GRIMM BROTHERS

Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Carl Grimm (1786–1859), the two oldest surviving children of Philipp Wilhelm Grimm and Dorothea Zimmer Grimm, may be unique in the history of letters both for the breadth of their scholarly achievements and for the length of their scholarly collaboration. Away from home to attend school in Cassel and, later, at the University of Marburg, they shared lodgings and the study of law. As adults, they held complementary positions as librarians in Cassel, librarians and professors at the University of Göttingen, and professors at the University of Berlin; they also shared a home, a circumstance unchanged by Wilhelm's marriage to Henriette Dorothea Wild in 1825. Whether working together or independently, the Grimm brothers made unparalleled contributions to the disciplines of folklore and linguistics, inventing both fields of study and methodologies appropriate to those fields.

folklore and literature

Much of the Grimms' popular reputation rests upon their collection of fairy tales, Children's and Household Tales (Kinder- und Hausmärchen). This work may have been inspired by Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, writers who published an early collection of German folk songs, The Boy's Magic Horn (Des Knaben Wunderhorn, 1805). In any case, letters that Wilhelm and Jacob exchanged in 1805, while Jacob was working for Friedrich Carl von Savigny in Paris, show both brothers developing an interest in literature, oral and written, of earlier times. Their collecting resulted in one volume of fairy tales in 1812, which was dedicated to the wife and infant son of Achim von Arnim; a second volume followed in 1815, and a third in 1822. Editions published in 1819, 1837, 1840, 1843, 1850, and 1857 revised texts, added new tales and, occasionally, omitted old ones for a total of more than two hundred tales. Ludwig Grimm, a younger brother, illustrated the 1819 second edition and Wilhelm's son, Herman, published an eighth edition in 1864. The second and subsequent editions, which were largely Wilhelm's work, expanded, edited, and polished the tales, creating in the process a paradigm for the literary fairy tale and making them more acceptable for a child audience. In the years before and during World War II, the tales were sometimes used to support a Nazi agenda; more recently, feminist, psychological, mythic, allegorical, Marxist, and other critics have variously interpreted the tales. Kinder- und Hausmärchen was first translated into English by Edgar Taylor (German Popular Stories, 1823). His translation, illustrated by George Cruikshank, has been followed by numerous others, among which are notable translations by Margaret Hunt (1884), Ralph Manheim (1977), Jack Zipes (1987), and Maria Tatar (2004). The fairy tales also live on in translations into more than one hundred languages as well as in films, sound recordings, musicals, poems, and Web sites.

Together, the brothers also published German Legends in two volumes (1816, 1818); in the foreword they defined the differences among legend, history, and fairy tale. Either together or separately, the brothers eventually published a number of Irish, Icelandic, Spanish, Danish, Latin, and additional German texts dating from the eighth to the sixteenth century. Jacob alone published Teutonic Mythology in two volumes (Deutsche Mythologie, 1835), in which he supplemented the all too slim extant material with parallels in folk tales and Norse myth. Wilhelm's two early studies of runes (1821, 1828), an alphabet used by German peoples early in the first millennium, anticipated subsequent interest in that field, and Jacob's critical edition of Reynard the Fox (Reinhart Fuchs, 1834), including variants of this trickster tale in Latin, Flemish, and multiple dialects of German, remains a model of early textual criticism.

linguistics

Jacob Grimm advanced the methodology of historical and comparative linguistics. In the process he both codified important phonological changes and also created the vocabulary to describe them. The most famous of these, the First Germanic Sound Shift, is often called Grimm's Law, although the Danish scholar Rasmus Rask had noted the phenomenon earlier. This theory posits nine original Indo-European consonants, all of which underwent changes in Germanic languages. Thus, for example, Germanic languages like English and German have the consonant f in words where all other Indo-European languages have the consonant p (English father, Latin pater). In the last two decades of the twentieth century Grimm's Law was challenged, most directly by the glottalic theory of Thomas V. Gamkrelidze and Vja?eslav V. Ivanov, a theory that would require changing previously held views of the consonant patterns of Indo-European, the location of the Indo-European homeland, the migratory patterns of these people, and the identity of those modern languages that most closely resemble Indo-European. Regardless of the eventual outcome of this debate, Jacob Grimm's theoretical method remains sound. So do his contributions in describing other early phonological shifts and the vocabulary to name them, for example, umlaut, the vowel shifts that produce noun inflections such as mouse-mice, and ablaut, the vowel shifts that produce verb inflections such as write-wrote-written. Jacob describes these and other matters in the monumental German Grammar (Deutsche Grammatik, 1819–1837); he continued this work in a two-volume History of the German Language (Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 1848).

The last large project the brothers undertook together was the German Dictionary. They began this project after they had been expelled from the University of Göttingen for refusing to swear an oath of allegiance to Ernst August, the new king of Hanover who had unilaterally revoked the country's constitution. The German Dictionary, originally conceived to include all German words from the time of Martin Luther to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, eventually expanded to include words both earlier and later, along with etymologies and illustrative quotations. This work anticipated the modern practices of describing rather than prescribing usage and of including all varieties of words. Jacob did most of the work on volume 1 (A-Biermolke, 1854), Wilhelm most of the work on volume 2, which was published posthumously (1860). Jacob had completed volume 3 through the word frucht at the time of his death in 1863. The thirty-third and final volume of the dictionary was finally published a century later, an example of the broad and lasting legacy of the Grimm brothers in the field of linguistics.

See alsoCruikshank, George; Germany.

bibliography

Primary Sources

Grimm, Jacob. Reinhart Fuchs. Berlin, 1835.

——. Deutsche Grammatik. 4 vols. Göttingen, 1819–1837.

——. Geschichte der deutschen Sprache. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1848; 2nd ed., 1853.

——. Teutonic Mythology. Translated by James Steven Stallybrass. Reprint. New York, 2004. Translation of Deutsche Mythologie (1835; 4th ed., 1855).

Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. The German Legends of the Brothers Grimm. Translated and edited by Donald Ward. Philadelphia, 1981. Translation of Deutsche Sagen (Vol. 1, 1816, Vol. 2, 1818.).

——. Deutsches Wörterbuch. Vols. 1–3. Leipzig, 1854–1864. Reprint. Munich, 1999 (33 vols.). CD-ROM: Trier, 2000.

——. The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Translated by Jack Zipes. 3rd ed., illustrated by Johnny B. Grulle. New York, 2003. Translation of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Vol. 1, 1812; Vol. 2, 1815; Vol. 3, 1822; 7th ed., 1857).

——. The Annotated Brothers Grimm. Edited and translated by Maria Tatar. Introduction by A. S. Byatt. New York, 2004. Translations of forty-six tales and two prefaces.

Grimm, Wilhelm. Über deutsche Runen. Göttingen, 1821.

——. Zur Literatur der Runen: Nebst Mittheilung runischer Alphabete und gothischer Fragmente aus Handschriften. Vienna, 1828.

——. Die deutsche Heldensage. Göttingen, 1829. Reprint. Darmstadt, 1957.

Secondary Sources

Gamkrelidze, Thomas V., and Vja?eslav V. Ivanov. Indo-European and the Indo-Europeans: A Reconstruction and Historical Analysis of a Proto-Language and a Proto-Culture. 2nd ed. Translated by Johanna Nichols. Edited by Werner Winter. Berlin and New York, 2000.

Hettinga, Donald R. The Brothers Grimm: Two Lives, One Legacy. New York, 2001.

Michaelis-Jena, Ruth. The Brothers Grimm. New York and London, 1970.

Peppard, Murray B. Paths through the Forest: A Biography of the Brothers Grimm. New York, 1971.

Elizabeth L. Holtze