The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm is a national treasure of the German people. Among its 210 stories there are a dozen or so which are such master- pieces that they have become a treasure that belongs to the childhood and the adulthood of the whole world.
Ever since Bruno Bettelheim presented his psychoanalytic interpretation of the tales more than twenty years ago, scholars have been fascinated by the mysterious nature and continuing influence of these stories on the human imagination.
In the interval since the appearance of Bettelheim's The Uses of Enchantment, rewarding studies of these Grimm tales have been published from many points of view.
With approaches that are Jungian, Marxist, sociopolitical, dialectical, historical, text-historical, feminist, gender-related, mythological, and economic, with both affirmative and critical assessments, scholars have demonstrated the richness of the stories and their openness to many levels of interpretation.
One of the most intriguing suggestions originally made by Bettelheim was that underneath the psychological meaning of the stories he found hints of another, deeper layer of religious meaning, which he thought deserved serious attention.
This suggestion has largely gone unexamined by contemporary scholarship. This book is an attempt to explore that fascinating challenge and delve into the religious roots of the tales' enchantment by studying them as the poetic expression of what the brothers Grimm thought they were—fragments of ancient faith.
