Jacob grimm og wilhelm grimm biography

Jacob found full-time employment in when he was appointed court librarian to the King of Westphalia and went on to become a librarian in Kassel. He arranged and paid for his brother Ludwig 's studies at art school and for Wilhelm's extended visit to Halle to seek treatment for heart and respiratory ailments, after which Wilhelm joined Jacob as librarian in Kassel [ 1 ] At Brentano's request, the brothers had begun collecting folk tales in a cursory manner in During their employment as librarians—which paid little but afforded them ample time for research—the brothers experienced a productive period of scholarship, publishing books between and On 15 May Wilhelm married Henriette Dorothea Dortchen Wild, a pharmacist's daughter and childhood friend who had given the brothers several tales.

For the next seven years the brothers continued to research, write, and publish. The two brothers taught German studies at the university, becoming well-respected in the newly established discipline. The s were a period of political upheaval and peasant revolt in Germany, leading to the movement for democratic reform known as Young Germany.

For refusing to sign the oath, the seven professors were dismissed and three were deported from Hanover—including Jacob, who went to Kassel. He was later joined there by Wilhelm, Dortchen, and their four children. The brothers again depended on friends and supporters for financial assistance and influence in finding employment. In addition to teaching posts, the Academy of Sciences offered them stipends to continue their research.

Once they had established their household in Berlin they directed their efforts towards the work on the German dictionary and continued to publish their research. After the revolutions of in the German states the brothers were elected to the civil parliament. Jacob became a prominent member of the National Assembly at Mainz. In the late s Jacob resigned his university position and published The History of the German Language Geschichte der deutschen Sprache.

Wilhelm continued at his university post until After retiring from teaching, the brothers devoted themselves to the German Dictionary for the rest of their lives. He continued jacob grimm og wilhelm grimm biography on the dictionary until his own death on 20 September Zipes writes of the Grimms' dictionary, and of their very large body of work: "Symbolically the last word was Frucht fruit.

The rise of romanticismromantic nationalismand trends in valuing popular culture in the early 19th century revived interest in fairy tales, which had declined since their late 17th-century peak. They collected and published their tales as a reflection of German cultural identity. In the first collection, though, they included Charles Perrault 's tales, published in Paris in and written for the literary salons of an aristocratic French audience.

Scholar Lydie Jean says that Perrault created a myth that his tales came from the common people and reflected existing folklore to justify including them—even though many of them were original. Versions of tales differ from region to region, "picking up bits and pieces of local culture and lore, drawing a turn of phrase from a song or another story, and fleshing out characters with features taken from the audience witnessing their performance.

But Tatar argues that the Grimms appropriated as uniquely German stories, such as " Little Red Riding Hood ", that had existed in many versions and regions throughout Europe, because they believed that such stories reflected Germanic culture. When Jacob returned to Marburg from Paris intheir friend Brentano sought the brothers' help in adding to his collection of folk tales, at which time the brothers began to gather tales in an organized fashion.

These tales were heavily modified in transcription; many had roots in previously written sources. It is the earliest extant version of the Grimms' collection and has become a valuable source to scholars studying the development of the Grimms' collection from the time of its inception. The manuscript was published in and again in The brothers gained a reputation for collecting tales from peasants, although many tales came from middle-class or aristocratic acquaintances.

Wilhelm's wife, Henriette Dorothea Dortchen Wild, and her family, with their nursery maid, told the brothers some of the more well-known tales, such as "Hansel and Gretel" and " Sleeping Beauty ". Despite her middle-class background, in the first English translation she was characterized as a peasant and given the name Gammer Gretel.

According to scholars such as Tatar and Ruth Bottigheimer, some of the tales probably originated in written form during the medieval jacob grimm og wilhelm grimm biography with writers such as Straparola and Boccacciobut were modified in the 17th century and again rewritten by the Grimms. Moreover, Tatar writes that the brothers' goal of preserving and shaping the tales as something uniquely German at a time of French occupation was a form of "intellectual resistance", and in so doing they established a methodology for collecting and preserving folklore that set the model followed later by writers throughout Europe during periods of occupation.

From onward, the brothers added to the collection. Jacob established the framework, maintained through many iterations; from until his death, Wilhelm assumed sole responsibility for editing and rewriting the tales. He made the tales stylistically similar, added dialogue, removed pieces "that might detract from a rustic tone", improved the plots, and incorporated psychological motifs.

He believes that Wilhelm "gleaned" bits from old Germanic faithsNorse mythology, Roman and Greek mythologyand biblical stories that he reshaped. Over the years, Wilhelm worked extensively on the prose; he expanded and added detail to the stories to the point that many of them grew to twice the length they had in the earliest published editions.

After he began writing original tales for children children were not initially considered the primary audience and adding didactic elements to existing tales. Some changes were made in light of unfavorable reviews, particularly from those who objected that not all the tales were suitable for children because of scenes of violence and sexuality.

The Grimms' legacy contains legends, novellasand folk stories, the vast majority of which were not intended as children's tales. Von Arnim was concerned about the content of some of the tales—such as those that showed children being eaten—and suggested adding a subtitle to warn parents of the content. Instead the brothers added an introduction with cautionary advice that parents steer children toward age-appropriate stories.

Despite von Arnim's unease, none of the tales were eliminated from the collection; the brothers believed that all the tales were of value and reflected inherent cultural qualities. For example, in the Grimms' original version of " Snow White ", the Queen is Little Snow White's mother, not her stepmother, but still orders her Huntsman to kill Snow White her biological daughter and bring home the child's lungs and liver so that she can eat them; the story ends with the Queen dancing at Snow White's wedding, wearing a pair of red-hot iron shoes that kill her.

To some extent the cruelty and violence may reflected the medieval culture from which the tales originated, such as scenes of witches burning, as described in " The Six Swans ". Tales with a spinning motif are broadly represented in the collection. In her essay "Tale Spinners: Submerged Voices in Grimms' Fairy Tales", Bottigheimer argues that these stories reflect the degree to which spinning was crucial in the life of women in the 19th century and earlier.

Spinning, particularly of flaxwas commonly performed in the home by women. Many stories begin by describing the occupation of their main character, as in "There once was a miller", yet spinning is never mentioned as an occupation; this appears to be because the brothers did not consider it an occupation. Instead, spinning was a communal activity, frequently performed in a Spinnstube spinning rooma place where women most likely kept the oral traditions alive by telling stories while engaged in tedious work.

The Grimms' work have been subjected to feminist critique. For example, Emma Tennant writes:. But the worst of it was that two men—the Brothers Grimm—listened to these old tales told by mothers to their daughters; and they decided to record them for posterity. But the Brothers Grimm could understand only the tales of courage and manliness and chivalry on the part of the boys.

Always we must read that our heroine is a Beauty. The tales were also criticized for being insufficiently German, which influenced the tales that the brothers included and their use of language. Some critics, such as Alistair Hauke, use Jungian analysis to say that the deaths of the brothers' father and grandfather are the reason for the Grimms' tendency to idealize and excuse fathers, as well as the predominance of female villains in the tales, such as the wicked stepmother and stepsisters in "Cinderella".

The collection includes 41 tales about siblings, which Zipes says are representative of Jacob and Wilhelm. Many of the sibling stories follow a simple plot where the characters lose a home, work industriously at a specific task, and in the end find a new home. The Large editions contained all the tales collected to date, extensive annotations, and scholarly notes written by the brothers; the Small editions had only 50 tales and were intended for children.

Emil GrimmJacob and Wilhelm's younger brother, illustrated the Small editions, adding Christian symbolism to the drawings, such as depicting Cinderella's mother as an angel and adding a Bible to the bedside table of Little Red Riding Hood's grandmother. The first volume was published in with 86 folk tales, [ 22 ] and a second volume with 70 additional tales was published late in dated on the title page ; together the two volumes and their tales are considered the first of the annotated Large editions.

Secondary 2. Secondary 3. Secondary 4. Secondary 5. Concept sheets. Crash Courses. Exam prep and study tips. The Grimm Brothers in Biography in a few points. Inhe was sent to Paris to demand restitution of books taken by the French, and he attended the Congress of Vienna as Secretary of Legation in — Upon his return from Vienna, he was sent to Paris again to secure book restitutions.

Meanwhile, Wilhelm had obtained a job at the Kassel libraryand Jacob was made second librarian under Volkel in Upon the death of Volkel inthe brothers both expected promotion, and they were dissatisfied when the role of the first librarian was given to Rommel, the keeper of the archives. Jacob Grimm lectured on legal antiquities, historical grammarliterary historyand diplomaticsexplained Old German poems, and commented on the Germania of Tacitus.

He returned to Kassel with his brother, who had also signed the protest. They remained there until when they accepted King Frederick William IV 's invitation to move to the University of Berlinwhere they both received professorships and were elected members of the Academy of Sciences. Grimm was not under any obligation to lecture, and seldom did so; he spent his time working with his brother on their dictionary project.

During their time in Kassel, he regularly attended the meetings of the academy and read papers on varied subjects, including Karl Konrad Friedrich Wilhelm LachmannFriedrich Schillerold age, and the origin of language. He described his impressions of Italian and Scandinavian travel, interspersing more general observations with linguistic details.

Grimm died in Berlin at the age of 78, working until the very end of his life. He describes his own work at the end of his autobiography:. Nearly all my labours have been devoted, either directly or indirectly, to the investigation of our earlier language, poetry and jacobs grimm og wilhelm grimm biography. These studies may have appeared to many, and may still appear, useless; to me they have always seemed a noble and earnest task, definitely and inseparably connected with our common fatherland, and calculated to foster the love of it.

My principle has always been in these investigations to under-value nothing, but to utilize the small for the illustration of the great, the popular tradition for the elucidation of the written monuments. Grimm's Geschichte der deutschen Sprache History of the German Language explores German history hidden in the words of the German language and is the oldest linguistic history of the Teutonic tribes.

He collected scattered words and allusions from classical literature and tried to determine the relationship between the German language and those of the GetaeThracians, Scythians, and other nations whose languages were known only through Greek and Latin authors. Grimm's results were later greatly modified by a wider range of available comparisons and improved methods of investigation.

Many questions that he raised remain obscure due to the lack of surviving records of the languages, but his book's influence was profound. Grimm's famous Deutsche Grammatik German Grammar was the outcome of his purely philological work. He drew on the work of past generations, from the humanists onwards, consulting an enormous collection of materials in the form of text editions, dictionaries, and grammars, mostly uncritical and unreliable.

Some work had been done in the way of comparison and determination of general laws, and the concept of a comparative Germanic grammar had been grasped by the Englishman George Hickes by the beginning of the 18th century, in his Thesaurus. Ten Kate in the Netherlands had made valuable contributions to the history and comparison of Germanic languages.

Grimm himself did not initially intend to include all the languages in his Grammarbut he soon found that Old High German postulated Gothicand that the later stages of German could not be understood without the help of other West Germanic varieties including English, and that the literature of Scandinavia could not be ignored. The first edition of the first part of the Grammarwhich appeared intreated the inflections of all these languages, and included a general introduction in which he vindicated the importance of a historical study of the German language against the quasi-philosophical methods then in vogue.

In the book appeared in a second edition really a new work, for, as Grimm himself says in the preface, he had to "mow the first crop down to the ground". The considerable gap between the two stages of Grimm's development of these editions is shown by the fact that the second volume addresses phonology in pages — more than half the volume.

Grimm had concluded that all philology must be based on rigorous adherence to the laws of sound changeand he subsequently never deviated from this principle. This gave to all his investigations a consistency and force of conviction that had been lacking in the study of philology before his day. His advances have been attributed mainly to the influence of his contemporary Rasmus Christian Rask.

Rask was two years younger than Grimm, but the Icelandic paradigms in Grimm's first editions are based entirely on Rask's grammar; in his second edition, he relied almost entirely on Rask for Old English. His debt to Rask is shown by comparing his treatment of Old English in the two editions. The correct plural is dagas. The appearance of Rask's Old English grammar was probably the primary impetus for Grimm to recast his work from the beginning.

Rask was also the first to clearly formulate the laws of sound-correspondence in the different languages, especially in the vowels previously ignored by etymologists. The Grammar was continued in three volumes, treating principally derivation, composition and syntaxthe last of which was unfinished. Grimm then began a third edition, of which only one part, comprising the vowels, appeared inhis time being afterwards taken up mainly by the dictionary.

The Grammar is noted for its comprehensiveness, method and fullness of detail, with all his points illustrated by an almost exhaustive mass of material, and it has served as a model for all succeeding investigators. Diez 's grammar of the Romance languages is founded entirely on Grimm's methods, which have had a profound influence on the wider study of the Indo-European languages in general.

Jakob continued the work on the dictionary and related projects until his death in Berlin on Sept. A good biographical study of the Grimm brothers is Murray B. Informative brief discussions of their lives and works can be found in more general studies of the German romantic movement. Perhaps the best is Ralph Tymms, German Romantic Literaturewhich discusses the romantics' attitudes toward folklore and legends.

A brief treatment of the brothers, chiefly as editors of the Tales, is also in L. Willoughby, The Romantic Movement in Germany Further helpful discussions, with literary background material, may be found in Oskar Walzel, German Romanticism trans.

Jacob grimm og wilhelm grimm biography

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