Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm (4 January 1785 – 20 September 1863), also known as Ludwig Karl, was a German author, linguist, philologist, jurist, and folklorist. He formulated Grimm's law of linguistics, and was the co-author of the Deutsches Wörterbuch, the author of Deutsche Mythologie, and the editor of Grimms' Fairy Tales. He was the older brother of Wilhelm Grimm; together, they were the literary duo known as the Brothers Grimm.
Jacob Grimm was born 4 January 1785, in Hanau in Hesse-Kassel. His father, Philipp Grimm, was a lawyer who died while Jacob was a child, and his mother Dorothea was left with a very small income. Her sister was the lady of the chamber to the Landgravine of Hesse, and she helped to support and educate the family. Jacob was sent to the public school at Kassel in 1798 with his younger brother Wilhelm.
In 1802, he went to the University of Marburg, where he studied law, a profession for which he had been intended by his father. His brother joined him at Marburg a year later, having just recovered from a severe illness, and likewise began the study of law.
He then later with his brother, Wilhelm Grimm, wrote Grimms' Fairy Tales.
Jacob Grimm became inspired by the lectures of Friedrich Carl von Savigny, a noted expert of Roman law; Wilhelm Grimm, in the preface to the Deutsche Grammatik (German Grammar), credits Savigny with giving the brothers an awareness of science. Savigny's lectures also awakened in Jacob a love for historical and antiquarian investigation, which underlies all his work. It was in Savigny's library that Grimm first saw Bodmer's edition of the Middle High German minnesingers and other early texts, which gave him a desire to study their language.
At the beginning of 1805, he was invited by Savigny to Paris, to help him in his literary work. There Grimm strengthened his taste for the literature of the Middle Ages. Towards the close of the year, he returned to Kassel, where his mother and brother had settled after Wilhelm finished his studies. The following year, Jacob obtained a position in the war office with a small salary of 100 thalers. He complained that he had to exchange his stylish Paris suit for a stiff uniform and pigtail, but the role gave him spare time for the pursuit of his studies.
In 1808, soon after the death of his mother, he was appointed superintendent of the private library of Jérôme Bonaparte, King of Westphalia, into which Hesse-Kassel had been incorporated by Napoleon. Grimm was appointed an auditor to the state council, while retaining his superintendent post. His salary rose to 4000 francs and his official duties were nominal. In 1813, after the expulsion of Bonaparte and the reinstatement of an elector, Grimm was appointed Secretary of Legation accompanying the Hessian minister to the headquarters of the allied army. In 1814, he was sent to Paris to demand restitution of books taken by the French, and he attended the Congress of Vienna as Secretary of Legation in 1814–1815. Upon his return from Vienna, he was sent to Paris again to secure book restitutions. Meanwhile, Wilhelm had obtained a job at the Kassel library, and Jacob was made second librarian under Volkel in 1816. Upon the death of Volkel in 1828, the brothers both expected promotion, and they were dissatisfied when the role of the first librarian was given to Rommel, the keeper of the archives. Consequently, they moved the following year to the University of Göttingen, where Jacob was appointed professor and librarian, and Wilhelm under-librarian. Jacob Grimm lectured on legal antiquities, historical grammar, literary history, and diplomatics, explained Old German poems, and commented on the Germania of Tacitus.
Grimm joined other academics, known as the Göttingen Seven, who signed a protest against the King of Hanover's abrogation of the liberal constitution which had been established some years before. As a result, he was dismissed from his professorship and banished from the Kingdom of Hanover in 1837. He returned to Kassel with his brother, who had also signed the protest. They remained there until 1840 when they accepted King Frederick William IV's invitation to move to the University of Berlin, where they both received professorships and were elected members of the Academy of Sciences. Grimm was not under any obligation to lecture, and seldom did so; he spent his time working with his brother on their dictionary project. During their time in Kassel, he regularly attended the meetings of the academy and read papers on varied subjects, including Karl Konrad Friedrich Wilhelm Lachmann, Friedrich Schiller, old age, and the origin of language. He described his impressions of Italian and Scandinavian travel, interspersing more general observations with linguistic details. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1857.
Grimm died in Berlin at the age of 78, working until the very end of his life. He describes his own work at the end of his autobiography:
Nearly all my labours have been devoted, either directly or indirectly, to the investigation of our earlier language, poetry and laws. These studies may have appeared to many, and may still appear, useless; to me they have always seemed a noble and earnest task, definitely and inseparably connected with our common fatherland, and calculated to foster the love of it. My principle has always been in these investigations to under-value nothing, but to utilize the small for the illustration of the great, the popular tradition for the elucidation of the written monuments.
History of the German Language
Grimm's Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (History of the German Language) explores German history hidden in the words of the German language and is the oldest linguistic history of the Teutonic tribes. He collected scattered words and allusions from classical literature and tried to determine the relationship between the German language and those of the Getae, Thracians, Scythians, and other nations whose languages were known only through Greek and Latin authors. Grimm's results were later greatly modified by a wider range of available comparisons and improved methods of investigation. Many questions that he raised remain obscure due to the lack of surviving records of the languages, but his book's influence was profound.
Grimm's famous Deutsche Grammatik (German Grammar) was the outcome of his purely philological work. He drew on the work of past generations, from the humanists onwards, consulting an enormous collection of materials in the form of text editions, dictionaries, and grammars, mostly uncritical and unreliable. Some work had been done in the way of comparison and determination of general laws, and the concept of a comparative Germanic grammar had been grasped by the Englishman George Hickes by the beginning of the 18th century, in his Thesaurus. Ten Kate in the Netherlands had made valuable contributions to the history and comparison of Germanic languages. Grimm himself did not initially intend to include all the languages in his Grammar, but he soon found that Old High German postulated Gothic, and that the later stages of German could not be understood without the help of other West Germanic varieties including English, and that the literature of Scandinavia could not be ignored. The first edition of the first part of the Grammar, which appeared in 1819, treated the inflections of all these languages, and included a general introduction in which he vindicated the importance of a historical study of the German language against the quasi-philosophical methods then in vogue.
In 1822 the book appeared in a second edition (really a new work, for, as Grimm himself says in the preface, he had to "mow the first crop down to the ground"). The considerable gap between the two stages of Grimm's development of these editions is shown by the fact that the second volume addresses phonology in 600 pages – more than half the volume. Grimm had concluded that all philology must be based on rigorous adherence to the laws of sound change, and he subsequently never deviated from this principle. This gave to all his investigations a consistency and force of conviction that had been lacking in the study of philology before his day.