The Brothers Grimm were born in Hanau, a harbor city on the Main, into the family of a lawyer: Jacob on January 4, 1785, Wilhelm on February 24, 1786.
After graduating from the Lyceum in Kassel, the capital of the Kingdom of Westphalia, both brothers received a law degree at the University of Marburg.
Already in their youth, Jacob and Wilhelm were fascinated by German antiquity, and the brothers willingly listened and wrote down what they were told.
In 1812, the brothers published a collection of fairy tales, which they had been working on about thirteen years. By their own confession with this work they “... intended to provide a service not only to history, poetry and mythology, but also meant that the poetry inherent in these fairy tales could influence everyone, could please everyone who is able to enjoy it.”
While alive, the Brothers Grimm constantly supplemented the collection, it went through six editions and was translated into almost all European languages.
The collection of fairy tales is only a small part of the great contribution that the Brothers Grimm had made to German and world science.
Having started researching Germanic dialects, Jacob Grimm became an outstanding philologist. His “German Grammar” (1819), “Antiquities of German Law” (1828), “German Mythology” (1835) constituted an entire era in German philology and earned him fame as one of the founders of comparative historical linguistics.
Wilhelm Grimm is known as a talented researcher in the field of literary history. He studied individual poetic works and folk legends in general, collected and put in order German heroic sagas, and restored damaged texts of manuscripts. Wilhelm Grimm laid the cornerstone of comparative literary history, which studies the development and growth of the same poetic material among different peoples. Wilhelm Grimm's commentary on the collection of fairy tales published by the brothers provides rich material for comparing plots with the fairy-tale literature of the British, Spaniards, Italians, French, Scandinavians, Slavs, and even with the fabulous stock of oriental literatures.
Wilhelm Grimm died on December 16, 1859. Yakov Grimm followed his brother on September 20, 1863.
