The Brothers Grimm (Brüder Grimm, in their own words, not Gebrüder - for there were five surviving brothers, among them Ludwig Emil Grimm, the painter) were Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Hessian professors who were best known for publishing collections of authentic folk tales and fairy tales, and for their work in linguistics, relating to how the sounds in words shift over time.
Easton Press Brothers Grimm books
Franklin Library Brothers Grimm books
Fairy Tales by The Brothers Grimm - 100 Greatest Books of All Time - 1981
100 Fairy Tales by The Brothers Grimm - Collected Stories of the World's Greatest Writers - 1984
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Who are The Brothers Grimm?
Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm (also Carl) 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, six of whom survived infancy. Their early childhood was spent in the countryside in what has been described as an "idyllic" state. The Grimm family lived near the magistrate's house between 1790 and 1796 while the father was employed by the Prince of Hessen.
When the eldest brother Jacob was eleven years old, their father, Philip Wilhelm, died and the family moved into a cramped urban residence. Two years later, the children's grandfather also died, leaving their mother to struggle to support them in reduced circumstances. It has been argued that this is the reason behind the Brothers' tendency to idealize and excuse fathers, leaving a predominance of female villains in the tales and the infamous wicked stepmothers, for example, the evil stepmother and stepsisters in “Cinderella" 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 did not 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' selection of 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 studied law at the University of Marburg. There they were inspired by their professor Friedrich von Savigny, who awakened an interest in the past. 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.
In 1808, Jacob was named court librarian to the King of Westphalia. In 1812 the Grimm brothers published their first volume of fairy tales, Tales of Children and the Home. They had collected the stories from peasants and villagers, and ,controversially, from other sources such as published works from other cultures and languages (eg. Charles Perrault). 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. In 1816 Jacob became librarian in Kassel, where Wilhelm was also employed. Between 1816 and 1818 they published two volumes of German legends and 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. In 1830, they formed a household in Göttingen, where both brothers secured positions at the University of Göttingen. Jacob was named professor and head librarian in 1830; Wilhelm became a professor in 1835.
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. The professors were fired from their university posts and three were deported, including Jacob. Jacob settled in Kassel, outside Ernest's realm, and Wilhelm joined him there; they both stayed with their brother Ludwig. However, the next year, the two were invited to Berlin by the King of Prussia, and both settled there.
Their last years were spent in writing a definitive dictionary, the Deutsches Wörterbuch, the first volume being published in 1854. The work was carried on by future generations.
Marriage and family
Jacob remained a bachelor until his death. On May 15, 1825, Wilhelm married Henriette Dorothea Wild (also known as Dortchen). She was a pharmacist's daughter and a childhood friend who had told the brothers the story of "Little Red Riding Hood". Wilhelm and Henriette had four children, of whom three survived infancy: Karl, Jacob, and Agnes. Even after Wilhelm's marriage, the brothers stayed close. They lived as an extended family under one roof with little conflict.
Wilhelm died in Berlin on December 16, 1859. Jacob continued work on the dictionary and related projects until his death in Berlin on September 20, 1863. The brothers were 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. Its revolution of 1848/1849 was crushed by the Kingdom of Prussia, which established a constitutional monarchy.
Death
The brothers died while still working on the dictionary: Wilhelm died in December 1859, having completed the letter D; Jacob survived his brother by nearly four years, completing the letters A, B, C and E, and was working on Frucht (fruit) when he collapsed at his desk.
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 had recorded by inviting storytellers to their home and transcribing what they heard. Although they were said to have collected tales from peasants, many of their informants were middle-class or aristocratic, recounting tales they had heard from their servants. Several of the informants were of Huguenot ancestry and told tales that were French in origin. It is believed that certain elements of the stories were "purified" for the brothers, who were Christian. On the other hand, it has recently been claimed that many of these "folk tales" were written in Italy during an early fairy-tale boom, and adapted by travelling shows for peasant children. As adults, these people passed them on to the middle class families who told them to the Grimms.
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; these were published in 1816 and 1818. The legends are organized in the chronological order of historical events to which they were related. The brothers arranged the regional legends thematically for each folktale creature, such as dwarfs, giants, monsters, etc. not in any historical order. These legends were not as popular as the fairytales.
A second edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen followed in 1819-22, expanded to 170 tales. Five more editions were issued during the Grimms' lifetimes, in which stories were added or subtracted. 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. The tales were also criticized for being insufficiently German; this not only influenced the tales the brothers included, but their language. 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. There were others, including a German collection by Johann Karl August Musäus published in 1782-7. The earlier collections, however, made little pretence 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 sophistication 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.
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 early researchers were working before academic practices for such collections had been codified. 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 rather 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 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.
Notable fairy tales by the Brothers Grimm
The Almond Tree
The Blue Light
Brave Little Taylor
Brother and Sister
Cinderella
The Bremen Town Musicians
The Elves and the Shoemaker
The Fisherman and His Wife
The Five Servants
The Frog Prince
The Gallant Sailor
The Golden Bird
The Golden Goose
The Goose Girl
The Grateful Beasts
Hansel and Gretel
Iron John
Jorinde and Joringel
The Juniper Tree
King Thrushbeard
The Little Farmer
Little Red Riding Hood
Mother Hulda
Old Sultan
The Pied Piper of Hamelin
Rumpelstiltskin
Rapunzel
The Raven
The Salad
Simeli mountain
Six Soldiers of Fortune
The Six Swans
Sleeping Beauty
Snow White
Snow-White and Rose-Red
The Spirit in the Bottle
The Three Little Men in the Woods
The Three Spinsters
Tom Thumb
The Twelve Brothers
The Twelve Dancing Princesses
The Water of Life
The White Snake
The Wonderful Musician
Source and additional information: Brothers Grimm