Start Date
26-5-2026 4:30 PM
End Date
26-5-2026 4:45 PM
Description
This paper examines how the Grimm Brothers’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen (final edition, 1857) encode hunger as a structuring condition of both narrative and social order. Furthermore, it explores how these tales articulate the fragile and often unstable nature of abundance, from the perspective of food studies. Drawing on a corpus-based approach, the study highlights the predominance of a restricted alimentary lexicon centered on staple foods (such as bread, wine, beer, milk, and porridge) reflecting a subsistence economy rather than a state of plenitude. By situating these narrative patterns within the longue durée of recurring food crises in preindustrial Germany, the paper argues that the tales function as a cultural repository of subsistence experience. Through close readings of selected tales, including “Hänsel und Gretel,” “Gottes Speise,” “Der süße Brei,” “Die goldene Gans,” “Frau Holle,” and “Von dem Mäuschen, Vögelchen und der Bratwurst,” the paper argues that hunger is not merely episodic but constitutes a pervasive narrative force shaping bodily experience, social hierarchies, and moral evaluation. The tales repeatedly construct a distinction between material poverty and domestic mismanagement, suggesting that scarcity may arise both from structural conditions and from the disruption of culinary and household order. At the same time, food operates as a key ethical medium: practices of sharing function as tests of virtue, the refusal of which signals moral failure. Forms of abundance, when they appear, are typically confined to enclosed or regulated spaces (such as gardens) or take the form of alimentary miracles, which temporarily suspend but do not resolve the underlying scarcity. Similarly, the topos of the Land of Cockaigne represents an extreme and often unstable fantasy of labour-free nourishment. The study further shows how food can become a medium of deception and danger, particularly through sweet or luxurious substances, and how, in its most extreme form, alimentary anxiety culminates in representations of anthropophagy, where nurturing parents collapse into predatory consumers.
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Feast and Famine: Food, Crisis, and Hope in the Grimm Brothers’ Kinder– und Hausmärchen
This paper examines how the Grimm Brothers’ Kinder- und Hausmärchen (final edition, 1857) encode hunger as a structuring condition of both narrative and social order. Furthermore, it explores how these tales articulate the fragile and often unstable nature of abundance, from the perspective of food studies. Drawing on a corpus-based approach, the study highlights the predominance of a restricted alimentary lexicon centered on staple foods (such as bread, wine, beer, milk, and porridge) reflecting a subsistence economy rather than a state of plenitude. By situating these narrative patterns within the longue durée of recurring food crises in preindustrial Germany, the paper argues that the tales function as a cultural repository of subsistence experience. Through close readings of selected tales, including “Hänsel und Gretel,” “Gottes Speise,” “Der süße Brei,” “Die goldene Gans,” “Frau Holle,” and “Von dem Mäuschen, Vögelchen und der Bratwurst,” the paper argues that hunger is not merely episodic but constitutes a pervasive narrative force shaping bodily experience, social hierarchies, and moral evaluation. The tales repeatedly construct a distinction between material poverty and domestic mismanagement, suggesting that scarcity may arise both from structural conditions and from the disruption of culinary and household order. At the same time, food operates as a key ethical medium: practices of sharing function as tests of virtue, the refusal of which signals moral failure. Forms of abundance, when they appear, are typically confined to enclosed or regulated spaces (such as gardens) or take the form of alimentary miracles, which temporarily suspend but do not resolve the underlying scarcity. Similarly, the topos of the Land of Cockaigne represents an extreme and often unstable fantasy of labour-free nourishment. The study further shows how food can become a medium of deception and danger, particularly through sweet or luxurious substances, and how, in its most extreme form, alimentary anxiety culminates in representations of anthropophagy, where nurturing parents collapse into predatory consumers.