Born January 4th, 1785, in Hanau, Hesse-Kassel, German folklorist and philologist, Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm is best known, together with younger brother Wilhelm, for the folk tale collection, Kinder und Hausmarchen, published 1812 – ’15 and commonly known in English as Grimm’s Fairy Tales.
The brothers attended Marburg University and studied law, but spent most of their lives ‘in literary research’. In 1808, Jacob accepted the post of court librarian to the king of Westphalia, Jerome Bonaparte, and was later auditor to the Conseil d’Etat at Paris. Following Napoleon’s defeat at Leipzig in 1813, Jacob took part in the Congress of Vienna before joining Wilhelm at the Elector’s library at Kassel in 1816.
Jacob’s Deutsche Grammatik (1819 – ’37), on the grammars of all Germanic languages, elaborated a linguistic principle now known as ‘Grimm’s Law’, whilst his Deutsche Mythologie (1835), written during the brothers’ appointment as librarians and professors at Gottingen University, is considered an influential study of pre-Christian Germanic faith and superstition.
Collecting two hundred tales, recorded and transcribed from mostly oral sources, Kinder und Hausmarchen became a founding text that helped to establish the science of folklore. Despite being collected by Germans, however, the tales’ origins can be traced as far afield as Russia and the Slavic countries, to Greece, Italy and even to Sanskrit texts; to view the stories as ‘representing the ethnic German soul’, therefore, may be something of an overestimation.
Jacob Grimm apparently never married, remaining a bachelor until his death from natural causes on September 20th 1863. He and his brother Wilhelm are interred at Alter St. Matthaus-Kirchhof in Berlin.
References:
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/Brothers-Grimm
- https://www.pookpress.co.uk/
- https://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/200th-anniversary-the-cultural-legacy-of-grimms-fairy-tales-a-874054.html
© michael femm and blackwood article, 2024
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