A Grimm history

The Brothers Grimm are the world’s most famous folklorists. Their Children’s and Household Tales never sold well during their lifetimes, but it made them—not Martin Luther or Franz Kafka—the most widely translated German authors of all time. It contains those tales we all know so well (or think we do)—“Snow White,” “Cinderella,” and “Rapunzel”—as well as lesser-known ones like “The Hand With a Knife,” about a girl who cuts peat with a magic knife.

But as Ann Schmiesing shows in The Brothers Grimm (Yale University Press, 360 pp.)—the first biography of the brothers in English in more than 50 years—they were much more than folklorists. They sparked a continent-­wide interest in Germanic and Norse mythology that continues to this day, changed how dictionaries were written, made significant contributions to the field of linguistics, and played a minor role in the shaping of modern Germany.

Born in 1785 and 1786 respectively, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm had an idyllic childhood, raised in a devout and nurturing home in a peaceful town in western Germany. This came to a sudden end when their father, the district magistrate, died of pneumonia. Jacob was 11 and Wilhelm nearly 10. The family struggled to make ends meet and placed its hope in the two brothers, with Jacob heading to the University of Marburg in 1802 to study law, followed by Wilhelm a year later.

At Marburg, both Jacob and Wilhelm developed an interest in medieval literature. During a stint as a research assistant for a German law professor in Paris, Jacob copied medieval German songs he found in Paris’ extensive libraries, which were published in The Boy’s Magic Horn in 1805.

Jacob moved to Kassel in 1806 to serve on the War Board to support his mother and siblings. Napoleon invaded shortly afterward, setting up his own dissolute brother, Jérôme, as king of Westphalia. Jacob was named librarian to the king in 1807, and the role gave him ample time to pursue his burgeoning interest in folk literature since Jérôme disliked reading.

The French occupation convinced the brothers of the need to collect German folktales before they were lost to history. Both brothers longed for a unified Germanic state and saw in medieval folktales a kind of Germanness that could remind the people of a shared cultural heritage.

The first edition of Children’s and Household Tales was published in 1812, followed by six subsequent editions in their lifetimes. While other collections of folktales were highly stylized (they “do not allow the old to remain old,” Jacob complained), the Grimms presented their tales as the unadulterated stories of the people, despite collecting many of them from aristocratic families. Only minor edits for style and moral content were provided for the first ­edition, but these increased over time. The volume never became a bestseller, but it contributed to a renewed interest in an idealized German past.

Schmiesing does an excellent job showing how the brothers—both pious Calvinists—were part of a larger German Romanticism. Goethe assisted them at a crucial moment in collecting their tales, and the philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher provided copyediting assistance. Jacob’s work on German mythology had a pronounced influence on the composer Richard Wagner.

Their German dictionary, which they started in 1838 (nineteen years before the Oxford English Dictionary), was the first to provide a history of word usage (it was only completed in 1961). They protested the annulment of the Hanoverian constitution in 1837 when they were professors at Göttingen. Jacob was no liberal, but he believed that moderate improvements in freedom were important in preventing a culture from becoming ossified.

Erudite and briskly written, Schmiesing’s tale of the Brothers Grimm is surprising and wise—an appropriate tribute to the two brothers.

—Micah Mattix is the poetry editor of First Things magazine and a professor of English at Regent University