Jacob Grimm, full name Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm, was one of the Grimm brothers. He and his brother are best known for the collection Grimm’s Fairy Tales, which people may know as the dark and twisted original version of Disney films. However, Jacob and his brother Wilhelm did not write these stories. In fact, they were not fiction writers at all, but they were the most important German scholars of their time. They collected these stories and studied them as folklore, traditional stories of a specific region.
Jacob Grimm Facts
1. He did more than collect the fairy tales
Jacob Grimm did more than just collect fairy tales, though, and he wasn’t always tied to his brother. Grimm did a lot of work with historical literature, whether it be stories passed down from generation to generation, laws of ancient civilization, or the beliefs of people over time.
He was also very interested in German philology, or the study of a language structure and how the language came to be structured in that way. An interesting fact about Jacob Grimm is that he was influential enough in that field to have a law of linguistics named after him. More about that later.
2. Jacob Grimm was responsible for his family at a young age
By the time Jacob Grimm was 23 years old, both his mother and father were dead. Since he was the oldest child in the family, it fell to him to take care of his five other siblings. Wilhelm was the second oldest sibling.
3. He was going down a different path in life
Before Grimm found his passion for linguistics, he was going to follow in the footsteps of his father who was a lawyer. His grandparents before that were church ministers in a small town. Jacob Grimm went the University of Marburg to get his degree in law.
However, through a series of influences, Jacob discovered that he much preferred to be a scholar of linguistics, and by 1816, the brothers were working together in Elector’s Library in Kassel Germany. Jacob had given up his career in law to research literature. His father’s path was not for him.
4. Jacob Grimm had many different government offices
Before Jacob dove into linguistics, he filled many different government positions. In 1806, he served as the secretary to the office of War in Kassel. He was the private librarian to King Jerome of Westphalia, a small kingdom. He returned to his hometown after the defeat of Napoleon and traveled to France a few times in order to recover paintings and old, valuable books that France stole. He also served in the Congress of Vienna. These government positions were Grimm’s bridge between law and linguistics, an interesting fact about Jacob Grimm.
5. He was more a realist than a Romantic
Jacob Grimm and his brother very much went against the grain of the times. During their lives, Romanticism was popular, which meant romanticizing things, and indulging in grand fantasy. Jacob Grimm lived together with his brother for a while, and they worked steadily and lived simply, without spending a lot of money. They could be described more as Realists. They were greatly influenced by the social and political changes of their day, and the difficulties that came with those changes. The brothers Grimm became fascinated with looking into the past to figure out why things were how they were by looking at writings from many different countries.
6. Grimm helped set the standard for the “Science” of folklore
That sounds like a contradictory concept, the science of folklore, but it just means Grimm helped create a standard way to study and collect folklore. He didn’t come up with this all on his own, however. A man named Clemens Brentano made him fall in love with folk poetry, and Friedrich Karl von Savigny taught Grimm a way of studying ancient things which was the basic method he used during his studies.
Later on, he really focused his studies on folk stories, poetry, and song. He wrote essays on the importance of folk literature and the difference between it and all other writing. He believed that folk poetry was the only real poetry, revealing the eternal emotions of humanity. He and his brother collected folk stories in their famous Grimm’s Fairy Tales collection. There were over 200 stories in that collection, including Snow White, Little Red Riding Hood, and Sleeping Beauty. Many of the stories were collected from oral tradition, meaning the stories were told but had never been written down until that point.
In 1816, Jacob Grimm published a collection of German local legends, but it wasn’t nearly as popular.
7. Jacob Grimm traced the history of Germanic language for the first time
Jacob Grimm also had an interest in language, the way it was formed and the way it is structured. After publishing the collections of folklore, Grimm translated a book of Irish folklore to German, then started translating and publishing various ancient texts including ancient law practices and beliefs in Germany. Several other countries were inspired by these efforts and followed his example. Soon, he published his own book on Germanic grammar, not just German grammar, but the language family that evolved both into German and English. Grimm traced the development of the German language for the first time.
An interesting fact about Jacob Grimm is that he had a law named after him, Grimm’s law, which shows that certain letters in ancient languages predictably change into other letters in the new language.
8. He wrote a dictionary
Jacob Grimm’s great project was a dictionary containing every German word in literature from the past 3 centuries, complete with meaning, origin, and context of each word. Grimm himself only lived to see the letter F completed, and the dictionary wasn’t finished until more than 100 years later, carried on by generations of successors.
Conclusion
Jacob Grimm never married, but some could say he was married to his work. His work, his notes and investigations became a model of how to collect folktales. He made many journeys to do his research, and of course, gifted us with many stories that might otherwise have been lost to time.
I hope that this article on Jacob Grimm facts was helpful! If you are interested, visit the Historical People Facts Page!