That was their other lodestar: their work. Wilhelm, when he was in his late thirties, made bold to get married, but the lady in question simply moved into the brothers’ house and, having known them for decades, made the domestic operations conform to their work schedule. Biographers say that they had markedly different personalities-Jacob was difficult and introverted, Wilhelm easygoing-but this probably drew them closer. For most of their lives, they worked in the same room, at facing desks. If ever there was a stimulus to German intellectuals’ belief in a German people that was culturally and racially one, and to the hope of a politically unified Germany, this was it. They had political reasons, too-above all, Napoleon’s invasion of their beloved Hesse, and the installation of his brother Jérôme as the ruler of the Kingdom of Westphalia, a French vassal state. That is the movement that the Grimms joined in their early twenties. Young men fresh from reading Plutarch at university began sharing stories about what the troll said to the woodcutter, and publishing collections of these Märchen, as folk tales were called. The Grimms grew up in the febrile atmosphere of German Romanticism, which involved intense nationalism and, in support of that, a fascination with the supposedly deep, pre-rational culture of the German peasantry, the Volk. But soon afterward they began a different project, which culminated in their famous book “Nursery and Household Tales” (“Die Kinder- und Hausmärchen”), first published in two volumes, in 18, and now generally known as Grimms’ Fairy Tales. With difficulty, the brothers managed to attend a good lyceum and then, as their father would have wished, law school. Their father died, and the Grimms no longer had any money. But when they were eleven and ten everything changed. The family lived in a big house in the Hessian village of Hanau, near Kassel, and the boys received a sound primary education at home. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were born to a prosperous couple (the father was a lawyer), Jacob in 1785, Wilhelm in 1786. It feels like a glimpse of the dreadful side of the nature of things.” That is true of very many of the Grimms’ tales, even those with happy endings. Byatt has written that this is the real terror of the story: “It doesn’t feel like a warning to naughty infants. Whatever happened there, we all deserve it. (The Grimms used ein Kind, the neuter word for “child.” Zipes decided that the child was a boy.) And so the tale, without details to attach it to anything in particular, becomes universal. We don’t even know if it is a boy or a girl. Really? When, before, he had seemed to beg for life? But the worst thing in the story is that, beyond disobedience, it gives us not a single piece of information about the child. And what about the mother? Didn’t it trouble her to whip that arm? Then we are told that the youngster, after this beating, rested in peace. Was the child buried alive? The unconsenting arm looks more like a symbol. This story, with its unvarnished prose, should be clear, but it isn’t.