Weird World Adventures Season 2 Spotlight: Episode 6  Into the Woods

Here’s something they don’t tell you in the Disney films: fairy tales, in their original form, are not particularly child-friendly. The original Grimm tales — collected, not invented, by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm across rural Germany in the early 19th century — involve quite a lot of dismemberment, cannibalism, and the kind of moral ambiguity that children’s animation studios have been quietly editing out for generations as they take us into the woods. The Grimm brothers were folklorists, not entertainers. They were trying to preserve something. And what they were preserving was dark, regional, specific, and very, very old.

This episode of Weird World Adventures was an absolute gift to me as someone who has spent years studying mythology and folklore, because it sent me and Michael on the Fairy Tale Route — the Märchenstraße — a 600-kilometer trail through the German landscape that follows the footsteps of the Grimm brothers from Hanau, their birthplace, through the small towns and villages where many of the stories were gathered.

We began in Hanau, where the Grimm brothers were born and where a monument to them now stands in the marketplace — two serious-looking gentlemen in bronze, sitting with their books, apparently unaware of how many animated feature films their research would eventually inspire. From Hanau, we moved on to Steinau, where the brothers spent part of their childhood and where their family home has been preserved as a museum. Something about standing in the actual rooms where two of history’s most influential folklorists grew up felt genuinely significant. These were not mythological figures themselves. They were scholars. Researchers. People who understood that the stories a culture tells about itself are among the most important things that culture produces.

From Steinau, we followed the route through Alsfeld, with its half-timbered medieval streetscape that looks like it was designed as a Little Red Riding Hood set, and on to Marburg, where the brothers studied law at the university and began the scholarly work that would consume their lives. Marburg is a university town built on a hillside, and it has the particular energy of a place where serious thinking has been happening for a very long time.

And then there was our stay at Trendelburg Castle — which is exactly what it sounds like, a genuine medieval castle that you can sleep in — which provided one of the more memorable single days of filming we’ve had in two seasons of this show. Knight Dietrich, who gave us our tour of Trendelburg and the surrounding area, is one of those individuals who makes history feel immediate in a way that no textbook quite manages. The castle has a tower. The tower has a story involving a very long-haired young woman. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions.

What I love about the Fairy Tale Route as a concept is that it doesn’t pretend the stories came from nowhere. It grounds them in a specific landscape, a specific historical moment, a specific community of rural people who were telling these stories for reasons that had nothing to do with entertainment and everything to do with survival, warning, and the transmission of cultural memory across generations. The witch in the woods is a warning about trusting strangers. The stepmother who wants you dead reflects very real anxieties about family structure and inheritance in pre-industrial Europe. The girl who follows the rules and the girl who doesn’t — their respective fates are instructions for social behavior dressed in narrative clothing.

Fairy tales are, at their core, anthropology. And Germany, if you follow the right roads, is still full of them.

Into the Woods is streaming now on Amazon Prime, free for Prime members internationally. It’s also available free via the Fawesome app on Roku, Fire TV, Apple TV, and other streaming platforms. Leave a trail of breadcrumbs. We’ll find our way back.