​GRIMM, JACOB LUDWIG CARL (1785–1863), Germanphilologist and mythologist, was born on the 4th of January1785 at Hanau, in Hesse-Cassel. His father, who was a lawyer,died while he was a child, and the mother was left with verysmall means; but her sister, who was lady of the chamber tothe landgravine of Hesse, helped to support and educate hernumerous family. Jacob, with his younger brother Wilhelm(born on the 24th of February 1786), was sent in 1798 to thepublic school at Cassel. In 1802 he proceeded to the universityof Marburg, where he studied law, a profession for which he hadbeen destined by his father. His brother joined him at Marburga year later, having just recovered from a long and severe illness,and likewise began the study of law. Up to this time JacobGrimm had been actuated only by a general thirst for knowledgeand his energies had not found any aim beyond the practical oneof making himself a position in life. The first definite impulsecame from the lectures of Savigny, the celebrated investigatorof Roman law, who, as Grimm himself says (in the preface totheDeutsche Grammatik), first taught him to realize what itmeant to study any science. Savigny’s lectures also awakenedin him that love for historical and antiquarian investigationwhich forms the basis of all his work. Then followed personalacquaintance, and it was in Savigny’s well-provided library thatGrimm first turned over the leaves of Bodmer’s edition of theOld German minnesingers and other early texts, and felt an eagerdesire to penetrate further into the obscurities and half-revealedmysteries of their language. In the beginning of 1805 he receivedan invitation from Savigny, who had removed to Paris,to help him in his literary work. Grimm passed a very happytime in Paris, strengthening his taste for the literatures of themiddle ages by his studies in the Paris libraries. Towards theclose of the year he returned to Cassel, where his mother andWilhelm had settled, the latter having finished his studies.The next year he obtained a situation in the war office withthe very small salary of 100 thalers. One of his grievances wasthat he had to exchange his stylish Paris suit for a stiff uniformand pigtail. But he had full leisure for the prosecution of hisstudies. In 1808, soon after the death of his mother, he wasappointed superintendent of the private library of JeromeBuonaparte, king of Westphalia, into which Hesse-Cassel hadbeen incorporated by Napoleon. Jerome appointed him anauditor to the state council, while he retained his other post.His salary was increased in a short interval from 2000 to 4000francs, and his official duties were hardly more than nominal.After the expulsion of Jerome and the reinstalment of an elector,Grimm was appointed in 1813 secretary of legation, to accompanythe Hessian minister to the headquarters of the allied army.In 1814 he was sent to Paris to demand restitution of the bookscarried off by the French, and in 1814–1815 he attended thecongress of Vienna as secretary of legation. On his return hewas again sent to Paris on the same errand as before. MeanwhileWilhelm had received an appointment in the Cassel library, andin 1816 Jacob was made second librarian under Völkel. On thedeath of Völkel in 1828 the brothers expected to be advancedto the first and second librarianships respectively, and weremuch dissatisfied when the first place was given to Rommel,keeper of the archives. So they removed next year to Göttingen,where Jacob received the appointment of professor and librarian,Wilhelm that of under-librarian. Jacob Grimm lectured onlegal antiquities, historical grammar, literary history, anddiplomatics, explained Old German poems, and commented ontheGermania of Tacitus. At this period he is described as smalland lively in figure, with a harsh voice, speaking a broad Hessiandialect. His powerful memory enabled him to dispense with themanuscript which most German professors rely on, and he spokeextempore, referring only occasionally to a few names and dateswritten on a slip of paper. He himself regretted that he had begunthe work of teaching so late in life; and as a lecturer he was notsuccessful: he had no idea of digesting his facts and suitingthem to the comprehension of his hearers; and even the brilliant,terse and eloquent passages which abound in his writings lost muchof their effect when jerked out in the midst of a long array of dryfacts. In 1837, being one of the seven professors who signed aprotest against the king of Hanover’s abrogation of the constitutionestablished some years before, he was dismissed from hisprofessorship, and banished from the kingdom of Hanover.He returned to Cassel together with his brother, who had alsosigned the protest, and remained there till, in 1840, they acceptedan invitation from the king of Prussia to remove to Berlin,where they both received professorships, and were electedmembers of the Academy of Sciences. Not being under anyobligation to lecture, Jacob seldom did so, but together with hisbrother worked at the great dictionary. During their stay atCassel Jacob regularly attended the meetings of the academy,where he read papers on the most varied subjects. The bestknown of these are those on Lachmann, Schiller, and his brotherWilhelm (who died in 1859), on old age, and on the origin oflanguage. He also described his impressions of Italian andScandinavian travel, interspersing his more general observationswith linguistic details, as is the case in all his works.

Grimm died in 1863, working up to the last. He was never ill,and worked on all day, without haste and without pause. He wasnot at all impatient of interruption, but seemed rather to berefreshed by it, returning to his work without effort. He wrotefor the press with great rapidity, and hardly ever made corrections.He never revised what he had written, remarking witha certain wonder of his brother, “Wilhelm reads his manuscriptsover again before sending them to press!” His temperamentwas uniformly cheerful, and he was easily amused. Outside hisown special work he had a marked taste for botany. Thespirit which animated his work is best described by himself at theend of his autobiography. “Nearly all my labours have beendevoted, either directly or indirectly, to the investigation of ourearlier language, poetry and laws. These studies may haveappeared to many, and may still appear, useless; to me theyhave always seemed a noble and earnest task, definitely andinseparably connected with our common fatherland, and calculatedto foster the love of it. My principle has always been inthese investigations to under-value nothing, but to utilize thesmall for the illustration of the great, the popular tradition forthe elucidation of the written monuments.”

The purely scientific side of Grimm’s character developedslowly. He seems to have felt the want of definite principles ofetymology without being able to discover them, and indeed evenin the first edition of his grammar (1819) he seems to be oftengroping in the dark. As early as 1815 we find A. W. Schlegelreviewing theAltdeutsche Wälder (a periodical published by thetwo brothers) very severely, condemning the lawless etymologicalcombinations it contained, and insisting on the necessity of strictphilological method and a fundamental investigation of the lawsof language, especially in the correspondence of sounds. Thiscriticism is said to have had a considerable influence on the directionof Grimm’s studies.

The first work he published,Über den altdeutschen Meistergesang(1811), was of a purely literary character. Yet even inthis essay Grimm showed thatMinnesang andMeistersangwere really one form of poetry, of which they merely representeddifferent stages of development, and also announced his importantdiscovery of the invariable division of theLied into three strophicparts.

His text-editions were mostly prepared in common withhis brother. In 1812 they published the two ancient fragmentsof theHildebrandslied and theWeissenbrunner Gebet, Jacobhaving discovered what till then had never been suspected—thealliteration in these poems. However, Jacob had little taste fortext-editing, and, as he himself confessed, the evolving of a​critical text gave him little pleasure. He therefore left thisdepartment to others, especially Lachmann, who soon turnedhis brilliant critical genius, trained in the severe school of classicalphilology, to Old and Middle High German poetry and metre.Both brothers were attracted from the beginning by all nationalpoetry, whether in the form of epics, ballads or popular tales.They published in 1816–1818 an analysis and critical sifting ofthe oldest epic traditions of the Germanic races under the title ofDeutsche Sagen. At the same time they collected all the populartales they could find, partly from the mouths of the people,partly from manuscripts and books, and published in 1812–1815the first edition of thoseKinder- und Hausmärchen which havecarried the name of the brothers Grimm into every householdof the civilized world, and founded the science of folk-lore. Theclosely allied subject of the satirical beast epic of the middle agesalso had a great charm for Jacob Grimm, and he published anedition of theReinhart Fuchs in 1834. His first contribution tomythology was the first volume of an edition of the Eddaic songs,undertaken conjointly with his brother, published in 1815, which,however, was not followed by any more. The first edition of hisDeutsche Mythologie appeared in 1835. This great work coversthe whole range of the subject, tracing the mythology andsuperstitions of the old Teutons back to the very dawn of directevidence, and following their decay and loss down to the populartraditions, tales and expressions in which they still linger.

Although by the introduction of the Code Napoléon intoWestphalia Grimm’s legal studies were made practically barren,he never lost his interest in the scientific study of law andnational institutions, as the truest exponents of the life andcharacter of a people. By the publication (in 1828) of hisRechtsalterthümer he laid the foundations of that historical studyof the old Teutonic laws and constitutions which was continuedwith brilliant success by Georg L. Maurer and others. In thiswork Grimm showed the importance of a linguistic study of theold laws, and the light that can be thrown on many a darkpassage in them by a comparison of the corresponding words andexpressions in the other old cognate dialects. He also knewhow—and this is perhaps the most original and valuable part ofhis work—to trace the spirit of the laws in countless allusionsand sayings which occur in the old poems and sagas, or evensurvive in modern colloquialisms.

Of all his more general works the boldest and most far-reachingis hisGeschichte der deutschen Sprache, where at the same timethe linguistic element is most distinctly brought forward. Thesubject of the work is, indeed, nothing less than the history whichlies hidden in the words of the German language—the oldestnational history of the Teutonic tribes determined by means oflanguage. For this purpose he laboriously collects the scatteredwords and allusions to be found in classical writers, and endeavoursto determine the relations in which the German language stoodto those of the Getae, Thracians, Scythians, and many othernations whose languages are known only by doubtfully identified,often extremely corrupted remains preserved by Greek andLatin authors. Grimm’s results have been greatly modifiedby the wider range of comparison and improved methods ofinvestigation which now characterize linguistic science, andmany of the questions raised by him will probably for everremain obscure; but his book will always be one of the mostfruitful and suggestive that have ever been written.

Grimm’s famousDeutsche Grammatik was the outcome of hispurely philological work. The labours of past generations—fromthe humanists onwards—had collected an enormousmass of materials in the shape of text-editions, dictionariesand grammars, although most of it was uncritical and oftenuntrustworthy. Something had even been done in the wayof comparison and the determination of general laws, and theconception of a comparative Teutonic grammar had been clearlygrasped by the illustrious Englishman George Hickes, at thebeginning of the 18th century, and partly carried out by himin hisThesaurus. Ten Kate in Holland had afterwards madevaluable contributions to the history and comparison of theTeutonic languages. Even Grimm himself did not at first intendto include all the languages in his grammar; but he soon foundthat Old High German postulated Gothic, that the later stagesof German could not be understood without the help of the LowGerman dialects, including English, and that the rich literatureof Scandinavia could as little be ignored. The first edition of thefirst part of theGrammar, which appeared in 1819, and is nowextremely rare, treated of the inflections of all these languages,together with a general introduction, in which he vindicated theimportance of an historical study of the German language againstthe a priori, quasi-philosophical methods then in vogue.

In 1822 this volume appeared in a second edition—really anew work, for, as Grimm himself says in the preface, it cost himlittle reflection to mow down the first crop to the ground. Thewide distance between the two stages of Grimm’s developmentin these two editions is significantly shown by the fact that whilethe first edition gives only the inflections, in the second volumephonology takes up no fewer than 600 pages, more than half of thewhole volume. Grimm had, at last, awakened to the fullconviction that all sound philology must be based on rigorousadhesion to the laws of sound-change, and he never afterwardsswerved from this principle, which gave to all his investigations,even in their boldest flights, that iron-bound consistency, andthat force of conviction which distinguish science from dilettanteism;up to Grimm’s time philology was nothing but a more orless laborious and conscientious dilettanteism, with occasionalflashes of scientific inspiration; he made it into a science. Hisadvance must be attributed mainly to the influence of hiscontemporary R. Rask. Rask was born two years later thanGrimm, but his remarkable precocity gave him somewhat thestart. Even in Grimm’s first editions his Icelandic paradigms arebased entirely on Rask’s grammar, and in his second edition herelied almost entirely on Rask for Old English. His debt toRask can only be estimated at its true value by comparing histreatment of Old English in the two editions; the differenceis very great. Thus in the first edition he declinesdæg,dæges,pluraldægas, not having observed the law of vowel-changepointed out by Rask. There can be little doubt that the appearanceof Rask’s Old English grammar was a main inducementfor him to recast his work from the beginning. To Rask alsobelongs the merit of having first distinctly formulated the lawsof sound-correspondence in the different languages, especiallyin the vowels, those more fleeting elements of speech which hadhitherto been ignored by etymologists.

This leads to a question which has been the subject of muchcontroversy,—Who discovered what is known asGrimm’s law?This law of the correspondence of consonants in the older Indo-germanic,Low and High German languages respectively wasfirst fully stated by Grimm in the second edition of the firstpart of his grammar. The correspondence of single consonantshad been more or less clearly recognized by several of his predecessors;but the one who came nearest to the discovery of thecomplete law was the Swede J. Ihre, who established a considerablenumber of “literarum permutationes,” such asb forf,with the examplesbæra = ferre,befwer = fiber. Rask, in his essayon the origin of the Icelandic language, gives the same comparisons,with a few additions and corrections, and even the verysame examples in most cases. As Grimm in the preface to hisfirst edition expressly mentions this essay of Rask, there is everyprobability that it gave the first impulse to his own investigations.But there is a wide difference between the isolated permutationsof his predecessors and the comprehensive generalizations underwhich he himself ranged them. The extension of the law toHigh German is also entirely his own. The only fact thatcan be adduced in support of the assertion that Grimm wishedto deprive Rask of his claims to priority is that he does notexpressly mention Rask’s results in his second edition. Butthis is part of the plan of his work, viz. to refrain from allcontroversy or reference to the works of others. In his firstedition he expressly calls attention to Rask’s essay, and praisesit most ungrudgingly. Rask himself refers as little to Ihre,merely alluding in a general way to Ihre’s permutations, althoughhis own debt to Ihre is infinitely greater than that of Grimm to​Rask or any one else. It is true that a certain bitterness offeeling afterwards sprang up between Grimm and Rask, but thiswas the fault of the latter, who, impatient of contradiction andirritable in controversy, refused to acknowledge the value ofGrimm’s views when they involved modification of his own.The importance of Grimm’s generalization in the history ofphilology cannot be overestimated, and even the mystic completenessand symmetry of its formulation, although it has proveda hindrance to the correct explanation of the causes of thechanges, was well calculated to strike the popular mind, andgive it a vivid idea of the paramount importance of law, and thenecessity of disregarding mere superficial resemblance. Themost lawless etymologist bows down to the authority of Grimm’slaw, even if he honours it almost as much in the breach as in theobservance.

The grammar was continued in three volumes, treatingprincipally of derivation, composition and syntax, which lastwas left unfinished. Grimm then began a third edition, of whichonly one part, comprising the vowels, appeared in 1840, histime being afterwards taken up mainly by the dictionary. Thegrammar stands alone in the annals of science for comprehensiveness,method and fullness of detail. Every law, every letter,every syllable of inflection in the different languages is illustratedby an almost exhaustive mass of material. It has served as amodel for all succeeding investigators. Diez’s grammar of theRomance languages is founded entirely on its methods, whichhave also exerted a profound influence on the wider study of theIndo-Germanic languages in general.

In the great German dictionary Grimm undertook a task forwhich he was hardly suited. His exclusively historical tendenciesmade it impossible for him to do justice to the individuality of aliving language; and the disconnected statement of the factsof language in an ordinary alphabetical dictionary fatallymars its scientific character. It was also undertaken on so largea scale as to make it impossible for him and his brother to completeit themselves. The dictionary, as far as it was worked outby Grimm himself, may be described as a collection of disconnectedantiquarian essays of high value.

Grimm’s scientific character is notable for its combinationof breadth and unity. He was as far removed from the narrownessof the specialist who has no ideas, no sympathies beyondsome one author, period or corner of science, as from the shallowdabbler who feverishly attempts to master the details of half-a-dozendiscordant pursuits. Even within his own special studiesthere is the same wise concentration; no Mezzofanti-like parrotdisplay of useless polyglottism. The very foundations of hisnature were harmonious; his patriotism and love of historicalinvestigation received their fullest satisfaction in the study of thelanguage, traditions, mythology, laws and literature of his owncountrymen and their nearest kindred. But from this centrehis investigations were pursued in every direction as far as hisunerring instinct of healthy limitation would allow. He wasequally fortunate in the harmony that subsisted between hisintellectual and moral nature. He made cheerfully the heavysacrifices that science demands from its disciples, without feelingany of that envy and bitterness which often torment weakernatures; and although he lived apart from his fellow men, hewas full of human sympathies, and no man has ever exerciseda profounder influence on the destinies of mankind. His wasthe very ideal of the noblest type of German character.