German · b. 1785
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, the Brothers Grimm, were German scholars, philologists, and folklorists whose collection of fairy tales — including Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, and Snow White — became one of the most influential and beloved books in the world.
Jacob (born 1785) and Wilhelm (born 1786) Grimm were German academics, linguists, and cultural scholars who, in the early nineteenth century, set out to collect and preserve the oral folk tales of the German-speaking lands. Their Children’s and Household Tales, first published in 1812 and expanded over many editions, gathered some two hundred stories that have shaped storytelling and childhood ever since.
Beyond the fairy tales, the brothers were pioneering philologists — Jacob formulated “Grimm’s Law” of sound change in linguistics, and together they began the monumental German Dictionary. But it is their fairy tales — Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, and scores of darker, stranger lesser-known stories — for which they are universally remembered.
The Grimms’ collection remains a foundational treasury of Western folklore, endlessly adapted, studied, and retold, and a key to the roots of how we tell stories.
by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
The complete fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm. Gathered from German oral tradition in the early nineteenth century, these two hundred-odd tales — Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Snow White, and many darker, stranger lesser-known stories — are a foundational treasury of Western folklore.
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