Brothers Grimm

Jacob (1785-1863) and Wilhelm (1786-1859) Grimm were philologists and librarians first. They collected the tales as evidence about the old German language, not as reading for children, and only once it was clear that children were the readers did Wilhelm begin smoothing the texts from one edition to the next.

The first volume of Kinder- und Hausmärchen appeared in 1812 with eighty-six tales, a second followed two years later with seventy more, and the last edition published in their lifetime carried two hundred and eleven pieces in 1857.

The picture of the brothers walking from village to village writing down what peasants told them is a good story and not a true one. Most of the tales came from educated acquaintances in their own circle, several of them from Huguenot families. Hansel and Gretel and Sleeping Beauty came from the family of Dortchen Wild, whom Wilhelm later married.

The rest of their working lives went into a German dictionary that gave every word its history. They never finished it. In 1837 they lost their posts at Göttingen for refusing to swear an oath to the new king.