JACOB (1785-1863) and
WILHELM (1786-1859) GRIMM.

The Brothers Grimm were born into a middle class family in the German principality of Hesse-Cassel just when the middle class was emerging as a force. (This principality also provided the Hessian soldiers of the American Revolution.) Their lives spanned a tumultuous time in European history and literature: the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the Romantic movement and the struggles for constitutional government in the German states with the rise of Bismark. The brothers studied law, but they soon turned to scholarly research on language and literature. It was to these studies that they devoted their lives, thinking thisy would a be key to the history of the German people.

They worked together on adjoining desks in the same room. Although they collaborated on everything, Jacob's passion was language and he has been called the father of German philology (the study of language). He is credited with the identification of the Indo-European group of languages and their common root. (This consists of all of the European languages except Hungarian and Finnish.) Wilhelm worked on the German heroic sagas such as the Nibelungenlied and other folklore, mythology and fairy tales. Their Children's and Household Tales (Kinder- und Hausmärchen) appeared in several editions, one of which was illustrated by their younger brother Ludwig. They studied medieval manuscripts and asked all of their acquaintances to supply them with stories they had heard. At least 40 responded one of whom was Dortchen Wild. She told them the story of Hansel and Gretel and was later to become Wilhelm's wife.

Although they often had to choose between many different versions of a given story, they seldom attempted to impose their own embellishments, and their works remain faithful to the original folklore. The tales are filled with good and evil characters from whom it is possible to derive a lesson. However, while the French author Perrault ended each of his tales with a moral, the Grimm brothers never did. They let the stories do it for them. Their work was the beginning of the study of such tales as a worthy subject for scholars. They knew they were saving an oral tradition which was dying out, and they wrote the stories for "adults and serious people". Their methods were later imitated by other scholars. They censored the stories, removing obscenity and erotic elements, but they left the cruelty and emphasized that children were to be read TO! Grimm's stories are often called "fairy tales" but they seldom involve supernatural figures so are really folklore or legend.

Among their other works was the start of the German Dictionary one of the greatest works of all time. Begun in 1840, they only completed a few volumes (A-F); the entire work of thirty-two volumes was not completed until 1960. By comparison, the corresponding massive definitive work on the English language, The Oxford English Dictionary or OED runs to only twenty volumes. (The entry on the word 'theatre' in the on-line edition of the OED takes sixteen pages to print.)