has collected the Tales of the Punjab, tells how the little boys of India who seek to hold their listening groups will vary the incidents in a tale in different tellings, proving that the complete tale was not the original unit, but that single incidents are much more apt to retain their stock forms than plots.  The combination we now have in a given tale was probably a good form once hit upon and thereafter transmitted.

Jacob (1785-1863) and William (1786-1859) Grimm, both fine scholars, incapable of any but good work, did not undertake to put the tale into literary form suited to children.  They were interested in preserving folk-lore records for scientific purposes.  And we must distinguish between the tale as a means of reflecting the ideals of social and religious life, of displaying all the genius of primitive man for science to interpret, and the tale as a means of pleasing and educating the child.  The Grimms obtained most of their tales from the lips of people in Hesse and Hanau, Germany.  They were very fortunate in securing many of the tales they were thirteen years in collecting, from an old nurse, Frau Vichmannin, the wife of a cowherd, who lived at Niederzwehrn,