The Owl, The Raven, and the Dove

The brothers Grimm thought of fairy tales as remnants of ancient faith expressed in poetry. Through all the revisions of their collections of tales, their preface always begins with a description of gleaning, a biblical image recalling the command that the poor are not to be prevented from gathering the remnants that survive the harvest or the storm, nor the grain that has grown unnoticed by the hedgerow or the roadside.

The brothers, and especially Wilhelm, who continually revised the tales over a period of forty years, found those untouched grains of wheat still surviving on the margins of religious and poetic consciousness in traditional figures of speech, common superstitions, and, above all, in old stories. Wilhelm was a gleaner, he believed, of remnants of ancestral Germanic religious faith surviving on the margins of culture in popular poetic tales. The gleaner, however, was also a kneader and blender of other ancient stories embodying religious faith. He collected and reexpressed the religious faith found in the poetic tales primarily of three ancient traditions: Classical Greco-Roman, Norse-Germanic, and Biblical. In all three he was at home as a fluent reader, student, and storyteller, and in one of them, Christianity, he was a devout believer. His personal style of Johannine spirituality with its emphasis on love as the divine and life-giving form of faith, enabled him to have a serene reverence for pre-Christian, pagan religious awareness in Germanic and Greek forms, especially insofar as they too spoke of the primacy of love and the tragic and violent nature of its violation. To do justice to Wilhelm Grimm's retelling of the tales it is not enough to treat them as narratives that ignore the spiritual feelings of the past and integrate only the middle-class morals of the nineteenth century as some scholars seem to maintain.