Brothers Grimm

The Brothers Grimm (German: Die Brüder Grimm), Jacob Grimm (January 4, 1785 – September 20, 1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (February 24, 1786 – December 16, 1859), were German academics, linguists, cultural researchers, and authors who collected folklore and published several collections of it as Grimm's Fairy Tales, which became very popular.

Jacob was an academic in philology, researching how the sounds in words shift over time (Grimm's law). Furthermore, he was a lawyer whose legal work, German Legal Antiquities (Deutsche Rechtsaltertümer) in 1828, made him a valuable source of about the origin and meaning of much legal historical idiomatic usage and symbolism.

The brothers can be counted along with Karl Lachmann and Georg Friedrich Benecke as founding fathers of Germanic philology and German studies. Late in life they undertook the compilation of the first German dictionary.The first collection of fairy tales Children's and Household Tales (Kinder-und Hausmärchen) was published in 1812 with more than 200 fairy tales. Many of the stories had already been written by Charles Perrault in the late 1600s. They are among the best-known story tellers of European folktales, and their work popularized such stories as "Snow-White and Rose-Red" (Schneeweißchen und Rosenrot), "The Frog Prince" (Der Froschkönig), "Hansel and Gretel" (Hänsel und Gretel), "Rapunzel", "Rumpelstiltskin" (Rumpelstilzchen), "The Town Musicians of Bremen" (Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten), and "Snow White" (Schneewittchen).

Taken from Wikipedia.

Text sources:
Project Gutenberg
University of Pittsburgh

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