Grimm

Biography
Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm and Wilhelm Karl Grimm were born in 1785 and 1786,
respectively, in Hanau near Frankfurt in Hesse. They were educated at the Friedrichs-
Gymnasium in Kassel and later both read law at the University of Marburg.

The brothers traveled widely throughout what is now Germany and other countries,
performing field research for their linguistic work, which involved trying to find patterns
in how the vowels and consonants which made up specific words changed over time. To
determine these patterns, they needed to hear many different examples of authentic
speech by various speakers of different ages and in different regions. They eventually
discovered that one of the easiest ways to convince older local residents to give them
lengthy examples of their natural speech was to ask the residents to tell their favorite
stories to the brothers. As the brothers recorded the style of speech of the speaker for
their research (which eventually led to the formulation of Grimm's Law), they also
recorded the various stories that they were told, and eventually published them (in 1817).
The stories became immensely popular, and were widely reprinted. Ironically, the
brothers are now most widely known for these collections of stories, which were
essentially an unexpected byproduct of the linguistic research which was their primary
goal.

In 1830, they formed a household in Göttingen where they were to become 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 of Hanover. This group came to be known in the
German states as Die Göttinger Sieben (The Göttingen Seven). Invoking their right to
resist on reasons of natural and constitutional justice, they protested against the King's
hubris to abrogate the constitution. For this, all professors were fired from their university
posts and some even deported. Though politically divided by borders of duchies and
kingdoms at that time, public opinion and academia in German realms almost
unanimously supported the Grimms and their colleagues against the monarch.

Wilhelm died in 1859; his elder brother Jacob died in 1863. They 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 brutally
by the Kingdom of Prussia, where there was established a constitutional monarchy.

Collections of fairy tales

In 1812, the brothers published a collection of German fairy tales they had gathered in a
volume titled Kinder- und Hausmärchen ("Children's and Household Tales"). They
published a second volume in 1814 ("1815" on the title page), as well as many further
editions during their lifetimes.

The collection was regarded at the time as "Erziehungsmärchen", a German word

meaning fairy tales that were meant to teach lessons to children. Examples of such
lessons include not wandering alone into the woods and being wary of step-mothers.

Later editions

Along with the original German works, many originally French tales entered the Brothers
Grimm collection through a Huguenot tale-teller that the Grimms used as one of their
main sources. English translations of the 7th edition (1857) remain popular, and they
exist now predominantly as highly expurgated and saccharine versions intended for
children, even though the folk tales that the Grimms had collected had not been
previously considered stories for children. Witches, goblins, trolls and wolves prowl the
dark forests of the Grimms' ancient villages, as well as the deeper psyche of the city-life
of this time. However the Grimms often rewrote the stories to suit what was considered
appropriate for the time, especially as the folk tales were often quite sexually explicit.

Modern analysis

Modern psychologists and cultural anthropologists theorize that the stories that are often
read to children at bed-time in the West are actually representations of emotional angst,
fear of abandonment, parental abuse, and/or sexual development. The child psychologist
Bruno Bettelheim in his book The Uses of Enchantment believes the familiar Grimms'
fairy tales to be Freudian myths. A modern editor of the Brothers Grimm and interpreter
of the fairy tales tradition is Jack Zipes. The most prolific writer on Grimm's fairy tales in
Germany today is Eugen Drewermann who has interpreted more than twenty of the tales
psychologically as stories that speak about various struggles on our way to become and to
be fully human..

Linguistics
In the very early 19th century, the time in which the Brothers Grimm lived, the Holy
Roman Empire had just met its fate, and Germany as we know it today did not yet exist;
it was basically an area of hundreds of principalities and small or mid-sized countries.
The major unifying factor for the German people of the time was a common language.
There was no significant German literary history. 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 Germany is the brothers' work on a
German dictionary, the Deutsches Wörterbuch. Indeed, the Deutsches Wörterbuch was
the first major step in creating a standardized "modern" German language since Martin
Luther's translation of the Bible to German. Being very extensive (33 volumes, weighing
84 kg) it is still considered the standard reference for German etymology.
The brother 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.