The Brothers Grimm born (1785-1863) (1786-1859)

About:

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were born in Hesse in the state of Hanover in what would later become Germany. Their parents had nine children, only six of whom survived the first year of life and Jacob and Wilhelm were left the eldest of five brothers and a sister.
A year apart in age, the brothers lived an astonishingly close life.

In 1796 their father died when the brothers were ten and eleven years old respectively. What had been an idyllic rural childhood ceased abruptly and poverty in the city of Steinau took over. Unsurprisingly, fathers were to have an idealised position in many of their tales, and rather more surprisingly the villains were to be predominantly female. The boys were educated in the city of Kassel staying in the house of an aunt. They both moved on to the same University, Marburg, both studying Law (a year apart) and then progressed, together, from the law to an interest in linguistics.

The brothers were living in the splintered collection of principalities and states that made up the central part of Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century. But the beginnings of the unification of Germany were stirring and the brothers’ interest in the one unifying link between the areas, the German language, led to first what became known as Grimm’s Law – the first study of a recognised sound change in language - , and then to the collecting of German folklore and tales.

In 1830 the two brothers, again in tandem, moved to Göttingen University where they were both offered professorships. They became part of a political movement aimed at reversing the decision of King Ernest Augustus I of Hanover, ruler of the state to renege on the liberal reforms instituted by his father King George III. As a result of their activities they and five of their co-reformers at the University were exiled from the state, becoming known as the Göttingen seven. After a short sojourn in Kessel, they were invited by the King of Prussia to settle in Berlin, where they continued their work both as collectors of folklore and fomenters of the movement for democracy and a united state. They died four years apart with the younger brother Wilhelm dying in 1859 and his older sibling Jacob following him in 1863.