 Elisabeth was born on Christmas Eve, 1837, in Munich, Kingdom of Bavaria. She was the second of two daughters of Duke Max Joseph and his wife Ludovika, a daughter of the Bavarian king Maximilian I.
In her youth, Elisabeth had no obligations at the Bavarian court and spent a happy time in their castle at Lake Starnberg, where she enjoyed playing and riding in the country. Elisabeth’s nephew was the young Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph. His mother, Archduchess Sophie of Austria, was his advisor in his political as well as in his personal life, and thus in fact the real ruler of the Empire. When Franz Joseph was 23, Sophie arranged a marriage with her nice Helene, Elisabeth’s older sister. The family was invited to come to Bad Ischl in Austria, so that Franz Joseph could propose to Helene, although the two had never met before. Helene and Franz Joseph didn’t feel comfortable in each other’s presence, but Franz was immediately attracted to the fifteen-year-old Elisabeth. And so this would be the first time that Franz Joseph would disobey his mother: he wanted to marry Elisabeth, otherwise he would not marry at all. His mother was infuriated, but accepted his wish – at least he would marry a niece, and that was what she wanted in the end. But Elisabeth had not been prepared to be an Empress as Helene; she had lived her free, informal life until that moment, and she would never be able to fully adapt the royal way of life with all its rules and etiquette.  The brothers Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859) were German cultural researchers and authors who collected and published German folklore during the 19th century.
Other than sometimes falsely assumed, the brothers didn't make up the fairy tales themselves, but penned down popular German folk tales. With the movement of Romanticism that started in the late 18th century, the interest in fairy tales revived. While Germany was still an assembly of kingdoms and (grand) duchies, the brothers strongly believed that national unity relied on the knowledge of the common cultural past that was reflected in folklore. In the introduction to their first book of collected fairy tales, the Grimms explain that they had travelled through Germany to talk with storytellers who supplied them with tales. Since the stories had been handed oraly from generation to generation, they often heard various versions of tales that were in fact the same stories. In these cases, the Grimms picked out the common content and molded it into a single tale. The first edition of Children's and Household Tales ("Kinder- und Hausmärchen") was published in 1812, but was in a constant state of alteration. During their lifetime, the work was published 17 times. Wilhelm was the main editor of the two, making the tales stilistically similar, adding psychological and sometimes religious plots and dialogue. |
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