Rowan & Pine: A Feminist Folklore & Mythology Podcast - July 31, 2026


Pine Cones： The Brothers Grimm ｜ Rowan & Pine Shorts

Episode Fifty-Two Pt.2： Damsels [feat. Fairy Tale Fix] - Unsuspecting Ass Rowan & Pine： A Feminist Folklore & Mythology Podcast Trailer

Episode Stats


Length

14 minutes

Words per minute

124.02

Word count

1,770

Sentence count

77

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

9

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 As for speaking, there was no one to speak to, and as for laughing, she had no mind to
00:00:13.640 it, so she sat on and looked at nothing but her work.
00:00:18.920 From The Six Swans, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, 1812, translated by Margaret Hunt.
00:00:30.000 The Brothers Grimm are household names, spoken with the same familiarity as Cinderella, Hansel
00:00:40.520 and Gretel, or Rapunzel. In German-speaking Europe, their books were second only to the
00:00:46.260 Bible in popularity, and by the 20th century, they had become the most famous collectors
00:00:52.560 of folk and fairy tales in the Western world.
00:01:00.000 Adaptations of their stories, and homages to them, have appeared in every corner of culture.
00:01:09.540 Literature and opera, theatre and comedy, music, TV and film, and even meme culture.
00:01:16.920 You could say their influence is so widespread it feels almost like a magic spell cast over the land from one of their iconic retellings.
00:01:26.640 But, given how deeply their work has permeated our media, our childhoods, and our storytelling traditions, it's worth pausing to ask who these men actually were, and what values and beliefs they scattered through the pages of their beautifully illustrated tales.
00:01:43.840 Born just one year apart in the 1780s to a jurist and the daughter of a city councilman,
00:01:55.140 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were two of nine children, three of whom died in infancy.
00:02:01.600 They spent their early years in Hannau, now part of modern Germany.
00:02:06.840 In 1796, their father, Philip Grimm, died of pneumonia, plunging the family into poverty.
00:02:13.740 Dorothea, their mother, was forced to give up the household's servants and large home,
00:02:18.700 relying instead on financial help from her father and sister.
00:02:22.840 Since Jacob was the eldest surviving son,
00:02:25.660 he took on adult responsibilities at just 11 years old,
00:02:29.480 sharing them with Wilhelm for the next two years.
00:02:32.100 Out of these difficult circumstances, the brothers developed a famous work ethic,
00:02:37.740 a deep commitment to learning, and a bond that would last throughout their lives.
00:02:43.060 They went on to study law at the University of Marburg, where they also discovered a passion
00:02:53.980 for history, literature and philology, which is the study of language in its historical,
00:02:59.980 written and oral forms.
00:03:03.380 In 1808, their friend, the Romantic poet Clemens Brantano, asked them to gather folktales for
00:03:10.660 a planned book of literary fairy tales. In 1810, they sent him 54 texts, which they had
00:03:17.580 wisely copied. Brintano misplaced the original manuscript in the Ollenberg Monastery in Alsace
00:03:24.380 and never used their material. When it became clear that he would not publish the tales,
00:03:30.220 the brothers decided, with encouragement from another romantic writer and friend,
00:03:34.320 to release the collection themselves.
00:03:37.060 By then, it had grown to 86 tales,
00:03:40.500 which was published in 1812,
00:03:42.740 followed by another 70 in 1815.
00:03:48.720 The stories in the Grimm's collection
00:03:51.340 are not, strictly speaking, all fairy tales.
00:03:55.260 For a start, many contain no fairies at all.
00:03:58.180 Instead, they span a wide range of genres.
00:04:02.020 fables, legends, animal tales, folk anecdotes, trickster stories, tall tales and religious
00:04:10.020 narratives. The brothers aimed to gather and preserve every kind of ancient cultural relic
00:04:15.700 they could find. They treated these artefacts as if they were sacred objects, the goal being
00:04:21.300 to trace the roots of cultural evolution. They wanted to show how natural language,
00:04:26.740 shaped by the needs, customs and rituals of ordinary people,
00:04:30.500 created genuine social bonds and helped form cohesive communities.
00:04:36.180 It sounds idyllic, romantic and honestly pretty progressive.
00:04:41.060 But in reality, the Grimm's rarely collected stories by traveling into rural villages and
00:04:47.220 listening to peasants. Most of their informants were women from the educated middle class
00:04:53.460 and many tales came from aristocratic circles. A significant number were taken from other books,
00:05:00.020 especially after the 1819 edition. The tales were not exclusively German in origin,
00:05:05.460 but were part of a wider European storytelling tradition.
00:05:09.940 Even so, they were shaped by the changes
00:05:12.660 introduced by the German narrators and informants who passed them on.
00:05:23.460 During their lifetimes, the Grimms published seven editions of the so-called Large Collection between 1812 and 1857,
00:05:32.760 which Wilhelm revised continually after the first edition.
00:05:36.260 They also produced ten editions of the smaller collection of fairy tales between 1825 and 1858,
00:05:44.680 which Wilhelm likewise kept altering.
00:05:47.960 The result is a vast, ever-shifting body of material, including extensive notes,
00:05:53.460 that exists in multiple versions and continues to evolve with each new edition and scholarly interpretation.
00:06:01.220 Each subsequent evolution, of course, is not without a facet of the collectors who preserved them.
00:06:10.240 It is commonly assumed that the Grimm's stories were always meant to charm children,
00:06:15.800 to lull them to sleep or nudge them toward good behaviour.
00:06:19.700 Modern picture book editions certainly encourage that belief, smoothing out the rough edges and
00:06:25.220 pairing the tales with soft illustrations that politely ignore the social tension simmering
00:06:30.500 underneath. What tends to be forgotten is that Jacob and Wilhelm originally and repeatedly
00:06:36.580 stated that their collection was not for children at all. Their intended audience was grown-ups
00:06:42.340 and scholars. They knew children enjoyed the tales, sure, but their real aim was to encourage adults
00:06:48.100 to understand the present by studying their cultural past.
00:06:51.800 And that is where things get...
00:06:54.160 patriarchal.
00:06:57.380 From the start, the Grimms reshaped the stories
00:07:00.280 to match their idea of a proper folk narrative.
00:07:04.440 Over roughly 40 years,
00:07:06.400 and especially through Wilhelm's tireless revisions,
00:07:10.160 the collection shifted into a moral handbook
00:07:12.860 for well-behaved middle-class children.
00:07:15.540 anything sexual vulgar or socially inconvenient was trimmed away what remained was a word that
00:07:24.800 reinforced patriarchal authority protestant discipline and the expectation that women
00:07:30.360 should be industrious obedient and preferably indoors the brothers merged variants of tales
00:07:39.020 into polished versions that reflected their own tastes which means the stories we now call
00:07:44.780 folk tales are not untouched relics of the past, but carefully mediated works shaped by
00:07:51.160 educated informants and by the Grimm's own ideals of virtue and social order.
00:07:58.320 These values are woven into the archetypes that populate their stories.
00:08:03.800 The hero, often the youngest son, an orphan girl or an outcast, must leave home, confront danger
00:08:10.520 and prove inner worth through trials.
00:08:13.580 This reflects the Grimm's admiration for perseverance and moral strength. 0.91
00:08:18.040 The trickster or fool succeeds through wit or mischief, 0.61
00:08:22.220 capturing their interest in the cleverness of ordinary people. 0.98
00:08:25.960 The villain embodies greed, idleness or deception,
00:08:30.100 mirroring their belief that stories should confront the darker impulses of human nature.
00:08:34.900 the wicked stepmother reinforces their moral emphasis on maternal duty and the end of childhood
00:08:42.280 dependence the wise old helper offers guidance or magical aid representing their reverence for
00:08:49.380 inherited wisdom and cultural memory and crucially the innocent maiden endures cruelty or confinement
00:08:56.600 yet survives through purity patience and quiet resilience a figure shaped by the brother's
00:09:02.960 conviction that feminine virtue, once sufficiently tested, will eventually be rewarded.
00:09:11.880 The good women in the tales are demure, deferential, nurturing, and often silent.
00:09:20.260 The ideal of the silent woman appears again and again across German cultural life from this period,
00:09:27.060 as if quietness itself were the highest form of feminine virtue.
00:09:31.240 what is striking though is how differently silence functioned for men and women in both
00:09:38.020 oral and literary tradition male silence was treated as dignified the earned reward for a
00:09:45.500 life of striving or contemplation female silence on the other hand was not a reward at all it was
00:09:53.060 an expectation men could choose to be silent but women were expected to stay silent in other words 0.74
00:10:00.300 Male reticence was noble, while female reticence was enforced.
00:10:06.000 And these ideals show up everywhere once you start reading the tales with the Grimm's value system in mind. 0.59
00:10:12.880 Silence was only one of the virtues they rewarded.
00:10:16.340 Obedience, humility, tireless industry and near saintly willingness to suffer
00:10:21.500 were treated as the hallmarks of a good woman.
00:10:25.240 Cinderella is praised not for her wits or ambition, but for scrubbing floors without complaint.
00:10:31.020 In The Goose Girl, the princess is bound against speaking the truth,
00:10:35.540 and rewarded only when she quietly endures humiliation.
00:10:39.540 Even in The Six Swans, the sister must sew shirts from nettles in absolute silence for six years, 0.66
00:10:46.200 a feat of pain and labour that is framed as the pinnacle of feminine devotion.
00:10:51.120 Meanwhile, the heroines who dare to speak, question, or act on their own desires
00:10:55.100 are swiftly corrected by curses, exile, or death. 0.82
00:11:00.100 The Grimm's world is one where virtue is measured in quiet suffering, 0.98
00:11:04.400 where industriousness is feminine destiny, 0.73
00:11:07.780 and where the women who survive do so by embodying the very qualities
00:11:11.360 the brothers believed would keep society in order.
00:11:13.800 the legacy of the grim's tales is complicated powerful and more than a little ironic what
00:11:27.060 began as a scholarly project rooted in their own ideals of discipline obedience piety and proper
00:11:33.160 social order has grown into a global archive that now belongs to everyone their stories
00:11:38.720 traveled far beyond Germany, reshaped by translators like Edgar Taylor, and embraced so enthusiastically
00:11:45.040 in England, Scotland and Ireland that they often overshadowed local traditions. Joseph
00:11:50.700 Jacobs, the great collector of British and Irish folklore, once complained that what
00:11:55.800 Perrault started, the Grimms finished, as their polished, moralized versions of old
00:12:01.000 stories pushed native lore into the margins. Yet, despite the patriarchal scaffolding the
00:12:07.520 brothers built into their tales, readers across cultures have continued to reinterpret, reclaim
00:12:13.540 and subvert them. The very narratives once used to promote silence, obedience and industrious
00:12:21.060 suffering have become fertile ground for feminist retellings, queer reimaginings and modern critiques 0.67
00:12:27.560 of power. In other words, the Grimm's may have shaped the stories, but the world has
00:12:32.800 been reshaping them right back ever since. 0.98
00:12:38.400 Thank you for joining me for another Pinecones, Seeds of Folklore from Rowan and Pine. 0.91
00:12:45.060 I'm Niamh, and until next time, please remember that silence is not a feminine virtue,
00:12:51.700 and we will always support your right to yap. 1.00
00:12:55.920 Thanks for listening, and fuck ya folklore. 1.00
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