The Brothers Grimm by Ann Schmiesing

The Brothers Grimm: A Biography

By Ann Schmiesing

Yale University Press 2024

The nineteenth century was an age of dizzying creativity that saw the birth of a pantheon of literary characters destined to strut the cultural contours of humanity as long as it exists. Blossoming into their intellectual maturity at the onset of this century, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm acted as cultural stewards, bringing together strands of Germanic folklore and weaving them into some of the most enduring popular icons to ever grace our collective mythology. Characters like Snow White, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, and Cinderella, light up the eyes of children from all social settings everywhere in the world. Mostly remembered for collecting the fairy tales that proved to be such a perennial wellspring, the Grimms were also linguists, literary historians, librarians, mythographers, runologists, lexicographers, and civil servants, and in The Brothers Grimm: A Biography, Ann Schmiesing (professor at the University of Colorado Boulder) writes a new soup to nuts account of their lives, an edition long called for in the English language world.

Born, respectively, in 1785 and 1786, in Hanau, in the Landgraviate of Hesse-Kassel, within the Holy Roman Empire, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were the eldest surviving siblings in a family beset by instability and loss; the deaths of three siblings in infancy and then of their father Philip, followed close behind by the early deaths of their mother, and of their aunt, exacerbated the turmoil in the lives of the Grimms already waxing due to their status as academic and socio-economic underdogs in a world thrumming with political uncertainty. Although formally students of law, the brothers increasingly felt drawn to languages and to mining their literary traditions, as:

medieval literature offered a vision of a livelier and more unfettered German past populated by knights, traveling apprentices, minstrels, soldiers, and hunters ... it conveyed a sense of freedom that appealed to intellectuals who in the early nineteenth century had been subject to occupation, autocratic government, and censorship. The Grimms' attraction to medieval works was ... not an attempt to take refuge in an idealized past [but] a path towards a more liberated future [where] Germans [had] a self-sustaining sense of their heritage and identity.

Through thousands of pages of painstakingly researched scholarship, the Grimms became the foremost contributors to a post-Napoleonic German national awakening, a cause they championed through their collections of folk songs, fairy tales, legends, myths, customs, and legal texts; they would not survive to see their efforts co-opted under a more racialized approach to nationalism, peaking under the Nazis in the next century. Their collection, German Legends, had a "catalytic impact on the field of folklore studies", and they did pioneering scholarly work on their German Dictionary, a project that sprang from the love of words of true philologists, but ended up becoming a millstone around the necks of aging scholars. Jacob's lifelong study of Germanic languages yielded his German Grammar, "the significance [of which] to the humanities has been compared to that of Darwin's On the Origin of Species to the life sciences."

For most of their lives, the Grimms chafed under the yoke of administrative drudgery, and experienced everything from indifference to outward hostility from their rulers, for instance their banishment from the Göttingen University by the King of Hanover for their principled refusal to sign a personal oath of allegiance. While Wilhelm married and established a family, Jacob remained wedded to his scholarship for his entire life, and yet the brothers developed an extraordinarily strong bond and achieved true blissfulness only in those periods of their lives when they lived and worked together. They died within years of each other in their final home in Berlin, leaving the thousands of books in their personal library as that many orphaned children.

Schmiesing renders this life and it's complex historical moment in vivid detail, missing no stop on a long scholarly journey, the narrative of which gradually picks up momentum, and yet is still interspersed with endearing little details. Connections are made wherever the arc of research intersected with the Grimms' social landscape and personal history; the importance of legal archival work conducted by Jacob under Friedrich von Savigny is highlighted for placing the foundation for his future research with textual variants, and touching personal references the Grimms enshrined in their fairy tales are sleuthed out with consistency. The author does a good job unsettling pieties attached to the Grimms over the centuries, especially to Children's and Household Tales, their ticket to immortality; no, the fairy tales were not collected orally from poor, uneducated peasant women in regional backwaters, because most of the early informants were "literate, middle-class, young adult townspeople." She also highlights the brothers' gradually softening stance on translation and fidelity to source material, evident in the reworking and sanitization of the tales for later editions aimed at bringing them closer to the bourgeois values of the day in order to attract a larger audience. The Grimms' image as dowdy scholars is counteracted by their portrayal as being against any prescriptive stance on language or literature, and small symbols of their rusticity are scattered throughout the more scholarly dissections of their professional world; "their lifelong habit of bringing nature indoors ... [decorating] their desks with rocks from their walks…"

Insight is wrested even from the scholarly apparatus supporting the collection of fairy tales, and trenchant analysis of the stories themselves yield fruitful understanding of how the Grimms thought about this project of theirs:

[the placement of "The Golden Key" at the end of the collection] is powerful ... the tale's conclusion [symbolizes] the inexhaustible nature of fairy tales and folklore. The tale's position invites us to see the collection as merely a slice of a dazzling spectrum of folkloric creativity and expression. The book ends here, they seem to say, but fairy tales live on.

And so the Grimms survive the caprice of time in the pages of this masterful portrayal of lives twinned in the service of the word.

Siddharth Handa is a book critic currently living in New Delhi