Everything about Brothers Grimm totally explained
The
Brothers Grimm (
German:
Die Brüder Grimm also
Gebrüder Grimm),
Jacob and
Wilhelm Grimm, were
German academics who were best known for publishing collections of
folk tales and
fairy tales and for their work in linguistics, relating to how the sounds in words shift over time (
Grimm's Law). They are among the best known story tellers of
novellas from
Europe, allowing the widespread knowledge of such tales as
Snow White,
Rapunzel,
Cinderella, and
Hansel and Gretel.
History
The Brothers Grimm, Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Karl (1786–1859), became famous as the authors of fairy tales. As scholars, they also contributed to comparative linguistics. The Grimm brothers were the most important historians of medieval language and folklore.
The Brothers Grimm were born in
Hanau, Jacob on January 4, 1785, and Wilhelm on February 24, 1786. They grew up playing their games of make-believe together, and their lifelong close relationship made their accomplishments possible. The Grimm family lived nearby the magistrates' house between 1790 and 1796 while the father was employed by the Prince of Hesse. The brothers attended school in
Kassel, and both studied law at the University of Marburg. It was the inspiration of
Friedrich von Savigny who awakened in them an interest in the past. In 1808 Jacob was named court librarian to the king of Westphalia, and in 1816 he became librarian in Kassel, where Wilhelm was also employed. They remained there until 1830, when they secured positions at the University of Göttingen.
The Grimm brothers published their first volume of fairy tales,
Tales of Children and the Home, in 1812. They had received their stories from peasants and villagers. In their collaboration Jacob did more of the research, while Wilhelm, more fragile, put it into literary form and provided the childlike style. They were also interested in folklore and primitive literature. Between 1816 and 1818 they published two volumes of German legends and also a volume of early literary history.
In time the brothers became interested in older languages and their relation to German. Jacob began to specialize in the history and structure of the German language. The relationships between words became known as Grimm's Law. They gathered immense amounts of data. By 1830 the brothers moved to the University of Göttingen, where Jacob was named professor and head librarian. Wilhelm also became a professor in 1835. Both were dismissed that same year for protesting against the king's decision to abolish the Hanoverian constitution. Their last years were spent in writing a definitive dictionary of the German language, the first volume published in 1854, and it was carried on by future generations.
Wilhelm died in Berlin on December 16, 1859, while Jacob continued work on the dictionary and related projects until his death in Berlin on September 20, 1863.
Biography
Jakob Ludwig Grimm and
Wilhelm Karl Grimm were born on
January 4,
1785, and
February 24,
1786, respectively, in
Hanau near Frankfurt in
Hessen. They were among a family of nine children, only six of whom survived infancy. Their early childhood was spent in the countryside in what has been described as an "idyllic" state. When the eldest brother Jakob was eleven years old, however, their father, Philipp Wilhelm, died, and the family moved into a cramped urban residence. however this opinion ignores the fact that the brothers were
collectors of folk tales, not their authors:
» "They urged fidelity to the spoken text, without embellishments, and though it has been shown that they didn't always practise what they preached, the idealized ‘orality’ of their style was much closer to reality than the literary retellings previously thought necessary."
» "Scholars and psychiatrists have thrown a camouflaging net over the stories with their relentless, albeit fascinating, question of 'What does it mean?'"
Another influence is perhaps shown in the brothers' fondness for stories such as
The Twelve Brothers, which show
one girl and
several brothers (their own family structure) overcoming opposition.
The two brothers were educated at the Friedrichs-
Gymnasium in
Kassel and later both read law at the
University of Marburg. They were in their early twenties when they began the linguistic and
philological studies that would culminate in both
Grimm's Law and their collected editions of fairy and folk tales. Though their collections of tales became immensely popular, they were essentially a by-product of the linguistic research which was the Brothers' primary goal.
Jakob remained a bachelor until his death, but Wilhelm married Dorothea Wild, a pharmacist's daughter from whom the brothers heard the story
Little Red Riding Hood, in 1825. They had four children, three survived infancy. In 1830, they formed a household in
Göttingen with Jakob, where both brothers became professors.
In 1837, the Brothers Grimm joined five of their colleague professors at the
University of Göttingen to protest against the abolition of the liberal
constitution of the state of
Hanover by King
Ernest Augustus I, a reactionary son of
King George III. This group came to be known in the
German states as
Die Göttinger Sieben (
The Göttingen Seven). The two, along with the five others, protested against the abrogation. For this, the professors were fired from their university posts and three deported--including Jakob. Jakob settled in Kassel, outside Ernest's realm, and Wilhelm joined him there, both staying with their brother Ludwig. However, the next year, the two were invited to Berlin by the King of Prussia, and both settled there.
Wilhelm died in 1859; his elder brother Jakob died in 1863. The brothers are buried in the St. Matthäus Kirchhof Cemetery in
Schöneberg,
Berlin. The Grimms helped foment a nationwide democratic public opinion in
Germany and are cherished as the progenitors of the German democratic movement, whose
revolution of 1848/1849 was crushed by the Kingdom of
Prussia, where there was established a
constitutional monarchy.
The Tales
The Brothers Grimm began collecting folk tales around 1807, in response to a wave of awakened interest in German folklore that followed the publication of
Ludwig Achim von Arnim and
Clemens Brentano's folksong collection
Des Knaben Wunderhorn ("The Youth's Magic Horn"), 1805-8. By 1810 the Grimms produced a manuscript collection of several dozen tales, which they'd recorded by inviting storytellers to their home and transcribing what they heard. Although it's often believed that they took their tales from peasants, many of their informants were middle-class or aristocratic, recounting tales they'd heard from their servants, and several of the informants were of
Huguenot ancestry and told tales French in origin.
It is believed that certain elements of the stories were "purified" for the brothers who were Christian.
In 1812, the Brothers published a collection of 86 German fairy tales in a volume titled
Kinder- und Hausmärchen (
"Children's and Household Tales").
They published a second volume of 70 fairy tales in 1814 ("1815" on the title page), which together make up the first edition of the collection, containing 156 stories.
They wrote a two volume work titled Deutsche Sagen which included 585 German legends which were published in 1816 and 1818. The legends are told in chronological order of which historical events they were related. Then they arranged the regional legends thematically for each folktale creature like dwarfs, giants, monsters, etc. not in any historical order. in which stories were added or subtracted, until the seventh edition of 1857 contained 211 tales. Many of the changes were made in light of unfavorable reviews, particularly those that objected that not all the tales were suitable for children, despite the title. They were also criticized for being insufficiently
German; this not only affected the tales they included, but their language as they changed "Fee" (fairy) to an enchantress or wise woman, every prince to a king's son, every princess to a king's daughter. (It has long been recognized that some of these later-added stories were derived from printed rather than oral sources.)
These editions, equipped with scholarly notes, were intended as serious works of folklore. The Brothers also published the
Kleine Ausgabe or "small edition," containing a selection of 50 stories expressly designed for children (as opposed to the more formal
Große Ausgabe or "large edition"). Ten printings of the "small edition" were issued between 1825 and 1858.
The Grimms were not the first to publish collections of folktales. The 1697 French collection by
Charles Perrault is the most famous, though there were various others, including a German collection by Johann Karl August Musäus published in 1782-7. The earlier collections, however, made little pretense to strict fidelity to sources. The Brothers Grimm were the first workers in this genre to present their stories as faithful renditions of the kind of direct folkloric materials that underlay the sophistications of an adapter like Perrault. In so doing, the Grimms took a basic and essential step toward modern
folklore studies, leading to the work of
folklorists like
Peter and Iona Opie and others.
It should be noted that the Grimms' method was common in their historical era. Arnim and Brentano edited and adapted the folksongs of
Des Knaben Wunderhorn; in the early 1800s Brentano collected folktales in much the same way as the Grimms. The good academic practices violated by these early researchers hadn't yet been codified in the period in which they worked. The Grimms have been criticized for a basic dishonesty, for making false claims about their fidelity—for saying one thing and doing another; whether and to what degree they were deceitful, or self-deluding, is perhaps an open question.
Linguistics
In the very early 19th century, the time in which the Brothers Grimm lived, the
Holy Roman Empire had recently dissolved, and the modern nation of
Germany didn't exist. In its place was a
confederacy of 39 small- to medium-size German states, many of the states newly created by Napoleon when he reorganized Germany. The major unifying factor for the German people of the time was a common language. So part of what motivated the Brothers in their writings and in their lives was the desire to help create a German identity.
Less well known to the general public outside of Germany is the Brothers' work on a German dictionary, the
Deutsches Wörterbuch. It was very extensive, having 33 volumes and weighing 84 kg, and is still considered the standard reference for German
etymology. Work began in 1838, but by the end of their lifetime, only sections for the letter 'A' through part of the letter 'F' were completed. Ultimately, the work wasn't considered complete until 1960.
Jacob is recognized for enunciating
Grimm's law, Germanic Sound Shift, that was first observed by the Danish philologist
Rasmus Christian Rask. Grimm's law was the first non-trivial systematic
sound change ever to be discovered.
Citations
Further Information
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