Jacob Grimm

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Jacob Grimm : biography

4 January 1785 – 20 September 1863

During this period he is described as small and lively in figure, with a harsh voice, speaking a broad Hessian dialect. His powerful memory enabled him to dispense with the manuscript on which most German professors relied and he spoke extemporaneously, referring only occasionally to a few names and dates written on a slip of paper. He regretted that he had begun the work of teaching so late in life, but as a lecturer he was not successful: he had no aptitude for digesting facts and suiting them to the level of comprehension of his students.

In 1837, having been one of the seven professors who signed a protest against the King of Hanover’s abrogation of the constitution established some years before, he was dismissed from his professorship and banished from the Kingdom of Hanover. He returned to Kassel with his brother, who had also signed the protest. They remained there until 1840, when they accepted an invitation from the King of Prussia to move to Berlin, where they both received professorships and were elected members of the Academy of Sciences. Not being under any obligation to lecture, Jacob seldom did so but together with his brother worked on their great dictionary. During their time in Kassel, Jacob regularly attended the meetings of the academy, where he read papers on widely varied subjects. The best-known are those on Lachmann, Schiller, his brother Wilhelm, old age, and on the origin of language. He also described his impressions of Italian and Scandinavian travel, interspersing his more general observations with linguistic details, as is the case in all his works.

Grimm died in Berlin at the age of 78, working until the very end of his life.

He was never seriously ill, and habitually worked all day without pause but also without haste. He showed great patience for interruption, even seeming to be refreshed by it, and able to return to his work without effort. He wrote for the press with great rapidity, and rarely made corrections. He never revised what he had written, remarking with a certain wonder about his brother, Wilhelm, who read his own manuscripts over again before sending them to press. His temperament was uniformly cheerful and he was easily amused. Outside his own special work he had a marked taste for botany. The spirit that animated his work is best described by himself at the end of his autobiography:

"Nearly all my labors 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."

Notes

a. The Neue Deutsche Biographie records their names as "Grimm, Jakob Ludwig Carl", citing Neue Deutsche Biographie. and "Grimm, Wilhelm Carl"., citing Neue Deutsche Biographie, Deutsches biographisches Archiv and The National Union Catalog Pre-1956 Imprints. The Deutsches biographisches Archiv records Wilhelm’s name as "Grimm, Wilhelm Karl". The Allgemeine deutsche Biographie gives the names as "Grimm: Jakob (Ludwig Karl)" and "Grimm: Wilhelm (Karl)". The National Union Catalog Pre-1956 Imprints also gives Wilhelm’s name as "Grimm, Wilhelm Karl".

Works

The following is a complete list of his separately published works. Those he published with his brother are marked with a star (*). For a list of his essays in periodicals, etc., see vol. V of his Kleinere Schriften, from which the present list is taken. His life is best studied in his own Selbstbiographie, in vol. I of the Kleinere Schriften. There is also a brief memoir by Karl Goedeke in Göttinger Professoren (Gotha (Perthes), 1872).