Jacob Grimm

Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm was born on January 4, 1785, in Hanau, a town in the Landgraviate of Hesse-Kassel, the eldest surviving son of Philipp Wilhelm Grimm, a lawyer and town clerk, and Dorothea Grimm, born Zimmer ^[1]. Wilhelm, the brother who would share nearly all of his working life, arrived thirteen months later, in February 1786. The family moved to Steinau in 1791 when the father took up a post as district magistrate there, and the boys spent several comfortable years in the official residence, tutored at home and raised in the Reformed Calvinist faith ^[1].

That security collapsed in January 1796 when Philipp Grimm died of pneumonia at the age of forty four. His widow was left with six children and a sharply reduced income, and the household depended on the support of relatives, above all Dorothea's sister Henriette Zimmer, a lady in waiting at the court in Kassel ^[2]. In 1798 Jacob and Wilhelm were sent to Kassel to attend the Lyceum Fridericianum, where Jacob compressed the usual course of study and finished at the head of his class.

In 1802 Jacob entered the University of Marburg to study law, the profession expected of him as the eldest son. Wilhelm followed a year later. The decisive encounter of his student years was with Friedrich Carl von Savigny, the young professor of Roman law whose historical method taught Grimm that institutions could only be understood through their development over time ^[2]. Savigny opened his private library to the brothers, and there Jacob first read the medieval German poetry, including the minnesingers, that turned his attention permanently from legal practice toward the older language and literature of the German lands ^[1].

Savigny invited Jacob to Paris in 1805 to assist with research on the history of Roman law in the Middle Ages, an apprenticeship that gave the twenty year old direct experience of manuscript work in a great library ^[2]. Back in Hesse he took a modest clerkship with the Kassel war office in 1806, just as Napoleon's armies redrew the map of Germany. When the French installed Jérôme Bonaparte as king of the newly created Kingdom of Westphalia, Grimm became, in 1808, private librarian to the new king at Kassel, a quiet post that left him ample time for scholarship ^[1]. His mother died the same year, leaving him at twenty three responsible for his younger siblings.

During these Napoleonic years the brothers began systematically gathering folk tales, songs, and legends, partly at the prompting of the Romantic writers Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, whose folk song collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn had appeared in 1805 ^[3]. Contrary to the popular image of the brothers roaming the countryside, most of their material came from literate informants, family friends, and educated middle class storytellers in and around Kassel, among them Dorothea Viehmann, a tailor's wife from a Huguenot family, and members of the Hassenpflug and Wild households ^[3].

The first volume of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales) appeared in December 1812, with a second volume in 1815. Jacob supplied much of the scholarly framework and comparative annotation, while Wilhelm increasingly shaped the prose style through the seven editions published in their lifetimes ^[3]. After Napoleon's defeat, Jacob served the restored Elector of Hesse as a diplomat, attending the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and 1815 and working in Paris on the recovery of books and manuscripts the French had carried off ^[1]. In 1816 he gladly exchanged diplomacy for a post as second librarian at Kassel, where Wilhelm was already employed, and the brothers settled into thirteen of their most productive years.

Among Jacob Grimm achievements, the most consequential for science was the Deutsche Grammatik, whose first volume appeared in 1819 and whose heavily revised second edition of 1822 set out the systematic sound correspondences now known as Grimm's Law ^[4]. Building on observations by the Danish scholar Rasmus Rask, Grimm showed that the consonants of the Germanic languages had shifted in a regular, describable pattern from the sounds of the ancestral Indo-European tongue, so that, for example, an initial p in Latin pater corresponds to f in English father ^[4]. The demonstration that sound change follows rules rather than caprice gave historical and comparative linguistics its methodological foundation, and the Grammatik as a whole, eventually four volumes, treated the phonology and morphology of the Germanic languages with a completeness no one had approached before ^[2].

Grimm's range was extraordinary even by the standards of his century. His Deutsche Rechtsaltertümer (1828) examined the symbols, formulas, and customs of old Germanic law, joining his legal training to his antiquarian instincts ^[1]. Deutsche Mythologie (1835) attempted to reconstruct the pre-Christian beliefs of the Germanic peoples from medieval texts, folk customs, and surviving superstitions, and it effectively created comparative Germanic mythology as a field of study ^[5]. He also published a history of the German language, an edition of Reinhart Fuchs, and studies of medieval poetry, often working at a pace that astonished contemporaries.

The crowning project of his later years was the Deutsches Wörterbuch, the great historical dictionary of German that he and Wilhelm agreed to undertake in 1838 after losing their Göttingen posts ^[6]. Conceived as a record of the written language from Luther to Goethe, with every word documented by dated quotations, it dwarfed anything previously attempted in German lexicography. The first installment appeared in 1852 and the first full volume in 1854. Jacob completed the letters A, B, C, and E, and was working on the word Frucht (fruit) at his death. The dictionary was finished only in 1961, more than a century after it began, by generations of successors at the German academies ^[6].

In 1829, passed over for promotion at the Kassel library, the brothers accepted positions at the University of Göttingen in the Kingdom of Hanover, Jacob as professor and librarian, Wilhelm as under librarian and later professor ^[1]. Jacob lectured on legal antiquities, literary history, and grammar, though he never enjoyed teaching as much as writing.

The Göttingen years ended abruptly in political protest. In 1837 the new king of Hanover, Ernst August, revoked the relatively liberal constitution of 1833 and demanded that state servants swear allegiance to him personally. Seven Göttingen professors, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm among them, signed a formal protest declaring themselves still bound by their oath to the constitution ^[7]. The king dismissed all seven, and Jacob, regarded as a ringleader, was ordered to leave the kingdom within days. The affair of the Göttingen Seven became a celebrated cause across the German states, and sympathizers raised funds to support the dismissed scholars ^[7].

Jacob returned to Kassel as an exile in his own homeland and answered his critics in a pamphlet, Jacob Grimm über seine Entlassung (1838), defending the duty of a scholar to keep faith with a sworn oath ^[7]. Rescue came from Berlin: in 1840 the new Prussian king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, invited both brothers to the Prussian capital as members of the Academy of Sciences with the right to lecture at the university. They moved in 1841 and remained in Berlin for the rest of their lives ^[1].

Jacob Grimm never married. From 1825, when Wilhelm wed Henriette Dorothea Wild, known as Dortchen, a Kassel pharmacist's daughter who had contributed tales to their collection, Jacob lived within his brother's household, and the arrangement lasted until his death ^[1]. He was devoted to Wilhelm's children, and his nephew Herman Grimm became a noted art historian. Contemporaries described Jacob as the more austere and single minded of the pair, happiest at his desk, while Wilhelm was the more sociable and the finer stylist ^[2].

His habits were frugal and his working discipline relentless. He read omnivorously in a dozen languages, corresponded with scholars across Europe, and assembled a large working library that the brothers shared. Though reserved in company, he was not a recluse: he served in public roles when asked, from his diplomatic missions of 1814 and 1815 to his election to the Frankfurt Parliament in 1848, where he sat as an independent during Germany's failed liberal revolution ^[1]. Politics, however, disappointed him, and he withdrew after the assembly's collapse to concentrate on the dictionary.

A few Jacob Grimm facts capture the man's temperament. He declined honors he thought empty, kept the same modest routines in Berlin that he had followed in Kassel, and wrote German nouns without the customary capital letters, a small typographic rebellion he justified on historical grounds and used in his own books ^[2].

The Berlin decades were consumed above all by the Deutsches Wörterbuch. Working with excerpts sent by dozens of volunteer readers, Jacob drafted entries that were less definitions than compact histories of each word, tracing forms and senses across centuries of texts ^[6]. He continued to publish on other subjects, including the two volume Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (1848), which mixed linguistic history with bold, sometimes speculative arguments about the early migrations of the Germanic tribes ^[2].

Wilhelm's death on December 16, 1859, was the heaviest blow of Jacob's life. He delivered a memorial address to the Berlin Academy, Rede auf Wilhelm Grimm, that contemporaries counted among the most moving things he ever wrote, and he pressed on with the dictionary alone ^[1]. Age slowed him little; visitors found him at his desk into his late seventies.

Jacob Grimm died in Berlin on September 20, 1863, at the age of seventy eight, after a short illness ^[1]. He was buried beside Wilhelm in the St. Matthäus churchyard in the Schöneberg district of Berlin, where the brothers' plain gravestones still draw visitors ^[8].

Any Jacob Grimm biography has to reckon with a double legacy: the world knows the fairy tales, while scholarship reveres the science. The Kinder- und Hausmärchen has been translated into well over a hundred languages and ranks among the most widely circulated German books ever printed; UNESCO added the brothers' annotated personal copies, held in Kassel, to its Memory of the World Register in 2005 ^[3]. Stories the brothers collected, from Cinderella and Snow White to Hansel and Gretel, remain raw material for writers and filmmakers around the world.

Within linguistics, Grimm's Law remains a fixture of every introductory course in the history of the Germanic languages, and the comparative method he helped establish still structures the discipline ^[4]. Folklorists likewise trace their field's beginnings to the brothers' collecting and to Jacob's mythological researches, even as modern scholars have revised the Romantic assumptions behind them and documented how heavily edited the published tales were ^[5].

Germany has kept the brothers' memory in stone and institution alike. The Brüder Grimm-Nationaldenkmal, a bronze monument by Syrius Eberle, was unveiled in their birthplace of Hanau in 1896, and the city anchors the German Fairy Tale Route that runs north to Bremen ^[8]. Kassel opened the museum GRIMMWELT in 2015 to house manuscripts and exhibits on the brothers' lives, and the main library building of the Humboldt University in Berlin is named the Jacob-und-Wilhelm-Grimm-Zentrum ^[8]. Few scholars of any era have left marks so deep on both the nursery and the seminar room.