“…. suddenly a White Rabbit with pink eyes ran close by her ….. when the Rabbit actually took a watch out of its waistcoat-pocket, and looked at it, and then hurried on, Alice started to her feet, for it flashed across her mind that she had never before seen a rabbit with either a waistcoat-pocket, or a watch to take out of it, and burning with curiosity, she ran across the field after it, and fortunately was just in time to see it pop down a large rabbit-hole under the hedge.  In another moment down went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again.” That’s from the beginning of Chapter 1, titled “Down the Rabbit-Hole,” in Lewis Carroll’s “Alice in Wonderland.”  Webster’s defines “rabbit hole” as “one in which the pursuit of something (such as an answer or solution) leads to other question, problems, or pursuits.”  Perhaps trained researchers, like old reference librarians, are more prone to this, but I sure spend a lot of time in the informational warren.  For example, a documentary on the latest breakthroughs in translating ancient Mayan texts sent me scurrying recently into the realms of prosopography and onomastics and on to a bunch of Wilhelms and fairy tales.

            The documentary touched upon Ernst Wilhelm Förstemann, a nineteenth-century German historian, mathematician, doctor of linguistics, librarian, director of the Saxon State Library, and a leading founder of onomastics and folk etymology studies in Germany.  Onomastics, according to Webster’s, is “the science or study of the origin and forms of proper names of persons or places,” and the American Heritage Dictionary definition of prosopography is a “study, often using statistics, that identifies and draws relationships between various characters or people within a specific historical, social, or literary context.”  Before he became an esteemed librarian, Förstemann entered a contest to compile a list of names common in Germany prior to 1100 CE.  Förstemann won even though he only submitted a draft answer because he was the only contestant to respond at all, and Grimm helped him publish his findings when complete.  He went on to be a librarian in Danzig until the widow of Prussia’s King Frederick William IV invited him to be the director of the Saxon State Library.  Besides reorganizing that library and enhancing its collections, he found time to decipher the Mayans’ calendar numbering systems.

            There was great interest among intellectuals, like Försteman, in welding the many tiny German principalities into a unified nation, and Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were major players.  “Beautiful Dreamers,” an excellent New Yorker article by Jennifer Wilson, is subtitled “How the Brothers Grimm Sought to Awaken a Nation” and describes how the Grimms, alongside Förstemann and others, strove to help form a German national identity.  Collecting traditional German folktales for their seminal book, “Children’s and Household Tales” (better known in English as “Grimm’s Fairy Tales”) was an integral part of that.  “Their aim in collecting such folklore – alongside the fairy tales, the Grimms published legends, songs, myths – was to create a cohesive national identity for German speakers.  It’s why the brothers, especially Jacob, also wrote books on German philology and began what was intended to be the most comprehensive dictionary of the German language, the Deutsches Worterbuch (toiling into their final years, they got as far as frucht, fruit.”  Along the way they also became known for “History of the German Language,” “Grimm’s Grammar,” and “Grimm’s Law,” (he recognized regular patterns by which consonants from other Indo-European languages altered as they made their way into German).

            Actually, Jacob authored the History and Grammar, never married but did most of the intellectual lifting, while Wilhelm helped with the folklore, married happily, and enjoyed life more.  Moreover, they also worked together as professional librarians, and the Grimm Library is part of Berlin’s Humboldt University.  As Wilson wrote, “Jacob and Wilhelm were two rather disparate men.  Wilhelm was the bon vivant to Jacob’s introvert,” but “they were ardently inseparable.  They were born a year apart (1785 and 1786), lived together throughout their lives (Wilhelm affectionately nicknamed his patient wife “my beer lout”), and were buried side-by-side.  Their Grimm-like childhoods fostered this closeness.  The family was originally happy; their father was a comfortably middle-class town clerk who was promoted to be magistrate of a nearby town.  This job came with “a stately home” and servants, but their 44-year-old dad soon died, leaving his family penniless and forced to move into “an almshouse just next door.”  Their social fall, subsequent shock, and eventual rebound is strikingly similar to the riches-to-rags-to-riches plots of their fairy tales.

            The popular image of the brothers collecting the stories from rural grannies is largely a myth; they mostly asked middle- and upper-class ladies to seek out old, fireside stories from their rural servants.  However, the Grimms insisted on wanting only the original storyteller’s unvarnished wordings and phrasings.  Consequently, their stories are rather abrupt and unpolished, or as Wilson put it, “sparse, hectic, visceral, unfiltered” because “what mattered was to be authentic, not appropriate.”  Their collection certainly includes lurid tales that intended for amusing grownups after the children were abed.  There are scads of online free copies of all 200 tales and ten other “children’s legends,” but when I’m in the mood to dip into the Grimms, my first choice is “The Juniper Tree,” which, is aptly titled in Maria Popova’s review in themarginalia.org, “Where the Wild Things Really Are: Maurice Sendak Illustrates the Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm.”  The Juniper Tree was published in 1973, the 150^th anniversary of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and translated by novelist Lore Segal.  Sendak illustrated each of the book’s 27 stories in his mysteriously pensive style. In a 1973 NYTimes review, Alison Lurie wrote that “Stylistically it is a pleasure to read …. as English prose ‘The Juniper Tree’ appears to avoid the clumsiness of a literal version while staying far closer to it than most popular editions, in which every mention of a natural process is removed …. There are already many good collections of fairy stories for children. “The Juniper Tree” is for grownups, who can read these strange old tales as if they had been written yesterday by Borges, Bartheime or I. B. Singer, and will, if they are fortunate, find them a way into a lost world, not of childhood, but of universal power and meaning.”

            Wilhelm was a widespread given name in Germany until Kaiser Wilhem lost his luster following the disastrous World War I, and by 1920 its popularity dropped to zero.  However, another namesake propelled Wilhelm’s popularity into the twenty-first century.  This was the “Wilhelm scream” that first appeared in the 1951 Warner Brothers’ movie “Distant Drums” when a soldier fleeing from Seminole warriors in a swamp was attacked and devoured by an alligator.  That scream is believed to have been recorded after the movie was shot by a bit actor named Sheb Wooley, who went on to fame for his novelty song “Flying Purple People Eater.”  Wooley’s scream was so effective it was added to the Warner Brothers stock sound library and reused for the 1953 movie “Charge at Feather River” in which a character named Private Wilhelm was shot in his thigh by an arrow.  It became known as “the Wilhelm scream” and was used again in over 400 movies and counting, including “A Star is Born,” “Willow,” and “The Wild Bunch.”  You can experience a belly-full of Wilhelm screams at https://youtu.be/4YDpuA90KEY?si=37uyx-T-LPrnKgcB.  

            Then legendary film sound designer, Ben Burtt, Jr., decided to make it truly iconic when he employed it as an homage in “E.T.,” “Gremlins,” “Anchorman,” and the Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies.  It’s now a sound engineers’ tradition to work it into their films and it’s become You Tube favorite.  For his part, Burtt also devised many other notable movie sound effects.  He wanted to avoid using electronic sounds in the first Star Wars movie, according to his Wikipedia article and “sought a more natural sound, blending in ‘found sounds’ to create the effects. The lightsaber hum, for instance, was derived from a film projector idling combined with feedback from a broken television set, and the blaster effect started with the sound acquired from hitting a guy-wire on a radio tower with a hammer.”  His own vocals were used for R2-D2’s “beeps and whistles,” and Darth Vader’s deep, wheezy breathing “was created by recording Burtt’s own breathing in an old Dacor scuba regulator.”  For the husky voice of the hero of “E.T. the Extra Terrestrial” Burtt “used the voice of an elderly lady that he had met in a photography shop …. The woman’s low pitch was the result of very heavy smoking, specifically Kool cigarettes.”  

Even after 40-plus movies, this is just scratching the surface of Wilhelm’s squawk.   It’s sort of like Taylor Swift said, “If you go too far down the rabbit hole of what people think about you, it can change everything about who you are.”