Fairy tales collected by the Brothers Grimm, including "The Robber Bridegroom". "The Robber Bridegroom" is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm, tale number 40. Joseph Jacobs included a variant, Mr Fox, in English Fairy Tales, but the original provenance is much older; Shakespeare (circa 1599) alludes to the Mr. Fox variant in Much Ado About Nothing, Act 1, Scene 1: Like the old tale, my lord: "it is not so, nor `t was not so; but, indeed, God forbid it should be so." It is Aarne–Thompson type 955, the robber bridegroom. This type is closely related to tales of type 312, such as Bluebeard, and type 311, such as How the Devil Married Three Sisters and Fitcher's Bird. (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0)