Jacob Grimm

• 1. Introduction

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  Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm was born on the 4th of January 1785, in Hanau in Hesse-Kassel, and he spent nearly eight decades building what may be the most wide-ranging scholarly legacy in the history of the German language. His father Philipp, a lawyer, died while Jacob was still a child, leaving his mother Dorothea with very little income. A lifeline came through her sister, who served as lady of the chamber to the Landgravine of Hesse and helped support and educate the family. In 1798, Jacob and his younger brother Wilhelm were sent together to the public school at Kassel. That brotherly partnership would define both their lives.

  From that modest beginning, Jacob Grimm would formulate one of the foundational laws of modern linguistics, compile a dictionary that took over a century to finish, and edit a collection of folk tales that found its way into households across the western world. He also survived exile, survived revolution, and described his own life's purpose in an autobiography with striking plainness: to investigate the earlier language, poetry, and laws of his people, and to use the small to illuminate the great. The questions worth asking are how a lawyer's son from Hesse became the man who changed how the world thinks about language, what drove him to keep working until his last day, and how a fairy tale collection ended up being only one small corner of an enormous life.

• 2. A Mentor and a Library

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  Friedrich Carl von Savigny, a noted expert in Roman law, transformed Jacob Grimm from a routine law student into a man consumed by history. Wilhelm Grimm would later credit Savigny, in the preface to the Deutsche Grammatik, with giving both brothers an awareness of science. Savigny's lectures lit a love of historical and antiquarian investigation in Jacob that never left him, and that impulse underlies every major project he undertook.

  It was in Savigny's personal library that Grimm first encountered Bodmer's edition of the Middle High German minnesingers and other early texts. That encounter gave him a hunger to study the language behind them. At the start of 1805, Savigny invited him to Paris to help with literary work, and Grimm's taste for the literature of the Middle Ages deepened during that stay. When he returned to Kassel towards the close of that year, he found a position in the war office paying a small salary of 100 thalers. He complained that he had to trade his stylish Paris suit for a stiff uniform and pigtail, but the post left him enough spare time to keep studying.

  Then in 1808, shortly after his mother died, Grimm was appointed superintendent of the private library of Jérôme Bonaparte, King of Westphalia, the state into which Napoleon had incorporated Hesse-Kassel. His salary rose to 4000 francs, and his official duties were, in practice, minimal. The position gave him the access and the time that a scholar needs, and the years that followed would produce some of the most consequential work of his career.

• 3. The Grammar That Changed Everything

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  The first edition of the first part of the Deutsche Grammatik appeared in 1819, and it treated the inflections of a range of Germanic languages, including English and the languages of Scandinavia. Grimm had not originally planned to include all of them. He found, working through the material, that Old High German required Gothic to make sense, and that later German could not be understood without the other West Germanic varieties. The grammar grew to match the subject.

  By 1822, he had rewritten it so thoroughly that he described the process himself: he had to "mow the first crop down to the ground." The second edition gave more than 600 pages to phonology alone, more than half the volume. That shift reflected a new conviction: all philology had to rest on rigorous adherence to the laws of sound change. Grimm never deviated from that principle again, and it gave his investigations a consistency that had been absent from the field before him.

  The debt he owed to the Danish philologist Rasmus Christian Rask was real and acknowledged, at least in the first edition. Rask, who was two years younger than Grimm, had formulated the laws of sound correspondence and had supplied the Icelandic paradigms that Grimm's first edition relied on entirely. For Old English in the second edition, Grimm again leaned heavily on Rask's work. A later bitterness developed between the two men after Rask refused to consider the value of Grimm's views when they clashed with his own. The Grammar was ultimately continued in three volumes covering derivation, composition, and syntax, with the last volume unfinished, and a third edition begun in 1840 covered only the vowels before the dictionary absorbed the rest of Grimm's time.

• 4. Grimm's Law

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  The second edition of the Grammar's first part, published in 1822, is also where Grimm first fully stated what would come to be called Grimm's law. The law describes a systematic shift in consonants between Proto-Indo-European and its Germanic descendants, including Low Saxon and High German. It is known too as the Rask-Grimm Rule and as the First Germanic Sound Shift, and it holds the distinction of being the first non-trivial sound-change law in the history of linguistics.

  Predecessors had noticed individual consonant correspondences. Friedrich von Schlegel, Rask, and Johan Ihre had each identified isolated permutations, and Ihre had established a number of what he called literarum permutationes. Rask's essay on the origin of the Icelandic language gave similar comparisons and even the same examples in most cases. Grimm expressly cited Rask's essay in his first edition preface, making it probable that it inspired his own investigations. The extension of the law to High German, however, belongs entirely to Grimm.

  The law was a turning point for the discipline. It allowed a rigorous methodology to enter historical linguistic research for the first time. The charge that Grimm tried to deprive Rask of priority rests on the fact that the second edition dropped the explicit mention of Rask's results; Grimm's own explanation was that he had resolved never to enter into controversy or cite the works of others in that edition. Whatever the truth of that, Grimm's comprehensive generalization from scattered observations into a unified law represented something genuinely new, and it is the reason his name remains attached to the rule more than two centuries later.

• 5. The Göttingen Seven and Exile

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  In 1828, the death of a senior librarian named Volkel at Kassel left the brothers expecting a promotion. When the post of first librarian went instead to Rommel, the keeper of the archives, the brothers moved the following year to the University of Göttingen, where Jacob was appointed professor and librarian and Wilhelm became under-librarian. At Göttingen, Jacob lectured on legal antiquities, historical grammar, literary history, and diplomatics, and he commented on the Germania of Tacitus.

  In 1837, the King of Hanover abolished the liberal constitution that had been in place for several years. Jacob joined six other academics, a group that became known as the Göttingen Seven, in signing a public protest. The consequence was immediate: he was dismissed from his professorship and banished from the Kingdom of Hanover. Both brothers returned to Kassel.

  The exile lasted until 1840, when King Frederick William IV invited them to the University of Berlin, where both received professorships and were elected members of the Academy of Sciences. Jacob was under no obligation to lecture there and seldom did. He spent his time on the dictionary. In 1848, he was elected to the Frankfurt National Parliament during the German revolution, and he made speeches there insisting that the German-speaking duchy of Holstein, then under Danish rule, should come under German control. He grew disillusioned with the National Assembly and asked to be released from his duties, preferring to return to his studies.

• 6. The Unfinishable Dictionary

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  In 1838, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm began work on the Deutsches Wörterbuch, a dictionary of the German language. They expected the project to take roughly ten years and to fill six or seven volumes. The first volume was published in 1854. The brothers had misjudged the scale so thoroughly that neither of them would live to see it finished.

  The dictionary as Grimm himself worked on it was described by later scholars as a collection of disconnected antiquarian essays of high value. That characterization captures something real about how he approached it: not as a reference list but as an exploration of the language's history and meaning. Subsequent scholars carried it forward after his death, and it was finally finished in 1961, more than a century after work began. A supplementary volume appeared in 1971. The finished dictionary runs to 33 volumes and contains around 330,000 headwords, and it remains a standard reference work. A current project at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities is working to bring the Deutsches Wörterbuch up to modern academic standards, with volumes A through F planned for completion through the Language Research Centre there and the University of Göttingen.

• 7. Fairy Tales, Mythology, and Law

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  Between 1812 and 1815, Jacob and Wilhelm published the first edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, the Children's and Household Tales, gathering stories from oral sources as well as manuscripts and books. That collection would carry the brothers' name into households across the western world, though it represented only one strand of Jacob's much larger project of recovering German cultural memory.

  In 1816, he published an essay, Von der Poesie im Recht, that developed a broad Romantic conception of law as something rooted in the life of a people rather than imposed from above. The Deutsche Rechtsalterthümer of 1828 assembled sources of law from all Germanic languages and opened a path to understanding older German legal traditions that had developed without Roman influence. His Weisthümer, a compilation of partially oral legal traditions from rural Germany published across four volumes between 1840 and 1863, gave researchers a record of how written law had evolved in Northern Europe.

  The first edition of his Deutsche Mythologie appeared in 1835 and covered the full range of old Teutonic mythology and superstition, tracing it from the earliest surviving evidence down to the popular traditions, tales, and expressions of his own day. His first published work, a literary essay on old German Meistergesang in 1811, had already announced a discovery that would matter to scholars: that Minnesang and Meistergesang were not separate forms but two stages of the same poetic development. Jacob's death on the 20th of September 1863 in Berlin, at the age of 78, came while he was still at work on the dictionary he had begun a quarter-century before.