Jacob Grimm

Born in Hanau in 1785, Jacob Grimm became one of the great German scholars of the 19th century. With his younger brother Wilhelm, he collected and edited the stories later published as Kinder- und Hausmärchen, known in English as Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Those books made the brothers famous, but Jacob was also a jurist, librarian, and major figure in the study of folklore.

Jacob’s scholarly work was just as influential as the tales. He is closely associated with Grimm’s law, an important principle in historical linguistics, and he also worked on the vast Deutsches Wörterbuch, a dictionary of the German language begun with Wilhelm. His writings on mythology and language helped shape modern philology and the serious study of traditional culture.

He spent much of his career in Kassel, Göttingen, and Berlin, where he continued writing and research until his death in 1863. Today, he is remembered not only for preserving stories that generations of readers have loved, but also for showing that folk tradition and language were worthy of deep scholarly attention.