When I first started reading about the Brothers Grimm, I expected a pair of romantic wanderers. Two German scholars in long coats, walking the countryside, listening to peasants tell stories around the hearth. That is the image I grew up with. It is also, as it turns out, almost entirely wrong.
Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859) Grimm did not collect their fairy tales by wandering. They collected them by reading, annotating, copying, comparing, and rewriting. They left behind one of the most thoroughly documented note-taking practices in literary history: more than 700 annotated books from their personal library, a manuscript of first-draft notes that disappeared and was later recovered, and thousands of paper slips for a German dictionary they did not live to finish.
I spent a few weeks going through what historians have pieced together about how the brothers actually worked, drawing on Ann Schmiesing’s 2024 biography and Jack Zipes’s translation of the first edition. The Grimms were not just preserving fairy tales. They were editing them, sometimes radically, across nearly 50 years and seven editions. Here are nine lessons I took from their notebooks.
1. Write Down What You Are Afraid of Losing
The Grimms started collecting tales during the Napoleonic Wars. Germany did not yet exist as a country. It was a patchwork of small states, and the one the brothers lived in had been taken over by the French. Jacob, in a turn of events that still strikes me as strange, served as librarian to Napoleon’s brother, King Jérôme of Westphalia.
It was inside that political mess that the brothers began worrying that the old tales were slipping away. In the introduction to the first edition of Children’s and Household Tales (Kinder- und Hausmärchen), published in 1812 – now inscribed on UNESCO’s Memory of the World register – they wrote:
It was perhaps just the right time to record these tales since those people who should be preserving them are becoming more and more scarce.
That sentence sat with me for a while. The Grimms were not journaling about their breakfast. They were journaling against loss. They had a clear sense that something they loved was disappearing, and they decided to do something about it.
I think most of us have something like that in our own lives. A grandparent’s stories. A childhood neighborhood. A way our family used to celebrate a holiday. A friend who is sick. The Grimms remind me that the journal entry you most need to write is often the one about what you are most afraid of losing.
Try this: Write one page tonight about a person, place, or tradition you are worried might fade. Do not edit. Just record.
2. Use the Inside Cover as Your Index
The brothers owned hundreds of books that fed into their fairy tale project. Researchers at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, have been working through a portion of their personal library, and what they found is striking. The Grimms wrote all over their books. They crossed out passages. They scribbled in the margins. They inserted slips of paper.
But the part that I keep coming back to is the index they built on the inside covers. Knowing they would return to these books over and over, the Grimms wrote out lists of themes with corresponding page numbers. Snow. Stepmothers. Forests. Tasks set by a king. Whatever they thought they might want to find again, they tagged – the same index-everything instinct behind Emerson’s 263 notebooks.
This is the kind of small, low-effort move that compounds. I started doing a version of it after reading about the Grimms. When I finish a book that I think I will mine for ideas later, I now spend ten minutes flipping back through it and writing a personal index on the inside back cover. Page numbers. A theme or a phrase. Nothing fancy. Just a way for future-me to find what past-me thought was worth marking.
The point is not the index. The point is that the Grimms expected to come back. They built notebooks for a future self who would need them.
3. Marginalia Is a Journaling Form
I used to feel guilty writing in books. School training, mostly. But the Grimms wrote in everything. The image of their personal 1812/1815 copies, now held by GRIMMWELT Kassel, shows pages covered in hand-written notes and corrections. They treated each book as a working document, not a relic.
This is the same instinct that drove Leonardo’s restless notebooks and the same one behind Edison’s 3,500 lab notebooks. Annotation is not consumption. It is conversation. You are pushing back at the page, marking the parts that matter, and starting the slow chemical reaction between what you read and what you think.
A marginal note is a tiny journal entry. It is dated by context. It is anchored to a specific passage. And weeks or years later, your past attention is suddenly available to you again.
I now read with a pencil next to me. I draw boxes around sentences I want to come back to. I write “yes” or “really?” in the margin. Sometimes I sketch a tiny diagram. None of it is precious. All of it counts as journaling.
4. Drafts Are Allowed to Be Skeletons
For decades, scholars believed the Grimms’ very first manuscript was lost. Then the Ölenberg Manuscript surfaced, sent by the brothers in 1810 to their friend Clemens Brentano, who never returned it. When it resurfaced, it changed our understanding of how the Grimms worked.
The tales in the Ölenberg Manuscript are not polished. They are skeletons. Just the architecture. Here is how “Snow White” begins in that early draft:
Once upon a time it was winter and snowed down from the sky and a queen sat at a window of ebony wood and sewed. She really wanted to have a child.
Now look at the same opening, polished for the first published edition of 1812:
Once upon a time it was the middle of winter, and the snowflakes fell like feathers from the sky. A beautiful queen sat and sewed at a window that had a frame made of black ebony.
The skeleton came first. The “snowflakes like feathers” came later.
I find this enormously freeing. When I sit down to journal, I want the polished version to arrive on the first try. Of course it does not. The Grimms remind me that the first pass is supposed to be unglamorous. Get the bones down. The feathers can wait – it is the same revise-it-later logic Virginia Woolf trusted across a working diary.
Try this: When you are stuck on a journal entry, write it in the rawest, ugliest possible form. Then leave it. Come back in a week and rewrite it. Notice what you add.
5. The Source Is Almost Never What You Think
Here is the most uncomfortable thing about the Brothers Grimm. The tales did not come straight from peasants in fields. Many of them came from educated, bourgeois women in the brothers’ own social circle, and from printed books, including French ones.
Their greatest single source was Dorothea Viehmann, who had grown up hearing tales in her father’s inn. The brothers described her, somewhat misleadingly, as a “Bäuerin,” a country or peasant woman. They were so grateful to her that they included her portrait in the 1819 edition of the tales.
And in the Ölenberg Manuscript, the brothers openly note their printed sources. An early version of “Hansel and Gretel” cites Charles Perrault’s “Le Petit Poucet,” a French tale, despite the Grimms’ whole project being built around German nationalism. They were drawing from a wider, messier, more international tradition than the legend allows.
The lesson, for me, is honesty about influence. When I journal about an idea that feels original, it almost never is. I picked it up somewhere. Someone said something. I read a sentence. A song was playing. Tracking those threads in a journal is more useful than pretending I invented anything. The Grimms knew where their tales actually came from. Their notes prove it. The marketing copy in their introduction is another story.
6. Edit, Then Edit Again
The Grimms published the first edition of Children’s and Household Tales in 1812. They published the final edition in 1857. That is 45 years and seven editions. Wilhelm did most of the editing. According to historian Ann Schmiesing, Jacob wanted to leave the tales mostly as they were, while Wilhelm believed they had to be rewritten for readability and morality. Wilhelm won.
A few of the changes are minor. Many are not. In the 1812 edition, Rapunzel innocently asks why her dress has gotten so tight. (She is pregnant.) In later editions, the pregnancy disappears entirely. In the 1812 edition of “Snow White,” the wicked queen asks the huntsman to bring her Snow White’s lungs and liver so she can “cook them with salt and eat them.” By 1857, the line is softened. The cannibalism is implied but not quite spelled out.
And in “Hansel and Gretel,” the mother who abandons her children in the woods in the first edition becomes, by the 1819 edition, a stepmother. A small change. An enormous change. The Grimms were rewriting the moral universe of the tales over and over.
I find this strangely encouraging. We tend to imagine that great writers get it right the first time. The Grimms got it wrong many, many times, and kept revising. So can the rest of us – persistence over polish is how a journaling habit actually survives.
7. Violence Crept In as the Audience Changed
Once the brothers realized their tales would be read to children, they made a counterintuitive editorial decision. They removed the sex and amped up the violence. Cinderella’s stepsisters in the final edition cut off pieces of their own feet to fit the slipper. Birds peck out their eyes. Rumpelstiltskin, who in the first edition simply runs away, by 1857 tears himself in half:
…with anger he stomped his right foot so hard into the ground that he fell in up to his waist. Then with both hands he took hold of his left foot and ripped himself up the middle in two.
The point is not to defend Wilhelm’s editorial choices. The point is that the Grimms revised with a clear audience in mind, and the revisions were enormous as a result. Once they decided whom they were writing for, the shape of the tales changed.
It came up again when I studied Bruce Lee’s training journals. He revised his philosophy of martial arts repeatedly, depending on which students he was teaching and what he wanted them to take away. Audience reshapes the work.
When I journal, I am usually writing for two readers: present-me, who needs to think out loud, and future-me, who will want to remember this clearly. Knowing which one I am writing for changes the entry.
8. Long Projects Need More Than One Note-Taking System
The fairy tales were not the Grimms’ main project. They would be surprised that we remember them mostly for the tales. The work they considered most important was the German dictionary, which they began in 1838 and worked on for the rest of their lives.
For the dictionary, they used a different system than for the tales. The first stage was a paper slip (“Zettel”). Each slip contained a single word, a quotation showing its usage, and the source. They accumulated thousands of these. Then they alphabetized the slips and copied them onto larger sheets, beginning to draft entries.
Wilhelm got as far as the letter “D” before he died in 1859. Jacob carried on and reached the letter “F” before his own death in 1863. His final entry was for the word “Frucht,” which means “fruit.” Then he put down his pen for the last time.
What strikes me about their dictionary work is the layering. Slip first. Then sheet. Then draft. Then publication. A long project cannot survive on a single notebook. It needs different stages, each one a little more organized than the last. Franklin’s daily virtue tracking used the same logic: small daily entries feeding a larger weekly review, feeding a lifelong project.
If you are working on something that will take years, the question is not “what notebook should I use.” The question is, “what are the stages of this project, and what note-taking system fits each one?”
9. Annotation Is Collaboration With Everyone Who Came Before
The deepest lesson, for me, is the hardest to summarize. The Grimms did not just write down old tales. They put themselves into conversation with everyone who had ever written about those tales, from Charles Perrault in the 1600s to the printed compilations of their own century. They marked up the books, argued with them, borrowed and reshaped and disagreed.
In the introduction to the first edition, the brothers wrote:
Almost everything has been collected from oral traditions.
That is not really true. What is true is something more interesting. The Grimms were collaborating, across centuries, with the writers and tellers who had handled these stories before them. Every margin annotation was a small handshake with a dead author.
This is what I think a deep journaling practice eventually becomes. You start by writing about your own life. After a while, you notice you are also in conversation with everyone you read. I have been keeping a small notebook just for this, a “borrowed-from” journal. Whenever a sentence I read changes how I think, I copy it in with the source and write a few lines on what it means to me. (If you are not sure what to put in a journal, a borrowed-from page is a fine start.)
What the Grimms Got Right That We Can Borrow
The myth of the Grimms is two brothers in a forest, jotting down what they hear. The reality is two brothers at a desk, surrounded by 700 annotated books, drafting and redrafting and arguing about how a sentence should land. The reality is harder, slower, and more honest. It is also more useful.
A few practical takeaways:
- Annotate your books. The inside cover is your personal index – see journal examples for what that can look like.
- Let drafts be ugly. “Snowflakes like feathers” was not on the first page.
- Track your sources. You did not invent the idea. Note where it came from.
- Revise across years. Some entries deserve a rewrite in five years’ time.
- Save what you are afraid of losing. That is the whole point.
The Grimms gave themselves permission to be note-takers first and authors second. That order matters. It is the same order I see in the journals of Albert Einstein and the long letters of Martin Luther King Jr. If you want to see how this pattern shows up across other famous note-takers, I have written a longer piece analyzing the journals of successful people.
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Featured image: Jacob (left) and Wilhelm Grimm, painted by Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann in 1855. Not wanderers – readers, editors, and relentless annotators. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
