Brothers Grimm
Overview
The Brothers Grimm Jacob Grimm
Jacob Grimm
Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm was a German philologist, jurist and mythologist. He is best known as the discoverer of Grimm's Law, the author of the monumental Deutsches Wörterbuch, the author of Deutsche Mythologie and, more popularly, as one of the Brothers Grimm, as the editor of Grimm's Fairy...

 (January 4, 1785 – September 20, 1863) and Wilhelm Grimm
Wilhelm Grimm
Wilhelm Carl Grimm was a German author, the younger of the Brothers Grimm.-Life and work:...

 (February 24, 1786 – December 16, 1859), were German academics, linguists, cultural researchers, and authors who collected folklore
Folklore
Folklore consists of legends, music, oral history, proverbs, jokes, popular beliefs, fairy tales and customs that are the traditions of a culture, subculture, or group. It is also the set of practices through which those expressive genres are shared. The study of folklore is sometimes called...

 and published several collections of it as Grimm's Fairy Tales
Grimm's Fairy Tales
Children's and Household Tales is a collection of German origin fairy tales first published in 1812 by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the Brothers Grimm. The collection is commonly known today as Grimms' Fairy Tales .-Composition:...

, which became very popular. Jacob also did academic work in philology
Philology
Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...

, related to how the sounds in words shift over time (Grimm's law
Grimm's law
Grimm's law , named for Jacob Grimm, is a set of statements describing the inherited Proto-Indo-European stops as they developed in Proto-Germanic in the 1st millennium BC...

); he was also a lawyer whose legal work, German Legal Antiquities in 1828, made him a valuable source of testimony about the origin and meaning of much legal historical idiom usage and symbolism.
Quotations

Und als sie ganz nahe herankamen, so sahen sie, daß das Häuslein aus Brot gebaut war und mit Kuchen gedeckt; aber die Fenster waren von hellem Zucker.

Translation: When they came closer, they saw that the house was made of bread, and the roof was made of cake and the windows of sparkling sugar.

Zur Zeit, wo das Wünschen noch geholfen hat, ward ein Königssohn von einer alten Hexe verwünscht, dass er im Walde in einem großen Eisenofen sitzen sollte.

Translation: In the days when wishing still helped, an old witch with her magic imprisoned a prince in a cast-iron stove deep in the forest.

 
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