Wilhelm Grimm

Life

Wilhelm Carl Grimm was born in Hanau in 1786, a year after his brother Jacob, with whom he shared his education, his work and his home for the rest of his life. After their father’s death in 1796 the boys were schooled in Kassel and studied law at Marburg, where Savigny’s teaching led both toward the study of old German language and literature. Wilhelm’s health was poor in his twenties, with heart and respiratory trouble that kept him from regular employment for a time, and he took a spa cure at Halle in 1809.

Wilhelm became a secretary at the Kassel library in 1814 and worked beside Jacob there until 1829, when both moved to Göttingen. He was dismissed along with Jacob and five other professors in the Göttingen Seven affair of 1837 and, like Jacob, went to Berlin in 1841 as a member of the Academy of Sciences. Unlike his brother he married, in 1825, to Henriette Dorothea Wild, known as Dortchen, a Kassel pharmacist’s daughter who had been one of the brothers’ main sources for the fairy tales. They had three surviving children, and Jacob lived in the household. Wilhelm died in Berlin in 1859.

Literary significance

Within the partnership, Wilhelm was the editor and stylist of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen. From the second edition of 1819 onward he took main responsibility for the collection, and over the following decades he rewrote the tales in a smoother, more consistent narrative voice, added dialogue and proverbial phrasing, removed material considered unsuitable for children, and strengthened the moral framing. The “Grimm style” that later collectors imitated across Europe is largely his creation. He also produced scholarly editions of medieval German texts, a study of the German heroic legend (Die deutsche Heldensage, 1829), and shared with Jacob the first volumes of the German dictionary. His reshaping of the tales has been criticized by folklorists for departing from oral sources and praised by readers for producing the versions that have lasted.

Where to start

Grimms’ Fairy Tales in our catalog is the place to begin. Readers who want to see what Wilhelm changed can compare the 1812 first edition, now available in English, with the final 1857 text.