This chapter traces the emergence of the fairy tale as a generically defined form in Britain in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and argues that this process of generic consolidation was the product of a series of fruitful creative and commercial interchanges of narrative tradition with the continent of Europe. To make this argument, the chapter focuses upon the importance, for British approaches to the fairy tale, of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French vogues for literary fairy tales, and the revolution in approaches to traditional storytelling spearheaded in nineteenth-century Germany. It is also proposed that the work of the Scottish fairy-tale collector and anthologist Andrew Lang in consolidating and popularizing these continental traditions at the end of the nineteenth century was instrumental in giving shape to British ideas about the fairy tale at the cusp of the twentieth century. Writers, translators, and collectors considered in this chapter include Marie Catherine d’Aulnoy, Charles Perrault, Jean-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm Grimm, and Robert Samber.

In August 1846, the folktale collector, grammarian, mythographer, and lexicographer Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) wrote a letter to the Prussian king, Frederick William IV (1795–1861), in which he urged the monarch to support the German-speaking population of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, the areas between Denmark and the German lands. At the time, the Danish king, Christian VIII, was also the duke of the twin duchies; in the summer of 1846, he had publicly declared that they must allow female succession, a reform that would secure continued Danish rule; the Danish royal family was running out of male heirs.

The chapter looks at Wilhelm Grimm’s early conception of the philologist as a redeemer of the nation. Grimm was decisively influenced by the university teacher and mentor of both brothers, the law professor Friedrich Carl von Savigny, who was known for his belief that the historicist legal scholar served as the primary custodian of the national legal corpus. Following Savigny’s example, Wilhelm Grimm argued that the philologist must strive to retrieve, clarify, disseminate, and thereby guard the nation’s folk culture. The nation formed the only viable basis for rule, but the nation’s history was not generally known; rather, it had to be explored, preserved, and transmitted by publicly oriented scholarship. In this sense, there was a vital philological dimension to the modern conception of political legitimacy, and the philologist had to assume the important task of reconstructing and reintroducing politically crucial cultural materials for the contemporary world. Inspired by the folktales’ own imagery of resurrection and rejuvenation, Wilhelm Grimm even pictured the philologist as able to reawaken the nation from its slumber.