Jacob Grimm

Life

Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm was born in Hanau, in the landgraviate of Hesse-Kassel, in 1785, the eldest surviving son of a lawyer. His father died in 1796, leaving the family in reduced circumstances, and Jacob and his brother Wilhelm, a year younger, were sent to school in Kassel and then to the University of Marburg to study law. There the legal historian Friedrich Carl von Savigny turned Jacob’s attention to the historical study of language and literature, and the brothers fell in with the Heidelberg Romantics, including Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, who were collecting folk songs.

The brothers began collecting folk tales around 1806 and published the first volume of Kinder- und Hausmärchen in 1812, the second in 1815. They worked and lived together for nearly their whole lives. Jacob held posts as a librarian in Kassel, then from 1830 as professor and librarian at Göttingen. In 1837 he was one of the seven Göttingen professors dismissed for protesting the King of Hanover’s revocation of the constitution, an act that made him a liberal hero in Germany. From 1841 both brothers were members of the Academy of Sciences in Berlin, where Jacob lectured and worked on the German dictionary. He was a delegate to the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848. He never married. Wilhelm died in 1859, and Jacob in Berlin in 1863.

Literary significance

Jacob Grimm was the more scholarly of the two brothers and one of the founders of Germanic philology. His Deutsche Grammatik (1819 onward) set out what is still called Grimm’s Law, describing the regular sound shifts that distinguish the Germanic languages from the other Indo-European languages. His Deutsche Mythologie (1835) was the first systematic study of pre-Christian Germanic belief, and the Deutsches Wörterbuch, begun with Wilhelm in 1838 and finished by others only in 1961, is the great historical dictionary of German. To the general reader, though, he is one half of “the Brothers Grimm,” and the fairy tales, which Wilhelm did more to shape in their final form, are the work that carries his name around the world.

Where to start

Grimms’ Fairy Tales, in our catalog, is the only route into the brothers’ work for most readers and is best taken a few tales at a time.