Little Red Riding Hood, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel — every one of these stories, read by children the world over, comes from the Children’s and Household Tales (first edition 1812), compiled by Jacob Grimm and his brother Wilhelm Grimm. But that same Jacob is also the author of the Deutsche Grammatik covered elsewhere in this feature, devoted a lifetime to a single dictionary, and was driven out of his university post for political reasons. These look like scattered pursuits. They are not.
Recording “the people’s words,” as they are
The Germany the Grimm brothers worked in, in the early nineteenth century, was not yet one nation — it was still divided into dozens of small states. Into that setting came an idea championed by the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder and others: that a people carries its own distinctive “spirit” (Volksgeist) inside its words, its songs, its stories. The Grimms’ fairy-tale collecting put that idea into practice. Tales handed down among farmers and ordinary people were to be written down as close to how they were actually told as possible — not polished, not fitted with a moral (some smoothing crept in across later editions, but that was the founding principle).
The same posture carried into the grammar. What Jacob aimed at in Deutsche Grammatik was not imposing rules from above, but describing, as it actually happened, the historical change the Germanic languages had really gone through. Fairy tales or grammar, the stance toward the object was the same: copy out, carefully and without alteration, what is already there.
A lifetime’s dictionary, left unfinished
In 1838 the Grimm brothers took on an even larger project — the Deutsches Wörterbuch (German Dictionary), an attempt to cover every word of German, from its etymology to its actual recorded usage. How enormous that undertaking was is written into what happened next. Jacob died in 1863 while writing the entry for Frucht (“fruit”). The dictionary as a whole was not finished until 1961 — nearly a century after the brothers’ deaths.
Losing a post for standing against a king
Grimm’s work wasn’t confined to a scholar’s study. In 1837, as a professor at the University of Göttingen, Jacob joined six colleagues in publicly protesting King Ernest Augustus I of Hanover’s unilateral abolition of the state constitution. The seven who signed that protest became known as the “Göttingen Seven” (Göttinger Sieben) — and the cost was severe: all seven lost their professorships, and three, Jacob among them, were expelled from the kingdom outright. The stance of respecting language and folk tale “as they are” turns out to run on the same ground as resisting a ruler who unilaterally rewrites the terms.
Summary
| Work | Year | Shared stance |
|---|---|---|
| Children’s and Household Tales | from 1812 | Record the people’s words without altering them |
| Deutsche Grammatik, 2nd edition | 1822 | Describe language’s historical change as it actually happened |
| The Göttingen Seven affair | 1837 | Protest a unilateral change to established terms |
| Deutsches Wörterbuch | begun 1838, finished 1961 | Record every German word together with its actual usage |
In a nutshell — fairy tales, grammar, a dictionary, even a protest against a king: for Grimm, all of it was one attitude wearing different clothes. Respect what is already there, rather than rewriting it by power or by whim. “Grimm’s Law,” the subject of this feature, is what that same attitude produced once it was turned on the sound-changes of language itself.