The Brothers Grimm

If it were not for these two German writers, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, best- known as the Brothers Grimm, many of us wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the classic fairy tales, since they would have been lost in time.
Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859) were born in Hanau, in the city of Hessen, near Frankfurt. They belonged to a working family and spent their early childhood in the countryside, and between 1790 and 1796 they lived near the magistrates’ house, since their father, Philip Wilhelm, a lawyer and court official, worked for Prince of Hessen.
They had one sister and six more brothers, three of whom died very young. Their father also died in 1797, so that the Grimm Family had to move into an urban residence and lived there during two years.
When in 1808, their mother, Dorothea Grimm, died at the age of fifty-two, Jacob began working as a librarian and Wilhelm as a secretary.
They both attended classes at the University of Marburg to become lawyers. While studying, these two writers started to research and collect folk tales originated centuries before and that had only been passed down by word of mouth. Their main aim was to preserve such material as a valuable part of German culture and history.
In their resource they included a collection of some of the most famous fairy tales like Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Cinderella, Snow white and the Seven Drawfs and Rumpelstiltskin. In 1812 Jacob and Wilhelm published their first book called Children’s and Household Tales, which included more than eighty stories. On top of that, in the following volume of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, seventy more folktales, and continued up to reach six more editions with two hundred stories.
In 1825 Wilhelm Grimm married Henriette Dorothea, but throughout their lives the two brothers were very closed to each other and they went on living together.
Both brothers worked in the University of Gottingen, but in 1837 they were dismissed because they protested against a constitutional violation of the King Ernest August I of Hannover. However, they were offered to take a new position as professors at the University of Berlin where they worked from 1842 to 1852. In the meantime, Jacob became member of the Parliament of Frankfurt. After that time, they decided to abandon their work there and dedicated fully to their studies and writings.
They became specialized in the German language and also wrote German Mythology, Old German Tales and The History of the German Language. Apart from their books, they also published a German historical dictionary, the Deutsches Worterbook, which was finally completed by other authors in 1954.
In 1859 Wilhelm died at the age of seventy-three and four years later his brother Jacob also died when he was seventy-eight.
Many of their fairy tales have become popular among children all over the world and most of us still enjoy those stories full of imagination and have been translated into more than one-hundred and fifty languages.