標準歴史・文化

The Brothers Grimm

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Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were born in the 1780s in the town of Hanau, in what is now Germany. Their father worked as a and a local , and the family lived comfortably at first. However, when Jacob was only eleven, their father died suddenly, leaving the family with very little money. Fortunately, their mother's sister worked at the of a local ruler. She paid for the boys to a good school in the city of Kassel, where they studied hard and finished at the top of their class. Later, the brothers studied law at the of Marburg. There, one of their professors, who owned a large of old books and poems, allowed them to use his library, an that made them deeply interested in the of German and . At that time, many tales were passed down only by of mouth, and the brothers worried that they would soon . They began visiting people who knew these stories and writing down what they heard. In 1812, they published the first of Children's and Tales. The two brothers had different strengths. Wilhelm, who had a gentle personality, continued to the tales in later editions. He made the smoother and removed some that parents might find unsuitable, so that the stories could be read to children. Jacob, on the other , focused on the study of itself. He discovered patterns in the way sounds in words had changed over time. In 1838, the brothers also began working on a dictionary of the German , but it was not completed until more than 100 years later. Today, stories such as Snow White and Hansel and Gretel are known by children all over the world. Many people know them through movies and picture books without realizing where they came from. Experts say that the brothers' greatest was not inventing stories but saving them. By carefully recording tales that people told, they kept an important part of European from being lost. Their work also showed that the stories of farmers and servants were just as to study as the writings of authors.