JACOB LUDWIG CARL GRIMM, (1785-1863), was born on the 4th of January 1785 at Hanau, in Hesse-Cassel. His father, who was a lawyer, died while he was still a child, and the mother was left with very small means ; but her sister, who was lady of the chamber to the landgravine of Hesse, helped to support and educate her numerous family. Jacob with his younger brother Wilhelm (born on the 24th of February 1786) was sent in 1798 to the public school at Cassel. In 1802 he proceeded to the university of Marburg, where he applied himself to the study of law, a profession for which he had always been destined by his father, and which seemed to offer the best prospect of speedy independence. His brother joined him at Marburg a year later, having just recovered from a long and severe illness, and likewise began the study of law. Up to this time Grimm had been actuated only by a general thirst for knowledge and the instinct of intellectual activity, and his energies had not found any aim beyond the practical one of making himself a position in life. The first definite impulse came from the lectures of Savigny, the celebrated investi-gator of Roman law, who, as Grimm himself says (in the preface to the Deutsche Grammatik), first taught him to realize what it meant to study any science, whether that of law or any other. Savigny's lectures at the same time awakened in him that love for historical and antiquarian investigation which forms the basis of all his work. Then followed personal acquaintance, and it was in Savigny's well-provided library that Grimm first turned over the leaves of Bodmer's edition of the Old German minnesingers and other early texts, and felt an eager desire to penetrate further into the obscurities and half-revealed mysteries of their language. In the beginning of 1805 he received an invitation from Savigny, who had removed to Paris to continue his researches among the libraries there, to join him and help him in his literary work. This offer was joyfully accepted by young Grimm, who passed a very happy time in Paris, enjoying the society of Savigny, and strengthening his taste for the literatures of the Middle Ages by his studies in the Paris libraries. Towards the close of the year he returned to Cassel, where his mother and Wilhelm had settled, the latter having finished his studies. The next year he obtained a situation in the war office with the very small salary of 100 thalers. One of his grievances was, as he himself tells us in his autobiography, that he had to exchange his stylish Paris suit for a stiff uniform and pigtail. But he had full leisure for the prosecution of his studies. In 1808, soon after the death of his mother, he was appointed superin-tendent of the private library of Jerome Buonaparte, king of Westphalia, into which Hesse-Cassel had been incorpor-ated by Napoleon. He was treated with marked favour by the king, who appointed him an auditor to the state council, while he still retained his other post. His salary was increased in a short interval from 2000 to 4000 francs, which removed all anxiety as to the means of subsistence, 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 accompany the Hessian minister to the headquarters of the allied army. In 1814 he was sent to Paris to demand restitution of the books carried off by the French, and in 1814-15 he attended the congress of Vienna as secretary of legation. On his return he was again sent to Paris on the same errand as before. Meanwhile Wilhelm had received an appointment in the Cassel library, and in 1816 Jacob was made second librarian under Vblkel. On the death of Volkel in 1828 the brothers expected to be ad-vanced to the first and second librarianships respectively, and were much dissatisfied when the first place was given to Rommel, keeper of the archives. So they removed next year to Gottingen, where Jacob received the appointment of professor and librarian, Wilhelm that of under-librarian. Jacob Grimm lectured on legal antiquities, historical grammar, literary history, and diplomatics, explained Old German poems, and commented on the Germania of Tacitus. At this period he is described as small and lively in figure, with a harsh voice, speaking a broad Hessian dialect. His powerful memory enabled him to dispense with the " heft" which most German professors rely on, and he spoke extempore, referring only occasionally to a few names and dates written on a slip of paper. He himself regretted that he had begun the work of teaching so late in life, and as a lecturer he was not successful; he had no idea of digesting his facts and suiting them to the comprehension of his hearers ; and even the brilliant, terse, and eloquent passages which abound in his writings lost much of their effect when jerked out in the midst of a long array of dry facts. In 1837, being one of the seven professors who signed a protest against the king of Hanover's abrogation of the constitution which had been established some years before, he was dismissed from his professorship, and banished from the kingdom of Hanover. He returned to his native Cassel together with his brother, wdio had also signed the protest, and remained there till, in 1840, they accepted an invitation from the king of Prussia to remove to Berlin, where they both received professorships, and were elected members of the Academy of Sciences. Not being under any obligation to lecture, Jacob very seldom did so, but together with his brother worked at the great dictionary, the plan of which had already been partly developed. During their stay at Cassel Jacob regularly attended the meetings of the academy, where he read papers on the most varied subjects. The best known of these are those on Lachmann, Schiller, and his brother Wilhelm (who died in 1859), on old age, and on the origin of language. He also described his im-pressions of Italian and Scandinavian travel, interspersing his more general observations with linguistic details, as is the case in all his works. He died in 1863, working up to the last.

Grimm's physical constitution was an excellent one. He possessed in the highest degee that Teutonic energy and endurance which are as essential to the sedentary student as to the pioneer in other regions of human activity. He was never ill, and worked on all day, without haste and without pause. He himself (in his biography) speaks of his " iron industry." He was not at all impatient of interruption, but seemed rather to be refreshed by it, returning to his work without effort. He wrote for press with great rapidity, and hardly ever made corrections. He never revised what he had written, remarking with a certain wonder of his brother, " Wilhelm reads his manuscripts over again before sending them to press !" He often started on a journey which he had determined upon only the day before. His tempera-ment was uniformly cheerful, and he was easily amused. He took a keen interest in politics, and when the newspapers arrived, he would often read them through at once, break-ing off his work for the purpose. Outside his own special work he had a marked taste for botany, and always liked to have flowers about him while working, a taste which was shared by his brother. The spirit which animated his work is best described by himself at the end of his autobiography. " Nearly all my labours have been devoted, either directly or indirectly, to the investigation of our earlier language, poetry, and laws. These studies may have appeared to many, and may still appear, useless; to me they have always seemed a noble and earnest task, definitely and inseparably connected with our common fatherland, and calculated to foster the love of it. My principle has always been in these investigations to under-value nothing, but to utilize the small for the illustration of the great, the popular tradition for the elucidation of the written monuments." We may, in fact, sum up Grimm's tendencies by saying that he was inspired by an intense enthusiasm for research, guided into definite channels by a not less enthusiastic love and veneration for everything German,—this word including, in its widest sense, all the great brotherhood of the Teutonic nations,—and limited by his decided predilection for history and antiquities. It will be observed that, whenever he refers to living dialects or traditions, it is in order to throw light on the past, not the reverse. Even in his great German dictionary the historical tendency strongly predominates.

The purely scientific side of Grimm's character developed itself but slowly, and it was long before he applied to the study of etymology and inflexions the system and method Savigny had taught him to develop in legal history. He seems to have felt the want of definite principles of etymology without being able to discover them, and indeed even in the first edition of his grammar (1819) he seems to be often groping in the dark, and to have but a vague idea of the necessity of rigorous principles of letter-comparison. As early as 1815 we find A W. Schlegel reviewing the Altdeutsche Wälder (a periodical published by the two brothers) very severely, condemning the lawless etymological combinations it contained, and insisting on the necessity of strict philological method and a fundamental investigation of the laws of language, especially in the correspondence of sounds. This criticism is said to have had a considerable influence on the direction of Grimm's studies.
The first work he published, lieber den altdeutschen Meistergesang (1811), was of a purely literary character. But even here we see the difference between the more passive contemplation of the aesthetic literary critic and the activity of the investigator who is always seeking definite results and definite laws. In this essay Grimm showed that Minnesang and Meistersang were really one form of poetry, of which they merely represented different stages of development, and also announced his important discovery of the invariable division of the Lied into three strophic parts.





His text-editions were mostly prepared in common with his brother. In 1812 they published the two ancient fragments of the Hildebrandslied and the Weissenbrunner Gebet, Jacob having discovered what till then had never been suspected—the alliteration in these poems. However, Jacob had but little taste for text-editing, and, as he him-self confessed, the evolving of a critical text gave him little pleasure. He therefore left this department to others, especially Lachmann, who soon turned his brilliant critical genius, trained in the severe school of classical philology, to Old and Middle High German poetry and metre. Both brothers were attracted from the beginning by all national poetry, whether in the form of epics, ballads, or popular tales. They published in 1816-18 an analysis and critical sifting of the oldest epic traditions of the Germanic races under the title of Deutsche Sagen. At the same time they collected all the popular tales they could find, partly from the mouths of the people, partly from manuscripts and books, and published in 1812-15 the first edition of those Kinder- und Haus-Mdrchen which have carried the name of the brothers Grimm into every household of the civilized world, and founded the science of what is now called folklore. The closely allied subject of the satirical beast epic of the Middle Ages also had a great charm for Jacob Grimm, and he published an edition of the lieinhart Fuclis in 1834. His first contribution to mythology was the first volume of an edition of the Eddaic songs, undertaken con-jointly with his brother, published in 1815, which, however, was not followed by any more. The first edition of his Deutsche Mythologie appeared in 1835. This great work covers the whole range of the subject, tracing the mytho-logy and superstitions of the old Teutons back to the very dawn of direct evidence, and following their decay and loss down to the popular traditions, tales, and expressions in which they still linger.

Although by the introduction of the Code Napoleon into Westphalia Grimm's legal studies were made practically barren, he never lost his interest in the scientific study of law and national institutions, as the truest exponents of the life and character of a people. By the publication (in 1828) of his Rechtsalterthumer he laid the foundations of that historical study of the old Teutonic laws and constitu-tions which has been continued with brilliant success by Maurer and others. In this work Grimm showed the im-portance of a linguistic study of the old laws, and the light that can be thrown on many a dark passage in them by a comparison of the corresponding words and expressions in the other old cognate dialects. He also knew how—and this is perhaps the most original and valuable part of his work—to trace the spirit of the laws in countless allusions and sayings which occur in the old poems and sagas, or even survive in modern colloquialisms.

Of all his more general works the boldest and most far-reaching is unquestionably his Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, where at the same time the linguistic element is most distinctly brought forward. The subject of the work is, indeed, nothing less than the history which lies hidden in the words of the German language—the oldest national history of the Teutonic tribes determined by means of language. For this purpose he laboriously collects the scattered words and allusions to be found in classical writers, and endeavours to determine the relations in which the German language stood to those of the Getse, Thracians, Scythians, and many other nations whose languages are known to us only by doubtfully identified, often extremely corrupted remains preserved by Greek and Latin authors. It need hardly be said that Grimm's results have been greatly modified by the wider range of comparison and im-proved methods of investigation which now characterize linguistic science, while, on the other hand, many of the questions raised by him will probably for ever remain obscure; but his book will always be one of the most fruitful and suggestive that have been ever written.

We now come to his purely philological work, of which his famous Deutsche Grammati/c was the outcome. We have already seen how slowly and with what difficulty he attained a sound method of etymological and grammatical investigation. Nevertheless the time was a favourable one for his work. The persevering labours of past generations —from the humanists onwards—had collected an enormous mass of materials in the shape of text-editions, dictionaries, and grammars, although most of it was uncritical and often untrustworthy. Something had even been done in the way of comparison and the determination of general laws, and the conception of a comparative Teutonic grammar had been clearly grasped by the illustrious Englishman Hickes, at the beginning of the last century, and partly carried out by him in his Thesaurus. Ten Kate in Holland had after-wards made valuable contributions to the history and com-parison of the Teutonic languages. Even Grimm himself did not at first intend to include all the languages in his grammar; but he soon found that Old High German postu-lated Gothic, that the later stages of German could not be understood without the help of the Low German dialects, including English, and that the rich literature of Scandi-navia could as little be ignored. The first edition of the first part of the Grammar, which appeared in 1819, and is now extremely rare, treated of the inflexions of all these languages, together with a general introduction, in which he vindicated the importance of a historical study of the German language against the a priori, quasi-philosophical methods then in vogue.

In 1822 this volume appeared in a second edition— really a totally new work, for, as Grimm himself says in the preface, it cost him little reflexion to mow down the first crop to the ground. The wide distance between the two stages of Grimm's development in these two edi-tions is significantly shown by the fact that while the first edition gives only the inflexions, in the second volume phonology takes up no less than 600 pages, more than half of the whole volume. Grimm had, at last, awakened to the full conviction that all sound philology must be based on rigorous adhesion to the laws of sound-change, and he never afterwards swerved from this principle, which gave to all his investigations, even in their boldest flights, that iron-bound consistency, and that force of conviction which distinguish science from dilettanteism; up to Grimm's time philology was—as it still is in England—nothing but a more or less laborious and conscientious dilettanteism, with occasional flashes of scientific inspiration ; he made it into a science. His advance must be attributed mainly to the influence of his contemporary Rask. Bask wras born two years later than Grimm, but his remarkable precocity gave him somewhat the start. Even in his first edition Grimm's Icelandic paradigms are based entirely, on Bask's grammar, and in his second edition he has relied almost entirely on Rask for Old English. His debt to Rask can only be estimated at its true value by comparing his treat-ment of Old English in the two editions; the difference is very great. Thus in the first edition he declines dceg, dceges, plural dcegas, not having observed the law of vowel-change pointed out by Rask. There can be little doubt that the appearance of Rask's Old English grammar was a main inducement for him to recast his work from the beginning. To Rask also belongs the merit of having first distinctly formulated the laws of sound-correspond-ence in the different languages, especially in the vowels, those more fleeting elements of speech which had hitherto been ignored by etymologists.
This leads us to a question which has been the subject of much controversy,—Who discovered Grimm's law 1 The law of the correspondence of consonants in the older Indo-germanic, Low, and High German languages respectively was first fully stated by Grimm in the second edition of the first part of his grammar. The correspondence of single consonants had been more or less clearly recognized by several of his predecessors; but the one who came nearest to the discovery of the complete law was the Swede Ihre, who established a considerable number of "literarum per-mutationes," such as b for /, with the examples bcera = ferre, befiver —fiber. Rask, in his essay on the origin of the Icelandic language, gives the same comparisons, with a few additions and corrections, and even the very same examples in most cases. As Grimm in the preface to his first edition expressly mentions this essay of Rask, there is every probability that it gave the first impulse to his own investigations. But there is a wide difference between the isolated permutations of his predecessors and the comprehensive generalizations under which he himself ranged them. The extension of the law to High German is also entirely his own. The only fact that can be adduced in support of the assertion that Grimm wished to deprive Rask of his claims to priority is that he does not expressly mention Eask's results in his second edition. But this is part of the plan of his work, made absolutely necessary by its enormous extent, viz., to refrain from ail controversy or reference to the works of others, leaving his readers to assign to each investigator his due. In his first edition he expressly calls attention to Eask's essav, and praises it most ungrudgingly. Bask himself refers as little to Ihre, merely alluding in a general way to Hire's permutations, although his own debt to Ihre is infinitely greater than that of Grimm to Bask or any one else. It is true that a certain bitterness of feeling afterwards sprang up between Grimm and Bask, but this was the fault of the latter, who, impatient of contradiction and irritable in controversy, refused to acknowledge the value of Grimm's views when they involved modification of his own. The importance of Grimm's generalization in the history of philology cannot be overestimated, and even the mystic completeness and symmetry of its formulation, although it has proved a hindrance to the correct explana-tion of the causes of the changes, was well calculated to strike the popular mind, and give it a vivid idea of the paramount importance of law, and the necessity of disregarding mere superficial resemblance. Even the lawless English etymologist bows down to the authority of Grimm's law, though it must be confessed he honours it almost as much in the breach as in the observance.

The grammar was continued in three volumes, treating principally of derivation, composition, and syntax, which last was left unfinished. Grimm then began a third edition, of which only one part, comprising the vowels, appeared in 1840, his time being afterwards taken up mainly by the dictionary. Of the grammar as a whole we can only say that it stands quite alone in the annals of science for com-prehensiveness, method, and fulness of detail. Every law, every letter, every syllable of inflexion in the different languages, is illustrated by an almost exhaustive mass of material, drawn from every period and every dialect. It has served as a model for all succeeding investigators. Diez's grammar of the Romance languages is founded entirely on its methods, which have also exerted a pro-found influence on the wider study of the Indo-Germanic languages in general.

In the great German dictionary Grimm undertook a task for which he was hardly suited. His exclusively historical tendencies made it impossible for him to do justice to the individuality of a living language ; and the disconnected statement of the facts of language in an ordinary alphabeti-cal dictionary fatally mars its scientific character. It was also undertaken on so large a scale as to make it impossible for him and his brother to complete it themselves. We may describe the dictionary, as far as it was worked out by Grimm himself, as a collection of disconnected anti-quarian essays of, it need hardly be remarked, high value.

In summing up Grimm's scientific character we are struck by its combination of breadth and unity. He was as far removed from the narrowness of the specialist who has no ideas, no sympathies beyond some one. author, period, or narrow corner of science, as from the shallow dabbler who feverishly attempts to master the details of half a dozen discordant pursuits, which have no central point of interest round which to rally. Even within his own special studies there is the same wise concentration; no Mezzofanti-like parrot display of useless poly^lottism. The very founda-tions of his nature were harmonious ; his patriotism and love of historical investigation received their fullest satis-faction in the study of the language, traditions, mythology, laws, and literature of his own countrymen and their nearest kindred. But from this centre his investigations were pursued in every direction as far as his unerring instinct of healthy limitation would allow. He was equally fortun-ate in the harmony that subsisted between his intellectual and moral nature. He made cheerfully the heavy sacrifices that science demands from its disciples, without feeling any of that envy and bitterness which often torment weaker natures; and although he lived apart from his fellow men, he was full of human sympathies, and no man has ever exercised a profounder influence on the destinies of mankind than he has—an influence which is still only in its infancy. His was the very ideal of the noblest type of German character.

The following is a complete list of his separately published works, those which he published in common with his brother being marked with a star. For a list of his essays in periodicals, &c, see vol. v. of his Kleinere Schriften, from which the present list is taken. His life is best studied in his own "Selbstbiographie," in vol. i. of the Kleinere Schriften. There is also a brief memoir by Dr Gödeke in Göttinger Professoren, Gotha (Perthes), 1872.

Ueber den altdeutschen Meistergesang, Göttingen, 1811; Kinder- und Haus-Märchen, Berlin, 1812-15 (many editions); Das Lied van Hildebrand und das Weissenbrunner Gebet, Cassel, 1812; Altdeutsche Wälder, Cassel, Frankfort, 1813-11, 3 vols.; Der arme Heinrich von Hartmann von der Aue, Berlin, 1815; Irmenstrasse und Irmensäule, Vienna, 1815; *Die Lieder der alten Edda, Berlin. 1815 , Silva de romances viejos, Vienna, 1815; Deutsche Sagen, Berlin, 181(1-18, 2(1 ed., Berlin, 1865-66; Deutsche Grammatik, Güttingen, 18111, 2d ed., Göttingen, 1822-40, reprinted 1870 by W. Sehercr, Berlin ; Wuk StephanovitsclCs Kleine serbische Grammatik, verdeutscht mit einer Vorrede, Leipsic and Berlin, .1824; Zur Recension der deutschen Grammatik, Cassel, 1826; Irische Elfenmärchen, aus dem englischen, Leipsic, 1826; Deutsche Rechtsatterthümer, Göttingen, 1828, 2d ed., 1854; Hymno-rumveteris ecclesia; XXVL interpretatio Theodisca, Göttinyen, 1830; Reinhart Fuchs, Berlin, 1834; Deutsche Mythologie, Göttingen. 1835, 3d ed., 1854, 2 vols.; Taciti Germania eilidit, Göttingen, 1835 ; Ueber meine Entlassung, Basel, 1838; (together with Schindler) Lateinische Gedichte des X. und XL Jahrhunderts, Göttingen, 1838; Sendschreiben an Karl Lachmann über Reinhart Fuchs, Berlin, 1840; Weisthümer, th. i., Göttingen, 1840 (continued, partly by others, in 5 parts, 1840-69); Andreas und Eime, Cassel, 1840; Frau Aventure, Berlin, 1842: Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, Leipsic, 1848, 3d ed., 1868, 2 vols.; Das Wort des Besitzes, Berlin, 1850 ; Deutsches Wörterbuch, bd. i., Leipsic, 1854 (still in progress); Rede auf Wilhelm Grimm und Rede über das Alter, Berlin, 1868, 3d ed., 1865; Kleinere Schriften, Berlin, 1864-70, 5 vols. (IL SW.)