The Brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, were German academics who were best known for publishing collections of folk tales and fairy tales and for their work in linguistics, relating to how the sounds in words shift over time (Grimm’s Law). They are among the best known story tellers of novellas from Europe, allowing the widespread knowledge of such tales as Rumpelstiltskin, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Cinderella, and Hansel and Gretel.

The Brothers Grimm, Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Karl (1786–1859), became famous as the authors of fairy tales. As scholars, they also contributed to comparative linguistics. The Grimm brothers were also very important historians of medieval language and folklore.

The Brothers Grimm were born in Hanau, Jacob on January 4, 1785, and Wilhelm on February 24, 1786. They grew up playing games of make-believe together, and their lifelong close relationship made their accomplishments possible. The Grimm family lived nearby the magistrates’ house between 1790 and 1796 while the father was employed by the Prince of Hesse. The brothers attended school in Kassel, and both studied law at the University of Marburg. It was the inspiration of Friedrich von Savigny who awakened in them an interest in the past. In 1808 Jacob was named court librarian to the king of Westphalia, and in 1816 he became librarian in Kassel, where Wilhelm was also employed. They remained there until 1830, when they secured positions at the University of Göttingen.

The Grimm brothers published their first volume of fairy tales, Tales of Children and the Home, in 1812. They had received their stories from peasants and villagers. In their collaboration Jacob did more of the research, while Wilhelm, more fragile, put it into literary form and provided the childlike style. They were also interested in folklore and primitive literature. Between 1816 and 1818 they published two volumes of German legends and also a volume of early literary history.

In time the brothers became interested in older languages and their relation to German. Jacob began to specialize in the history and structure of the German language. The relationships between words became known as Grimm’s Law. They gathered immense amounts of data. By 1830 the brothers moved to the University of Göttingen, where Jacob was named professor and head librarian. Wilhelm also became a professor in 1835. Both were dismissed that same year for protesting against the king’s decision to abolish the Hanoverian constitution. Their last years were spent in writing a definitive dictionary of the German language, the first volume published in 1854, and it was carried on by future generations.

Wilhelm died in Berlin on December 16, 1859, while Jacob continued work on the dictionary and related projects until his death in Berlin on September 20, 1863.

The Brothers Grimm began collecting folk tales around 1807, in response to a wave of awakened interest in German folklore that followed the publication of Ludwig Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano’s folksong collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (“The Youth’s Magic Horn”), 1805-8. By 1810 the Grimms produced a manuscript collection of several dozen tales, which they had recorded by inviting storytellers to their home and transcribing what they heard. Although it is often believed that they took their tales from peasants, many of their informants were middle-class or aristocratic, recounting tales they had heard from their servants, and several of the informants were of Huguenot ancestry and told tales French in origin. It is believed that certain elements of the stories were “purified” for the brothers who were Christian.

In 1812, the Brothers published a collection of 86 German fairy tales in a volume titled Kinder- und Hausmärchen (“Children’s and Household Tales”). They published a second volume of 70 fairy tales in 1814 (“1815″ on the title page), which together make up the first edition of the collection, containing 156 stories.

They wrote a two volume work titled Deutsche Sagen which included 585 German legends which were published in 1816 and 1818. The legends are told in chronological order of which historical events they were related. Then they arranged the regional legends thematically for each folktale creature like dwarfs, giants, monsters, etc. not in any historical order. These legends were not as popular as the fairytales.

A second edition, of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, followed in 1819-22, expanded to 170 tales. Five more editions were issued during the Grimms’ lifetimes, in which stories were added or subtracted, until the seventh edition of 1857 contained 211 tales. Many of the changes were made in light of unfavorable reviews, particularly those that objected that not all the tales were suitable for children, despite the title. They were also criticized for being insufficiently German; this not only affected the tales they included, but their language as they changed “Fee” (fairy) to an enchantress or wise woman, every prince to a king’s son, every princess to a king’s daughter. (It has long been recognized that some of these later-added stories were derived from printed rather than oral sources).

These editions, equipped with scholarly notes, were intended as serious works of folklore. The Brothers also published the Kleine Ausgabe or “small edition,” containing a selection of 50 stories expressly designed for children (as opposed to the more formal Große Ausgabe or “large edition”). Ten printings of the “small edition” were issued between 1825 and 1858.

The Grimms were not the first to publish collections of folktales. The 1697 French collection by Charles Perrault is the most famous, though there were various others, including a German collection by Johann Karl August Musäus published in 1782-7. The earlier collections, however, made little pretense to strict fidelity to sources. The Brothers Grimm were the first workers in this genre to present their stories as faithful renditions of the kind of direct folkloric materials that underlay the sophistications of an adapter like Perrault. In so doing, the Grimms took a basic and essential step toward modern folklore studies, leading to the work of folklorists like Peter and Iona Opie and others.

It should be noted that the Grimms’ method was common in their historical era. Arnim and Brentano edited and adapted the folksongs of Des Knaben Wunderhorn; in the early 1800s Brentano collected folktales in much the same way as the Grimms. The good academic practices violated by these early researchers had not yet been codified in the period in which they worked. The Grimms have been criticized for a basic dishonesty, for making false claims about their fidelity—for saying one thing and doing another; whether and to what degree they were deceitful, or self-deluding, is perhaps an open question.