Jacob Grimm

Born in Hanau in 1785, he studied law at the University of Marburg, but his interests soon widened into old German literature, language, and tradition. Working closely with his younger brother Wilhelm, he gathered and edited the stories later known around the world as Grimm’s Fairy Tales, while also building a reputation as a major scholar.

His work reached far beyond folklore. He is credited with formulating Grimm’s law, an important idea in historical linguistics about sound changes in Germanic languages, and he also wrote Deutsche Mythologie. With Wilhelm, he began the monumental Deutsches Wörterbuch, an ambitious dictionary of the German language.

He spent his later years in Berlin and died there in 1863. Today, he is remembered both as a guardian of traditional stories and as a pioneering philologist whose research gave lasting shape to the study of language, myth, and folk culture.