The most famous collection of fairy tales the world over is that made by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (1785-1863 and 1786-1859) and published under the title Kinder- und Hausmärchen, ‘Children’s and Household Tales’ (hereafter KHM). The first edition appeared in two volumes dated 1812 and 1815, and six more editions, each different from the others, followed during their lifetime: 1819-22 (second), 1837 (third), 1840 (fourth), 1843 (fifth), 1850 (sixth) and 1857 (seventh). The seventh edition is the basis of virtually all subsequent printings of the tales in German. Here the tales are numbered 1-200, but with an additional item, 151*; no. 38, ‘Die Hochzeit der Frau Füchsin’ (‘The Wedding of Mrs Fox’), consists of two separate items, while no. 39, ‘Die Wichtelmänner’ (‘The Goblins’) and no. 105, ‘Märchen von der Unke’ (‘Tales about the Toad’) are both divided into three parts. At the end of the collection ten Kinderlegenden (pious tales for children) are added. This makes for a total of 216 items. But in the forty-five-year-long process of editing many more tales were collected. Some of them were new; others were alternative versions of already known tales, while thirty-four items printed in the 1812 volume were removed from subsequent editions. The mass of material thus published is veryextensive. The numbering of the tales up to 200 clearly had some sort of symbolic significance for Wilhelm Grimm, who was responsible for editing the collection from 1819 onwards. It was not until 1850 that the collection amounted to two hundred items, exactly twice the number of tales in Boccaccio's Decameron, that most influential late medieval collection of popular story material. Also in that same year of 1850, Friedrich Heinrich von der Hagen (1780-1856), appointed first Professor of German at the newly founded University of Berlin in 1810, published a collection of one hundred medieval German tales entitled Gesammtabenteuer, clearly emulating Boccaccio. Wilhelm Grimm and von der Hagen were elected members of the Prussian Academyof Sciences in Berlin in 1840 and 1841 respectively, so one can perhaps infer that Grimm was aiming to outdo his colleague.

Both Boccaccio and von der Hagen were writing or collecting material designed for an adult readership. The Grimms, on the other hand, were concerned with traditional tales for children, a form of literature hitherto neglected or looked down upon by intellectuals in Germany and circulating, so they believed, chiefly in oral form.