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.