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The Shadow-Walkers: Jacob Grimm's Mythology of the Monstrous. Edited by Tom Shippey. (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2005. Pp. xl + 429. Bibliography, indices.)
Although Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm's Kinderund Hausmärchen is the best known to folklorists of the Grimms' many works, Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie (or James Stallybrass's nineteenth-century translation of it, Teutonic Mythology) is arguably the most influential. This work has been especially important for the study of mythology and folk religion. In Deutsche Mythologie, Jacob Grimm outlines his rationale for the reconstruction of ancient Germanic mythology and religion, and this rationalization has been used by many scholars from the nineteenth century and later in their own re-creations of Germanic and other European mythologies.
In essence, Grimm believed that Christianity was never really a part of folk culture. Instead, he argued, it was a thin layer over the ethnic religion and mythology of the people, and thus one could, by removing the Christian layer, recover pre-Christian mythology and folk religion. Grimm's argument has been powerful for scholars of pre-Christian religion and mythology. It allowed them to use materials from the Christian period, even modern materials, in the study of the pre-Christian...