Jacob Grimm
Grimm, Jacob (Hanau, 1785-1863, Berlin), after studying law at Marburg University from 1802 to 1805, entered the Hessian civil service at Kassel. In 1808 he became Librarian to Jérôme, King of Westphalia, in whose realm Kassel was included. He was in the Hessian delegation at the Congress of Vienna (see Wiener Kongress), and on his return resumed employment as a librarian. Jacob Grimm was always in the closest collaboration with his brother Wilhelm (below); in 1830 both were appointed to chairs at the Hanoverian university of Göttingen. By this time the two brothers, of whom Jacob was the leading and more original spirit, had written their two famous works of folk-lore in the spirit of the Romantic movement (see Romantik), the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (2 vols., 1812-14) and Deutsche Sagen (2 vols., 1816-18). They had also laid the foundations of their Germanistic studies in the periodical Altdeutsche Wälder (1813-16), while Jacob had earlier published Über den altdeutschen Meistergesang (1811). Jacob alone was responsible for the systematic philology of the historical Deutsche Grammatik (1819-37), and his Deutsche Mythologie (1835) made an important contribution to the Germanic theory of folk-lore. In 1837 the two brothers were among the seven dissident professors (see Göttinger Sieben) dismissed by Ernst August, who succeeded William IV of Great Britain as king of Hanover.
Grimm returned with his brother to Kassel until in 1841 both brothers once more received a simultaneous invitation, this time to Berlin, to become members of the Prussian Akademie der Wissenschaften. Jacob Grimm's achievement in his Berlin years was his Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (2 vols., 1848). His most ambitious project, the great dictionary (Deutsches Wörterbuch), the German equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary, began to appear in 1852, but got no further than four volumes in his lifetime. This monumental enterprise, in which Wilhelm Grimm assisted his brother until his death in 1859, was continued by later scholars, and was completed in 1960 after more than a century of lexicographical and etymological research. A complete edition of the writings of J. and W. Grimm in 62 vols. began to appear in 1974. The Deutsches Wörterbuch (33 vols.) was reprinted in
