Jacob Grimm

Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm (Hanau, Germany, January 4, 1785-Berlin, September 20, 1863) was a German linguist, philologist, and mythologist, considered the founder of historical grammar.

His life and work was closely linked to that of his younger brother, Wilhelm, which is why it is common to hear about the Brothers Grimm as a whole.

Biography

Jacob Grimm, the son of Dorothea and the lawyer Philipp Grimm, was the eldest of several children, studied law in Marburg and also in Paris, France, and worked as a librarian in Kassel in 1808. His liberal ideas earned him expulsion from the University of Göttingen in 1837 along with six other professors who professed similar political beliefs. However, he was soon after elected a member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. At that time dedicated to Germanic, he set out to create a gigantic German dictionary in no less than 32 volumes, which was never finished.

Outside Germany he is best known for being one of the first folklorists to collect the traditional folk tales of his country, along with his younger brother Wilhelm Grimm, imbued with the idea of volkgeist from German Romanticism, which highly appreciated traditional literature as an expression of the natural national spirit; both are generally known as the Brothers Grimm. Those influential collections they published were Children's and Household Tales (2 vols., 1812-1815) and Brothers Grimm's Fairy Tales (enhanced version of the former, 1857).

The importance of Jacob Grimm for German linguistics derives from having understood and described, in 1822, the nature of the phonetic modifications suffered by the Germanic languages, modifications that have since been known as Grimm's Law (consisting of the mutation phonetics of the Indo-European voiced stop consonants when passing into Germanic, so that they became voiceless; the voiceless stops into fricatives and the voiced aspirated stops into voiced fricatives: for example, the Germanic consonants p, t, k, correspond in other Indo-European languages the consonants b, d, g).

His most important scientific work is the Deutsches Wörterbuch (Dictionary of the German Language) (1819-1837), of more than 20 volumes, the first great step for create a standardized German language. It is still considered an essential reference for German etymology.

Works

With his brother he wrote Deutsche Grammatik (German Grammar, 1819-1837) and Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (History of German language, 1848). He alone published Deutsche Rechtsaltertümer (Antiquities of Germanic Law, 1828), Deutsche Mythologie (German Mythology, 1835) and Über den altdeuschen Meistergesang (On the old German craftsmen, 1811).

A compilation of German folklore tales

The life and work of the Grimm brothers has transcended into popular culture thanks to their books with compilations of stories, works that collect a series of stories that were traditionally told to children in German-speaking areas; Commissioned by Friedrich Carl von Savigny, the brothers Jacob and Wilhem Grimm toured different German-speaking areas to learn about and collect popular folklore stories, which were later published in two books that have transcended time, one of the most valuable sources was storytelling. Dorothea Viehmann, who contributed several of the stories that the Brothers Grimm published.

Jacob was the one who was most committed to the dissemination of such works, encouraging the publication of some of the stories collected in newspapers and almanacs for children, which facilitated their appropriation by children, while his brother Wilhem was in charge of adjustments stylistic that made the works more pleasant to small readers. The works have been edited several times, which has meant important changes in their content, highlighting the elimination of sections considered too cruel, such as the mutilation of Cinderella's sisters in said work.

Fairy Tales

Among the so-called "fairy tales" include the following notable works:

• Hansel and Gretel
• The beloved Rolando
• Complete stories I
• Complete accounts II
• Full stories III
• Complete counts IV
• Snow White and the seven dwarfs
• Traditional tales
• The jumping dwarf
• The wolf and the seven kids
• The king of thieves and other stories
• The sugar house
• The musicians of Bremen
• Rapunzel
• John without fear
• Snow White
• Red Riding Hood