User:Katiehamilton10/sandbox/The Brothers Grimm

= The Brothers Grimm =

The Brothers Grimm to this day is a common household name, they are responsible for writing down the folktales that were passed down from generation to generation by word of mouth. Some of the Brothers Grimm’s stories are more commonly recognized as Disney movies or fairy tales. Movies such as Cinderella, Snow White, and Sleeping Beauty, were cinematically modified to reach younger children and share morals learned from the stories. Each story written down by the Grimm brothers was a way for the brothers to organize German culture in a way that could be studied effectively. The Grimm brothers left behind a legacy in folklore, and legends.

Early Life
Jacob Karl Grimm was born on January 4, 1785, in Hanau, Germany. His brother, Wilhelm Karl Grimm, was born on February 24, 1786. They were born to Philipp Wilhelm Grimm a jurist and Dorothea née Zimmer. In 1795, Their father Philipp Grimm died of pneumonia and the family's income and social status declined rapidly. Jacob and Wilhelm could no longer live with their siblings and their mother, they were sent to Kassel for higher education. While in school they studied law and their law professor sparked their interest in history and in German folklore. After law school the brothers had many jobs Jacob had done research on legal manuscripts of the Middle Ages, became secretary to the war office in Kassel, Jacob became private librarian to King Jérôme of Westphalia, auditor of the Conseil d’État, and he also took part in the Congress of Vienna. Wilhelm had no regular employment up until 1814, where Wilhelm had become a secretary at the Elector’s library in Kassel, and Jacob joined him there in 1816 and remained there together until 1830.

Period Influences


The period in which the folk tales and the stories that were written down by Grimm brothers was during the 1800s, or the 18th century. This was a time period more commonly known as the Romanticism era. Romanticism was an attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography. Romanticism was depicted by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as the adoration of all the past and nature, which seemed to be medieval rather than the classical. Many of the stories first written down by the Grimm brothers were not written by them, many of them were told orally and some of them were from printed sources. The Grimm brothers first volume of Grimms’ Fairy Tales were violent and were not suitable for children, However, the brothers refused to edit the stories because it showed the culture behind each story. Many of the sources the brothers had used to get their stories from were peasants, in the romantic era peasants were seen as close to nature and close to god, which made them a good source for stories.

Later years


In 1830, the brothers got a job as librarians at the University of Göttingen, Jacob was named professor and head librarian, Wilhelm was appointed assistant librarian. In 1835, both of the brothers were dismissed from the University of Göttingen for political reasons (They had signed a protest against the king). The Grimm brothers moved back to Kassel and later became professors. The brothers spent their last years were spent in preparing a complete dictionary of the German language, tracing the origin of every word. In 1840 the brothers were invited to Berlin by the king of Prussia, where they started the German dictionary and worked on it until they died. On December 16th, 1859 Wilhelm Grimm died in Berlin, completing only up to the letter D in the German dictionary. On September 20th, 1863 Jacob Grimm died in Berlin, only completing up to the letter F in the German dictionary. Other German philologists agreeing with the principles established by the Grimm brothers, continued the work on the dictionary after the death of the brothers and completed it in 1960.