Jacob Grimm

Jacob Grimm
Born	Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm (1785-01-04)4 January 1785 Hanau,Landgraviate of Hesse-Kassel,Holy Roman Empire
Died	20 September 1863(1863-09-20)(aged 78) Berlin,Kingdom of Prussia,German Confederation
Parents	Philipp Grimm(father) Dorothea Grimm(mother)
Relatives	Wilhelm Grimm(brother) Ludwig Emil Grimm(brother) Herman Grimm(nephew) Ludwig Hassenpflug(brother-in-law)
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Marburg
Academic work
Institutions	University of Göttingen University of Berlin
Notable students	Wilhelm Dilthey
Influenced	August Schleicher
Signature

Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm(4 January 1785 – 20 September 1863), also known asLudwig Karl,was a German author, linguist, philologist, jurist, andfolklorist.He formulatedGrimm's lawof linguistics, and was the co-author of theDeutsches Wörterbuch,the author ofDeutsche Mythologie,and the editor ofGrimms' Fairy Tales.He was the older brother ofWilhelm Grimm;together, they were the literary duo known as theBrothers Grimm.

Life and books

Jacob Grimm was born 4 January 1785,inHanauinHesse-Kassel.His father,Philipp Grimm,was a lawyer who died while Jacob was a child, and his motherDorotheawas left with a very small income. Her sister was lady of the chamber to theLandgravineof Hesse, and she helped to support and educate the family. Jacob was sent to the public school atKasselin 1798 with his younger brotherWilhelm.

In 1802, he went to theUniversity of Marburgwhere he studied law, a profession for which he had been intended by his father. His brother joined him at Marburg a year later, having just recovered from a severe illness, and likewise began the study of law.

Meeting von Savigny

Jacob Grimm became inspired by the lectures ofFriedrich Carl von Savigny,a noted expert ofRoman law;Wilhelm Grimm, in the preface to theDeutsche Grammatik(German Grammar), credits Savigny with giving the brothers an awareness of science. Savigny's lectures also awakened in Jacob a love forhistoricalandantiquarianinvestigation, which underlies all his work. It was in Savigny's library that Grimm first sawBodmer's edition of theMiddle High Germanminnesingers and other early texts, which gave him a desire to study their language.

In the beginning of 1805, he was invited by Savigny to Paris, to help him in his literary work. There Grimm strengthened his taste for theliterature of the Middle Ages.Towards the close of the year, he returned to Kassel, where his mother and brother had settled after Wilhelm finished his studies. The following year, Jacob obtained a position in the war office with a small salary of 100thalers.He complained that he had to exchange his stylish Paris suit for a stiff uniform and pigtail, but the role gave him spare time for the pursuit of his studies.

Librarianship

In 1808, soon after the death of his mother, he was appointed superintendent of the private library ofJérôme Bonaparte,King ofWestphalia,into whichHesse-Kasselhad been incorporated byNapoleon.Grimm was appointed an auditor to the state council, while retaining his superintendent post. His salary rose to 4000 francs and his official duties were nominal. In 1813, after the expulsion of Bonaparte and the reinstatement of an elector, Grimm was appointed Secretary of Legation accompanying the Hessian minister to the headquarters of the allied army. In 1814, he was sent to Paris to demand restitution of books taken by the French, and he attended theCongress of Viennaas Secretary of Legation in 1814–1815. Upon his return from Vienna, he was sent to Paris again to secure book restitutions. Meanwhile, Wilhelm had obtained a job at theKassel library,and Jacob was made second librarian under Volkel in 1816. Upon the death of Volkel in 1828, the brothers both expected promotion, and they were dissatisfied when the role of first librarian was given to Rommel, the keeper of the archives. Consequently, they moved the following year to theUniversity of Göttingen,where Jacob was appointed professor and librarian, and Wilhelm under-librarian. Jacob Grimm lectured on legal antiquities,historical grammar,literary history,anddiplomatics,explained Old German poems, and commented on theGermaniaofTacitus.

Later work

Marble bustof Grimm byElisabet Ney,carved 1856–58 in Berlin

Grimm joined other academics, known as theGöttingen Seven,who signed a protest against theKing of Hanover's abrogation of the liberal constitution which had been established some years before.As a result, he was dismissed from his professorship and banished from the Kingdom of Hanover in 1837. He returned to Kassel with his brother, who had also signed the protest. They remained there until 1840, when they accepted KingFrederick William IV's invitation to move to theUniversity of Berlin,where they both received professorships and were elected members of the Academy of Sciences. Grimm was not under any obligation to lecture, and seldom did so; he spent his time working with his brother on their dictionary project. During their time in Kassel, he regularly attended the meetings of the academy and read papers on varied subjects, includingKarl Konrad Friedrich Wilhelm Lachmann,Friedrich Schiller,old age, and the origin of language. He described his impressions of Italian and Scandinavian travel, interspersing more general observations with linguistic details.He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciencesin 1857.

Grimm died in Berlin at the age of 78, working until the very end of his life. He describes his own work at the end of his autobiography:

Nearly all my labours have been devoted, either directly or indirectly, to the investigation of our earlier language, poetry and laws. These studies may have appeared to many, and may still appear, useless; to me they have always seemed a noble and earnest task, definitely and inseparably connected with our common fatherland, and calculated to foster the love of it. My principle has always been in these investigations to under-value nothing, but to utilize the small for the illustration of the great, the popular tradition for the elucidation of the written monuments.

Linguistic work

History of the German Language

During the research for his 'History of the German Language' Grimm corresponded with numerous colleagues. Ghent University Library holds several letters between Jacob Grimm andJan Frans Willems.

Grimm'sGeschichte der deutschen Sprache(History of the German Language) explores German history hidden in the words of the German language and is the oldest linguistic history of the Teutonic tribes. He collected scattered words and allusions from classical literature and tried to determine the relationship between the German language and those of theGetae,Thracians, Scythians, and other nations whose languages were known only through Greek and Latin authors. Grimm's results were later greatly modified by a wider range of available comparison and improved methods of investigation. Many questions that he raised remain obscure due to the lack of surviving records of the languages, but his book's influence was profound.

German Grammar

Grimm's famousDeutsche Grammatik(German Grammar) was the outcome of his purely philological work. He drew on the work of past generations, from the humanists onwards, consulting an enormous collection of materials in the form of text editions, dictionaries, and grammars, mostly uncritical and unreliable. Some work had been done in the way of comparison and determination of general laws, and the concept of a comparative Germanic grammar had been grasped by the EnglishmanGeorge Hickesby the beginning of the 18th century, in hisThesaurus.Ten Katein the Netherlands had made valuable contributions to the history and comparison of Germanic languages. Grimm himself did not initially intend to include all the languages in hisGrammar,but he soon found thatOld High GermanpostulatedGothic,and that the later stages of German could not be understood without the help of otherWest Germanicvarieties including English, and that theliterature of Scandinaviacould not be ignored. The first edition of the first part of theGrammar,which appeared in 1819, treated the inflections of all these languages, and included a general introduction in which he vindicated the importance of a historical study of the German language against the quasi-philosophical methods then in vogue.

In 1822 the book appeared in a second edition (really a new work, for, as Grimm himself says in the preface, he had to "mow the first crop down to the ground" ). The considerable gap between the two stages of Grimm's development of these editions is shown by the fact that the second volume addresses phonology in 600 pages – more than half the volume. Grimm had concluded that all philology must be based on rigorous adherence to the laws ofsound change,and he subsequently never deviated from this principle. This gave to all his investigations a consistency and force of conviction that had been lacking in the study of philology before his day.

His advances have been attributed mainly to the influence of his contemporaryRasmus Christian Rask.Rask was two years younger than Grimm, but the Icelandic paradigms in Grimm's first editions are based entirely on Rask's grammar; in his second edition, he relied almost entirely on Rask for Old English. His debt to Rask is shown by comparing his treatment ofOld Englishin the two editions. For example, in the first edition he declinesdæg, dæges,pluraldægas,without having observed the law ofvowel-changepointed out by Rask. (The correct plural isdagas.) The appearance of Rask's Old English grammar was probably the primary impetus for Grimm to recast his work from the beginning. Rask was also the first to clearly formulate the laws of sound-correspondence in the different languages, especially in the vowels (previously ignored byetymologists).

TheGrammarwas continued in three volumes, treating principally derivation, composition andsyntax,the last of which was unfinished. Grimm then began a third edition, of which only one part, comprising the vowels, appeared in 1840, his time being afterwards taken up mainly by the dictionary. TheGrammaris noted for its comprehensiveness, method and fullness of detail, with all his points illustrated by an almost exhaustive mass of material, and it has served as a model for all succeeding investigators.Diez's grammar of theRomance languagesis founded entirely on Grimm's methods, which have had a profound influence on the wider study of theIndo-European languagesin general.

Grimm's law

Main article:Grimm's law

Jacob is recognized for enunciatingGrimm's law,the Germanic Sound Shift, which was first observed by the Danish philologistRasmus Christian Rask.Grimm's law, also known as the "Rask-Grimm Rule" or the First Germanic Sound Shift, was the first law in linguistics concerning a non-trivialsound change.It was a turning point in the development of linguistics, enabling the introduction of a rigorous methodology to historic linguistic research. It concerns the correspondence of consonants between the ancestralProto-Indo-European languageand itsGermanicdescendants,Low SaxonandHigh German,and was first fully stated by Grimm in the second edition of the first part of hisGrammar.The correspondence of single consonants had been more or less clearly recognized by several of his predecessors, includingFriedrich von Schlegel,Rasmus Christian Rask andJohan Ihre,the last having established a considerable number ofliterarum permutationes,such asbforf,with the examplesbœra=ferre( "to bear" ),befwer=fibra( "fiber" ). Rask, in his essay on the origin of theIcelandic language,gave the same comparisons, with a few additions and corrections, and even the same examples in most cases. As Grimm in the preface to his first edition expressly mentioned Rask's essay, there is every probability that it inspired his own investigations. But there is a wide difference between the isolated permutations described by his predecessors and his own comprehensive generalizations. The extension of the law to High German in any case is entirely Grimm's work.

The idea that Grimm wished to deprive Rask of his priority claims is based on the fact that he does not expressly mention Rask's results in his second edition, but it was always his plan to refrain from all controversy or reference to the works of others. In his first edition, he calls attention to Rask's essay, and praises it ungrudgingly. Nevertheless, a certain bitterness of feeling afterwards sprang up between Grimm and Rask, after Rask refused to consider the value of Grimm's views when they clashed with his own.

German Dictionary

Grimm's monumentaldictionaryof theGerman Language,theDeutsches Wörterbuch,was started in 1838 and first published in 1854. The Brothers anticipated it would take 10 years and encompass some six to seven volumes. However, it was undertaken on so large a scale as to make it impossible for them to complete it. The dictionary, as far as it was worked on by Grimm himself, has been described as a collection of disconnected antiquarian essays of high value.It was finally finished by subsequent scholars in 1961 and supplemented in 1971. At 33 volumes at some 330,000 headwords, it remains a standard work of reference to the present day. A current project at theBerlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanitiesis underway to update theDeutsches Wörterbuchto modern academic standards. Volumes A–F were planned for completion in 2012 by the Language Research Centre at theBerlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanitiesand theUniversity of Göttingen.

Literary work

The first work Jacob Grimm published,Über den altdeutschen Meistergesang(1811), was of a purely literary character. Yet even in this essay Grimm showed thatMinnesangandMeistergesangwere really one form of poetry, of which they merely represented different stages of development, and also announced his important discovery of the invariable division of theLiedinto three strophic parts.

Grimm's text-editions were mostly prepared in conjunction with his brother. In 1812 they published the two ancient fragments of theHildebrandsliedand theWeißenbrunner Gebet,Jacob having discovered what until then had never been suspected — namely thealliterationin these poems. However, Jacob had little taste for text editing, and, as he himself confessed, working on a critical text gave him little pleasure. He therefore left this department to others, especially Lachmann, who soon turned his brilliant critical genius, trained in the severe school of classical philology, to Old andMiddle High Germanpoetry and metre.

Both Brothers were attracted from the beginning by all national poetry, whether in the form of epics, ballads or popular tales. They published In 1816–1818 a collection of legends culled from diverse sources and published the two-volumeDeutsche Sagen(German Legends). At the same time they collected all the folktales they could find, partly from the mouths of the people, partly from manuscripts and books, and published in 1812–1815 the first edition of thoseKinder- und Hausmärchen(Children's and Household Tales), which has carried the name of the brothers Grimm into every household of the western world. The closely related subject of the satiricalbeast epicof theMiddle Agesalso held great charm for Jacob Grimm, and he published an edition of theReinhart Fuchsin 1834. His first contribution to mythology was the first volume of an edition of theEddaicsongs, undertaken jointly with his brother, and was published in 1815. However, this work was not followed by any others on the subject.

The first edition of hisDeutsche Mythologie(German Mythology) appeared in 1835. This work covered the whole range of the subject, attempting to trace the mythology and superstitions of the oldTeutonsback to the very dawn of direct evidence, and following their evolution to modern-day popular traditions, tales, and expressions.

Legal scholarship

Grimm's work as a jurist was influential for the development of thehistory of law,particularly in Northern Europe.

His essayVon der Poesie im Recht(Poetry in Law,1816) developed a far-reaching, suprapositivist Romantic conception of law. TheDeutsche Rechtsalterthümer(German Legal Antiquities,1828) was a comprehensive compilation of sources of law from all Germanic languages, whose structure allowed an initial understanding of older German legal traditions not influenced by Roman law. Grimm'sWeisthümer(4 vol., 1840–63), a compilation of partially oral legal traditions from rural Germany, allows research of the development of written law in Northern Europe.

Politics

Jacob Grimm MdFN
Member of theFrankfurt Parliament forKreis Duisburg
In office 24 May 1848– 2 October 1848
Preceded by	Constituency established
Succeeded by	Carl Schorn
Personal details
Political party	Casino

Jacob Grimm's work tied in strongly with his views on Germany and its culture. His work on both fairy tales and philology dealt with the country's origins. He wished for a united Germany, and, like his brother, supported theLiberalmovement for a constitutional monarchy and civil liberties, as demonstrated by their involvement in theGöttingen Seven protest.In theGerman revolution of 1848,he was elected to theFrankfurt National Parliament.The people of Germany had demanded a constitution, so the Parliament, formed of elected members from various German states, met to form one. Grimm was selected for the office largely because of his part in the University of Göttingen's refusal to swear to the king of Hanover. In Frankfurt he made some speeches and was adamant that the Danish-ruled but German-speaking duchy ofHolsteinbe under German control. Grimm soon became disillusioned with the National Assembly and asked to be released from his duties to return to his studies.

He was elected to theAmerican Philosophical Societyin 1863.

Death

Jacob Grimm died on 20 September 1863, in Berlin, Germany from disease, at the age of 78.

Works

The following is a complete list of Grimm's separately published works. Those he published with his brother are marked with a star (*). For a list of his essays in periodicals, etc., see vol. V of hisKleinere Schriften,from which the present list is taken. His life is best studied in his ownSelbstbiographie,in vol. I of theKleinere Schriften.There is also a brief memoir byKarl GoedekeinGöttinger Professoren(Gotha (Perthes), 1872).

• Über den altdeutschen Meistergesang(Göttingen, 1811)
• *Kinder- und Hausmärchen(Berlin, 1812–1815) (many editions)
• *Das Lied von Hildebrand und des Weissenbrunner Gebet(Kassel, 1812)
• Altdeutsche Wälder(Kassel, Frankfurt, 1813–1816, 3 vols.)
• *Der arme Heinrich von Hartmann von der Aue(Berlin, 1815)
• Irmenstrasse und Irmensäule(Vienna, 1815)
• *Die Lieder der alten Edda(Berlin, 1815)
• Silva de romances viejos(Vienna, 1815)
• *Deutsche Sagen(Berlin, 1816–1818, 2nd ed., Berlin, 1865–1866)
• Deutsche Grammatik(Göttingen, 1819, 2nd ed., Göttingen, 1822–1840) (reprinted 1870 byWilhelm Scherer,Berlin)
• Wuk Stephanowitsch' Kleine Serbische Grammatik, verdeutscht mit einer Vorrede(Leipzig and Berlin, 1824) Vuk Stefanovic Karadzic – Serbian Grammar
• Zur Recension der deutschen Grammatik(Kassel, 1826)
• *Irische Elfenmärchen, aus dem Englischen(Leipzig, 1826)
• Deutsche Rechtsaltertümer(Göttingen, 1828, 2nd ed., 1854)
• Hymnorum veteris ecclesiae XXVI. interpretatio theodisca(Göttingen, 1830)
• Reinhart Fuchs(Berlin, 1834)
• Deutsche Mythologie(Göttingen, 1835, 3rd ed., 1854, 2 vols.)
• Taciti Germania edidit(Göttingen, 1835)
• Über meine Entlassung(Basel, 1838)
• (together withSchmeller)Lateinische Gedichte des X. und XI. Jahrhunderts(Göttingen, 1838)
• Sendschreiben an Karl Lachmann über Reinhart Fuchs(Berlin, 1840)
• Weistümer, Th. i.(Göttingen, 1840) (continued, partly by others, in 5 parts, 1840–1869)
• Andreas und Elene(Kassel, 1840)
• Frau Aventure(Berlin, 1842)
• Geschichte der deutschen Sprache(Leipzig, 1848, 3rd ed., 1868, 2 vols.)
• Des Wort des Besitzes(Berlin, 1850)
• *Deutsches Wörterbuch,Bd. i. (Leipzig, 1854)
• Rede auf Wilhelm Grimm und Rede über das Alter(Berlin, 1868, 3rd ad., 1865)
• Kleinere Schriften(F. Dümmler, Berlin, 1864–1884, 7 vols.).
  • vol. 1:Reden und Abhandlungen(1864, 2nd ed. 1879)
  • vol. 2:Abhandlungen zur Mythologie und Sittenkunde(1865)
  • vol. 3:Abhandlungen zur Litteratur und Grammatik(1866)
  • vol. 4:Recensionen und vermischte Aufsätze,part I (1869)
  • vol. 5:Recensionen und vermischte Aufsätze,part II (1871)
  • vol. 6:Recensionen und vermischte Aufsätze,part III
  • vol. 7:Recensionen und vermischte Aufsätze,part IV (1884)

External links

• Works by the Brothers Grimm in eBook formatStandard Ebooks
• Works by Jacob GrimmatProject Gutenberg
• Works by Jacob Ludwig Carl GrimmatFaded Page(Canada)
• Works by or about Jacob GrimmatInternet Archive
• Works by Jacob GrimmatLibriVox(public domain audiobooks)
• Works co-authored by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm:Works by Jacob GrimmatLibriVox(public domain audiobooks)
• Teutonic Mythology,English translation of Grimm'sDeutsche Mythologie(1880).
• Household Tales by the Brothers Grimm, translated by Margaret HuntArchived3 January 2010 at theWayback Machine(This site is the only one to feature all of the Grimms' notes translated in English along with the tales from Hunt's original edition. Andrew Lang's introduction is also included.)
• Literature by and about Jacob Grimmin theGerman National Librarycatalogue
• Works by and about Jacob Grimmin theDeutsche Digitale Bibliothek(German Digital Library)
• There is literature about Jacob Grimmin theHessian Bibliography
• Grimm, 2) Jakob Ludwig Karl.In:Meyers Konversations-Lexikon.4th edition. Volume 7, Verlag des Bibliographischen Instituts, Leipzig/Vienna 1885–1892, p. 741.
• The Grimm dictionary online
• Biography at LeMO-Portal