“The Brothers Grimm Were Dark for a Reason” by Jennifer Wilson (The New Yorker)

Because this is the only way of doing it:

Then, there was the matter of the Grimms’ language—sparse, hectic, visceral, unfiltered. In the preface, the brothers boasted of the collection’s fidelity to their sources: “No circumstance has been poeticized, beautified, or altered.” Well, that much was clear, complained the Grimms’ old friend Clemens Brentano, who thought they went too far. “If you want to display children’s clothes,” Brentano wrote, “you can do that with fidelity without bringing out an outfit that has all the buttons torn off, dirt smeared on it, and the shirt hanging out of the pants.” But the Grimms wanted to preserve the culture of the common folk, not to make the folk sound cultured. ©