Brothers Grimm

The Brothers Grimm were two German folklorists and linguists—Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm—who are today best known for their Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812–22). This collection of stories, called Grimm’s Fairy Tales in the English-speaking world, led to the modern study of folklore and helped popularize such classic fairy tales as “Cinderella,” “Hansel and Gretel,” and “Little Red Riding Hood.” The Brothers Grimm were among the most important German scholars of their time. Together they compiled several collections of folk music and folk literature. Jacob in particular did important work in historical linguistics and Germanic philology, which included the formulation of Grimm’s law, a notable contribution to the study of Indo-European languages.

Early life and legal career in Kassel

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were the oldest in a family of five brothers and one sister. Their father, Philipp Wilhelm Grimm, a lawyer, was town clerk in Hanau and later justiciary (chief judicial officer) in Steinau, another small Hessian town, where his father and grandfather had been ministers of the Calvinistic Reformed Church. His death in 1796 brought social hardships to the family; the death of their mother, Dorothea Grimm (née Zimmer), in 1808 left 23-year-old Jacob with the responsibility of four brothers and one sister. Jacob, a scholarly type, was small and slender with sharply cut features, while Wilhelm was taller, had a softer face, and was sociable and fond of all the arts.

After attending the high school in Kassel, the brothers followed their father’s footsteps and studied law at the University of Marburg (1802–06) with the intention of entering civil service. At Marburg they came under the influence of the Romantic writer Clemens Brentano, who awakened in both a love of folk poetry, and Friedrich Karl von Savigny, cofounder of the historical school of jurisprudence, who taught them a method of antiquarian investigation that formed the real basis of all their later work. Others, too, strongly influenced the Grimms, particularly the philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder, with his ideas on folk poetry. Essentially, the brothers remained individuals, creating their work according to their own principles.

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In 1805 Jacob accompanied Savigny to Paris to do research on legal manuscripts of the Middle Ages; the following year he became secretary to the war office in Kassel. Because of his health, Wilhelm remained without regular employment until 1814. After the French entered the Prussian states in 1806, Jacob became private librarian to King Jérôme of Westphalia in 1808 and a year later auditeur (legal assistant) of the Conseil d’État but returned to Hessian service in 1813 after Napoleon’s defeat. As secretary to the legation, he went twice to Paris (1814–15), to recover precious books and paintings taken by the French from Hesse and Prussia. He also took part in the Congress of Vienna (September 1814–June 1815), a conference between the major political powers that reorganized Europe after the Napoleonic Wars. Meantime, Wilhelm had become secretary at the Elector’s library in Kassel (1814), and Jacob joined him there in 1816.

Beginnings in folklore and fairy tale collecting

By that time the Grimm brothers had definitely given up thoughts of a legal career in favor of purely literary research. In the years to follow they lived frugally and worked steadily, laying the foundations for their lifelong interests. Their whole thinking was rooted in the social and political changes of their time and the challenge these changes held. Jacob and Wilhelm had nothing in common with the fashionable “Gothic” Romanticism of the 18th and 19th centuries. Their state of mind made them more Realists than Romantics. They investigated the distant past and saw in antiquity the foundation of all social institutions of their days. But their efforts to preserve these foundations did not mean that they wanted to return to the past. From the beginning, the Grimms sought to include material from beyond their own frontiers—from the literary traditions of Scandinavia, Spain, the Netherlands, Ireland, Scotland, England, Serbia, and Finland.

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They first collected folk songs and tales for their friends Achim von Arnim and Brentano, who had collaborated on an influential collection of folk lyrics in 1805, and the brothers examined in some critical essays the essential difference between folk literature and other writing. To them, folk poetry was the only true poetry, expressing the eternal joys and sorrows, the hopes and fears of humankind.

Encouraged by Arnim, they published their collected tales as the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (“Children’s and Household Tales”), implying in the title that the stories were meant for adults and children alike. In contrast to the extravagant fantasy of the Romantic school’s poetical fairy tales, the 200 stories of this collection (including, among the most enduring, “Snow White,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and “Rumpelstiltskin”) aimed at conveying the soul, imagination, and beliefs of people through the centuries—or at a genuine reproduction of the teller’s words and ways. Most of the stories were taken from oral sources, though a few were from printed sources.

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The great merit of Wilhelm Grimm is that he gave the fairy tales a readable form without changing their folkloric character. The results were threefold: The collection enjoyed wide distribution in Germany and eventually in all parts of the globe; it became and remains a model for the collecting of folktales everywhere; and the Grimms’ notes to the tales, along with other investigations, formed the basis for the science of the folk narrative and even of folklore. To this day the tales remain the earliest “scientific” collection of folktales.

The Kinder- und Hausmärchen was followed by a collection of historical and local legends of Germany, Deutsche Sagen (1816–18), which never gained wide popular appeal, though it influenced both literature and the study of the folk narrative. The brothers then published (in 1826) a translation of Thomas Crofton Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, prefacing the edition with a lengthy introduction of their own on fairy lore. At the same time, the Grimms gave their attention to the written documents of early literature, bringing out new editions of ancient texts, from both the Germanic and other languages. Wilhelm’s outstanding contribution was Die deutsche Heldensage (“The German Heroic Tale”), a collection of themes and names from heroic legends mentioned in literature and art from the 6th to the 16th centuries, together with essays on the art of the saga.

Studies in linguistics and Grimm’s law

While collaborating on these subjects for two decades (1806–26), Jacob Grimm also turned to the study of philology with an extensive work on grammar, the Deutsche Grammatik (1819–37). The word deutsch in the title does not mean strictly “German”; rather, it refers to the etymological meaning of “common” and is thus being used to apply to all of the Germanic languages, the historical development of which is traced for the first time. Jacob represented the natural laws of sound change (both vowels and consonants) in various languages and thus created bases for a method of scientific etymology—i.e., research into relationships between languages and development of meaning. In what was to become known as Grimm’s law, Jacob demonstrated the principle of the regularity of correspondence among consonants in genetically related languages, a principle previously observed by the Danish linguist Rasmus Rask. Jacob’s work on grammar exercised an enormous influence on the contemporary study of linguistics, Germanic, Romance, and Slavic. In 1824 he translated a Serbian grammar by his friend Vuk Stefanović Karadžić, writing an erudite introduction on Slavic languages and literature.

Jacob extended his investigations into the Germanic folk-culture with a study of ancient law practices and beliefs published as Deutsche Rechtsaltertümer (1828), providing systematic source material but excluding actual laws. The work stimulated other publications in France, the Netherlands, Russia, and the southern Slavic countries.