TY - JOUR AU - de Blécourt, Willem PY - 2010/12/08 Y2 - 2024/03/28 TI - Fairy Grandmothers: Images of Storytelling Events in Nineteenth-Century Germany JF - RELIEF - REVUE ÉLECTRONIQUE DE LITTÉRATURE FRANÇAISE JA - relief VL - 4 IS - 2 SE - II. Nouvelles fonctions de l’illustration pendant le long XIXe siècle DO - 10.18352/relief.544 UR - https://revue-relief.org/article/view/URN%3ANBN%3ANL%3AUI%3A10-1-101248 SP - 174-197 AB - Typical nineteenth‐century German images of elderly female storytellers capture them in the act of relating <em>Märchen</em> to young children. When these images reached a mass public, they reinforced the idea of a timeless female oral tradition. As researchers of oral tales hardly ever recorded any actual female storytellers, the images belonged for the most part to a romantic myth of Germanyʹs past. Towards the end of the century, artists started to produce more realistic paintings of female storytellers. This coincided with the growing popularity of fairy‐tale books which were indeed mostly read to children by women. ER -