Grimm, Brothers

▪ German folklorists and linguists

Introduction

German  Brüder Grimm 

 German brothers famous for their classic collections of folk songs and folktales. Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm (b. Jan. 4, 1785, Hanau, Hesse-Kassel [Germany]—d. Sept. 20, 1863, Berlin) and Wilhelm Carl Grimm (b. Feb. 24, 1786, Hanau, Hesse-Kassel [Germany]—d. Dec. 16, 1859, Berlin) were best known for Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812–22; also called Grimm's Fairy Tales), which led to the birth of the science of folklore. Jacob especially did important work in historical linguistics and Germanic philology.

Beginnings and Kassel period

      Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were the oldest in a family of five brothers and one sister. Their father, Philipp Wilhelm, a lawyer, was town clerk in Hanau and later justiciary in Steinau, another small Hessian town, where his father and grandfather had been ministers of the Calvinistic Reformed Church. The father's death in 1796 brought social hardships to the family; the death of the mother in 1808 left 23-year-old Jacob with the responsibility of four brothers and one sister. Jacob, a scholarly type, was small and slender with sharply cut features, while Wilhelm was taller, had a softer face, and was sociable and fond of all the arts.

      After attending the high school in Kassel, the brothers followed their father's footsteps and studied law at the University of Marburg (1802–06) with the intention of entering civil service. At Marburg they came under the influence of Clemens Brentano (Brentano, Clemens), who awakened in both a love of folk poetry, and Friedrich Karl von Savigny (Savigny, Friedrich Karl von), cofounder of the historical school of jurisprudence, who taught them a method of antiquarian investigation that formed the real basis of all their later work. Others, too, strongly influenced the Grimms, particularly the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (Herder, Johann Gottfried von) (1744–1803), with his ideas on folk poetry. Essentially, they remained individuals, creating their work according to their own principles.

      In 1805 Jacob accompanied Savigny to Paris to do research on legal manuscripts of the Middle Ages; the following year he became secretary to the war office in Kassel. Because of his health, Wilhelm remained without regular employment until 1814. After the French entered in 1806, Jacob became private librarian to King Jérôme of Westphalia in 1808 and a year later auditeur of the Conseil d'État but returned to Hessian service in 1813 after Napoleon's defeat. As secretary to the legation, he went twice to Paris (1814–15), to recover precious books and paintings taken by the French from Hesse and Prussia. He also took part in the Congress of Vienna (September 1814–June 1815). Meantime, Wilhelm had become secretary at the Elector's library in Kassel (1814), and Jacob joined him there in 1816.

      By that time the brothers had definitely given up thoughts of a legal career in favour of purely literary research. In the years to follow they lived frugally and worked steadily, laying the foundations for their lifelong interests. Their whole thinking was rooted in the social and political changes of their time and the challenge these changes held. Jacob and Wilhelm had nothing in common with the fashionable “Gothic” Romanticism of the 18th and 19th centuries. Their state of mind made them more Realists than Romantics. They investigated the distant past and saw in antiquity the foundation of all social institutions of their days. But their efforts to preserve these foundations did not mean that they wanted to return to the past. From the beginning, the Grimms sought to include material from beyond their own frontiers—from the literary traditions of Scandinavia, Spain, The Netherlands, Ireland, Scotland, England, Serbia, and Finland.

      They first collected folk songs (folklore) and tales for their friends Achim von Arnim and Brentano, who had collaborated on an influential collection of folk lyrics in 1805, and the brothers examined in some critical essays the essential difference between folk literature and other writing. To them, folk poetry was the only true poetry, expressing the eternal joys and sorrows, the hopes and fears of mankind.

      Encouraged by Arnim, they published their collected tales as the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, implying in the title that the stories were meant for adults and children (children's literature) alike. In contrast to the extravagant fantasy of the Romantic school's poetical fairy tales (fairy tale), the 200 stories of this collection (mostly taken from oral sources, though a few were from printed sources) aimed at conveying the soul, imagination, and beliefs of people through the centuries—or at a genuine reproduction of the teller's words and ways. The great merit of Wilhelm Grimm is that he gave the fairy tales a readable form without changing their folkloric character. The results were threefold: the collection enjoyed wide distribution in Germany and eventually in all parts of the globe (there are now translations in 70 languages); it became and remains a model for the collecting of folktales everywhere; and the Grimms' notes to the tales, along with other investigations, formed the basis for the science of the folk narrative and even of folklore. To this day the tales remain the earliest “scientific” collection of folktales.

      The Kinder- und Hausmärchen was followed by a collection of historical and local legends of Germany, Deutsche Sagen (1816–18), which never gained wide popular appeal, though it influenced both literature and the study of the folk narrative. The brothers then published (in 1826) a translation of Thomas Crofton Croker's Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland, prefacing the edition with a lengthy introduction of their own on fairy lore. At the same time, the Grimms gave their attention to the written documents of early literature, bringing out new editions of ancient texts, from both the Germanic and other languages. Wilhelm's outstanding contribution was Die deutsche Heldensage (“The German Heroic Tale”), a collection of themes and names from heroic legends mentioned in literature and art from the 6th to the 16th centuries, together with essays on the art of the saga.

      While collaborating on these subjects for two decades (1806–26), Jacob also turned to the study of philology with an extensive work on grammar, the Deutsche Grammatik (1819–37). The word deutsch in the title does not mean strictly “German,” but it rather refers to the etymological meaning of “common,” thus being used to apply to all of the Germanic languages, the historical (historical linguistics) development of which is traced for the first time. He represented the natural laws of sound change (both vowels and consonants) in various languages and thus created bases for a method of scientific etymology; i.e., research into relationships between languages and development of meaning. In what was to become known as Grimm's law, Jacob demonstrated the principle of the regularity of correspondence among consonants in genetically related languages, a principle previously observed by the Dane Rasmus Rask (Rask, Rasmus). Jacob's work on grammar exercised an enormous influence on the contemporary study of linguistics, Germanic, Romance, and Slavic, and it remains of value and in use even now. In 1824 Jacob Grimm translated a Serbian grammar by his friend Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (Karadžić, Vuk Stefanović), writing an erudite introduction on Slavic languages and literature.

      He extended his investigations into the Germanic (Germanic law) folk-culture with a study of ancient law practices and beliefs published as Deutsche Rechtsaltertümer (1828), providing systematic source material but excluding actual laws. The work stimulated other publications in France, The Netherlands, Russia, and the southern Slavic countries and has not yet been superseded.

The Göttingen years

      The quiet contentment of the years at Kassel ended in 1829, when the brothers suffered a snub—perhaps motivated politically—from the Elector of Hessen-Kassel: they were not given advancement following the death of a senior colleague. Consequently, they moved to the nearby University of Göttingen (Göttingen, University of), where they were appointed librarians and professors. Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Mythologie, written during this period, was to be of far-reaching influence. From poetry, fairy tales, and folkloristic elements, he traced the pre-Christian faith and superstitions of the Germanic people, contrasting the beliefs to those of classical mythology (Germanic religion and mythology) and Christianity. The Mythologie had many successors all over Europe, but often disciples were not as careful in their judgments as Jacob had been. Wilhelm published here his outstanding edition of Freidank's epigrams. But again fate overtook them. When Ernest Augustus, duke of Cumberland, became king of Hanover, he high-handedly repealed the constitution of 1833, which he considered too liberal. Two weeks after the King's declaration, the Grimms, together with five other professors (the “Göttingen Seven”), sent a protest to the King, explaining that they felt themselves bound by oath to the old constitution. As a result they were dismissed, and three professors, including Jacob, were ordered to leave the kingdom of Hanover at once. Through their part in this protest directed against despotic authority, they clearly demonstrated the academic's sense of civil responsibilities, manifesting their own liberal convictions at the same time. During three years of exile in Kassel, institutions in Germany and beyond (Hamburg, Marburg, Rostock, Weimar, Belgium, France, The Netherlands, and Switzerland) tried to obtain the brothers' services.

The Berlin period

      In 1840 they accepted an invitation from the king of Prussia, Frederick William IV, to go to Berlin, where as members of the Royal Academy of Sciences they lectured at the university. There they began work in earnest on their most ambitious enterprise, the Deutsches Wörterbuch, a large German dictionary intended as a guide for the user of the written and spoken word as well as a scholarly reference work. In the dictionary, all German words found in the literature of the three centuries “from Luther to Goethe” were given with their historical variants, their etymology, and their semantic development; their usage in specialized and everyday language was illustrated by quoting idioms and proverbs. Begun as a source of income in 1838 for the brothers after their dismissal from Göttingen, the work required generations of successors to bring the gigantic task to an end more than a hundred years later. Jacob lived to see the work proceed to the letter F, while Wilhelm finished only the letter D. The dictionary became an example for similar publications in other countries: Britain, France, The Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland. Jacob's philological research later led to a history of the German language, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, in which he attempted to combine the historical study of language with the study of early history. Research into names and dialects was stimulated by Jacob Grimm's work, as were ways of writing and spelling—for example, he used roman type and advocated spelling German nouns without capital letters.

      For some 20 years they worked in Prussia's capital, respected and free from financial worries. Much of importance can be found in the brothers' lectures and essays, the prefaces and reviews (Kleinere Schriften) they wrote in this period. In Berlin they witnessed the Revolution of 1848 and took an active part in the political strife of the succeeding years. In spite of close and even emotional ties to their homeland, the Grimms were not nationalists in the narrow sense. They maintained genuine—even political—friendships with colleagues at home and abroad, among them the jurists Savigny and Eichhorn; the historians F.C. Dahlmann, G.G. Gervinus, and Jules Michelet; and the philologists Karl Lachmann, John Mitchell Kemble, Jan Frans Willems, Vuk Karadžić, and Pavel Josef Šafařik. Nearly all academies in Europe were proud to count Jacob and Wilhelm among their members. The more robust Jacob undertook many journeys for scientific investigations, visiting France, The Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, Denmark, and Sweden. Jacob remained a bachelor; Wilhelm married Dorothea Wild from Kassel, with whom he had four children: Jacob (who was born and died in 1826), Herman (literary and art historian, 1828–1901), Rudolf (jurist, 1830–89), and Auguste (1832–1919). The graves of the brothers are in the Matthäikirchhof in Berlin.

Ludwig Denecke

Additional Reading

L. Denecke, Jacob Grimm und sein Bruder Wilhelm (1971); and K. Schulte Kemminghausen and L. Denecke, Die Brüder Grimm in Bildern ihrer Zeit (1963), standard modern biographies; earlier studies include: Die Selbstbiographien von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm (1830; ed. by I. Schnack, 1958); W. Scherer, Jacob Grimm (1865, 1885, new ed. 1921), antiquated but not dispensable; K. Zuckmayer, Die Brüder Grimm. Ein deutscher Beitrag zur Humanität (1948, 1972); H. Gerstner (ed.), Die Brüder Grimm: Ihr Leben und Werk in Selbstzeugnissen, Briefen und Aufzeichnungen (1952), collected documents; W. Schoof, Jacob Grimm (1961) and Wilhelm Grimm (1960), collected essays with documents; G. Ginschel, Der junge Jacob Grimm, 1805–1819 (1967), an outstanding work. English-language works: Ruth Michaelis-Jena, The Brothers Grimm (1970), detailed and fully illustrated; Muriel E. Hammond, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm (1968), a pleasant introductory work; Murray B. Peppard, Paths Through the Forest: A Biography of the Brothers Grimm (1971), learned and readable.

Festschrift publications

Brüder Grimm Gedenken 1963, ed. by L. Denecke and I.M. Greverus with G. Heilfurth (1963), contains 27 contributions from 15 countries, East and West; Jacob Grimm zur 100. Wiederkehr seines Todestages, ed. by W. Fraenger and W. Steinitz (1963), 12 contributions from 6 East European countries.

Letters.

For a complete list of edited correspondence, see L. Denecke (above); for a choice of important editions, Ruth Michaelis-Jena (above).

Special subjects.

R. Stieg, Goethe und die Brüder Grimm (1892, reprinted 1972), contains surprising aspects of this relationship; H. Kueck, Die Göttinger Sieben (1934), with political tracts and documents; W. Ebel, Jacob Grimm und die deutsche Rechtswissenschaft (1963), a concise study.

On the nursery and household tales.

H. Hamann, Die literarischen Vorlagen der Kinder- und Hausmärchen und ihre Bearbeitung durch die Brüder Grimm (1906); K. Schmidt, Die Entwicklung der Grimmschen Kinder- und Hausmärchen seit der Urhandschrift (1932); W. Schoof, Zur Entwicklungsgeschichte der Grimmschen Märchen (1959); Q. Gerstl, Die Brüder Grimm als Erzieher: Pädagogische Analyse des Märchens (1964); C. Buehler, Das Märchen und die Phantasie des Kindes, 6th ed. (1970).

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