Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm

Grimm, Jacob (Ludwig Carl) and Wilhelm (Carl)

 known as the Brothers Grimm

Jacob (right) and Wilhelm Grimm, oil portrait by Elisabeth Jerichau-Baumann, 1855; in the …

(credit: Courtesy of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin)

(born Jan. 4, 1785, Hanau, Hesse-Kassel—died Sept. 20, 1863, Berlin) (born Feb. 24, 1786, Hanau—died Dec. 16, 1859, Berlin) German folklorists and philologists. They spent most of their lives in literary research as librarians and professors at the Universities of Göttingen and Berlin. They are most famous for Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812–15), known in English as Grimm's Fairy Tales, a collection of 200 tales taken mostly from oral sources, which helped establish the science of folklore. Together and separately, they also produced many other scholarly studies and editions. Wilhelm's chief solo work was The German Heroic Tale (1829); Jacob's German Mythology (1835) was a highly influential study of pre-Christian German faith and superstition. Jacob's extensive Deutsche Grammatik (1819–37), on the grammars of all Germanic languages, elaborates the important linguistic principle now known as Grimm's law. In the 1840s the brothers worked on the Deutsches Wörterbuch, a vast historical dictionary of the German language that required several generations to complete.