Jacob Grimm

Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) was a German philologist, jurist and folklorist who, with his brother Wilhelm, compiled the Kinder- und Hausmärchen, the collection known in English as Grimms' Fairy Tales. He was born in Hanau on 4 January 1785 and died in Berlin on 20 September 1863.

The brothers' first volume of tales appeared in 1812 with 86 numbered stories; a second volume, dated 1815, added 70 more. The collection went through seven editions in their lifetimes, the last in 1857. Jacob also founded the scholarly study of the Germanic languages: his Deutsche Grammatik first appeared in 1819, and its 1822 second edition gave the first full statement of the sound shifts now called Grimm's law. Other works include Deutsche Rechtsaltertümer (1828), Deutsche Mythologie (1835) and Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (1848). After library posts in Kassel he became professor and librarian at Göttingen in 1829, but in 1837 he was dismissed and banished from the Kingdom of Hanover as one of the Göttingen Seven, who protested the king's abrogation of the constitution. In 1840 the brothers accepted an invitation to Berlin, where they worked on the Deutsches Wörterbuch, a dictionary that later scholars completed only in the 20th century.

For collectors: the two-volume first edition of the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812 and 1815) is the foundation text, holding 156 tales across its two volumes, against the much expanded seventh edition of 1857.