The Grimms' fairy tales were initially conceived as a collection of scholarly source material demonstrating the existence of a German national literature and thus contributing to the construction of a German nation state. It was in their reception and the course of roughly fifty years of continuous editing that they acquired their status of children's reading. Nevertheless, the German texts never entirely lost the traces of their scholarly origin. It is, however, in their translation into English that the texts were entirely received as children's literature and this paper examines the shifts due to genre conventions and enforced by didactic demands.