GRIMM, JACOB LUDWIG CARL (1785-1863), German philologist and mythologist, was born on Jan. 4, 1785, at Hanau, in Hesse-Cassel. His father, who was a lawyer, died while he was 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 (b. Feb. 24, 1786), was sent in 1798 to the public school at Cassel. The two brothers studied law at Marburg. The lectures of Savigny (q.v.) on Roman law taught Grimm to realize what it meant to study any science. Savigny's lectures also awakened in him that love for historical and antiqua rian investigation which forms the basis of all his work. In Savigny's well-provided library Grimm first turned over the leaves of Bodmer's edition of the Old German minnesingers and other early texts. In the beginning of 1805 Savigny, who had removed to Paris, invited him to help him in his literary work. Grimm passed a very happy time in Paris, 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, and obtained a small clerkship in the War Office. In 1808 he was appointed superintendent of the private library of Jerome Buonaparte, king of Westphalia, and auditor to the State council. 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 appoint ment in the Cassel library, and in 1816 Jacob was made second librarian under Volkel. The brothers removed next year to Gottingen, where Jacob received the appointment of professor and librarian, Wilhelm that of under-librarian. Jacob Grimm lec tured on legal antiquities, historical grammar, literary history, and diplomatics, explained Old German poems, and commented on the Germania of Tacitus. In 1837, being one of the seven professors who signed a protest against the king of Hanover's abrogation of the constitution, he was dismissed from his profes sorship, and banished from the kingdom of Hanover. The broth ers returned to Cassel, and in 184o went to Berlin, where they both received professorships, and were elected members of the Academy of Sciences. Jacob seldom lectured, but worked with his brother at the great dictionary. He died on Sept. 20, 1863, work ing up to the last. He was never ill, and worked on all day, with out haste and without pause.
The purely scientific side of Grimm's character developed slowly. 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. The first work he published, Uber den altdeutschen Meistergesang (181 I), was of a purely literary character. Yet even 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 little taste for text-editing, and, as he himself confessed, the evolving of a critical text gave him little pleasure. He therefore left this depart ment to others, especially Lachmann, who soon turned his bril liant critical genius, tiained in the severe school of classical phil ology, 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. They collected all the popular tales they could find, partly from the mouths of the people, partly from mss. and books, and published in I812–I5 the first edition of those Kinder- and Haus marchen which have carried the name of the brothers Grimm into every household of the civilized world, and founded the science of folk-lore. The closely allied subject of the satirical beast epic of the middle ages also had a great charm for Jaccb Grimm, and he published an edition of the Reinhart Fuchs in 1834. His first contribution to mythology was the first volume of an edition of the Eddaic songs, undertaken conjointly with his brother, pub lished in 1815, which, however, was not followed by any more. The first edition of his Deutsche Mythologie appeared in This great work covers the whole range of the subject, tracing the mythology 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 of his time.
Of all his more general works the boldest and most far-reaching is his Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, where at the same time the linguistic element is most distinctly brought forward. 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 Getae, Thracians, Scythians, and many other nations whose languages are known only by doubtfully identified, often extremely corrupted remains preserved by Greek and Latin authors. Grimm's results have been greatly modified by the work of later scholars ; but his book will always be one of the most fruitful and suggestive that have ever been written. His Deutsche Grammatik was the outcome of his purely philological work. Grimm himself did not at first intend to include all the languages in his grammar; but he soon found that Old High German postulated 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 Scandinavia could as little be ignored. The first edition of the first part of the Grammar appeared in 1819, the second in 1822. While the first edition gives only the inflections, in the second volume phonology takes up no fewer than 600 pages, more than half of the whole volume. Grimm had, at last, awak ened to the full conviction that all sound philology must be based on rigorous adhesion to the laws of sound-change. Up to Grimm's time philology was nothing but a more or less laborious and con scientious dilettanteism, with occasional flashes of scientific inspi ration; he made it into a science. His advance must be attrib uted mainly to the influence of his contemporary R. Rask. Even in Grimm's first editions his Icelandic paradigms are based en tirely on Rask's grammar, and in his second edition he relied almost entirely on Rask for Old English. His debt to Rask can only be estimated at its true value by comparing his treatment of Old English in the two editions ; the difference is very great. To Rask belongs the merit of having first distinctly formulated the laws of sound-correspondence in the different languages.
Grimm's Law.—The question, Who discovered what is known as Grimm's law? is a difficult one. This 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 correspond. ence of single consonants had been more or less clearly recog nized by several of his predecessors ; but the one who came near est to the discovery of the complete law was the Swede J. Ihre, who established a considerable number of "literarum permuta tiones." Rask, in his essay on the origin of the Icelandic language, gives the same comparisons, with a few additions. 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 his comprehensive generalizations. The extension of the law to High German is also entirely 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 explanation of the causes of the changes, impressed the popular mind, and gave it a vivid idea of the paramount importance of law, and the neces sity of disregarding mere superficial resemblance.
The grammar was continued in three volumes, treating prin cipally 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 184o, his time being afterwards taken up mainly by the dictionary. The grammar stands alone for comprehensiveness, method and fullness of detail. Every law, every letter, every syllable of inflection in the differ ent languages is illustrated by an almost exhaustive mass of ma terial. 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 profound influence on the wider study of the Indo-Germanic languages in general.
In the great German dictionary Grimm undertook a task on so large a scale as to make it impossible for him and his brother to complete it themselves. The dictionary, as far as it was worked out by Grimm himself, may be described as a collection of discon nected antiquarian essays of high value. Grimm's 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 di rection as far as his unerring instinct of healthy limitation would allow. He was equally fortunate in the harmony that subsisted between his intellectual and moral nature. He made cheerfully the heavy sacrifices that science demands from its disciples, with out 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. 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 be ing marked with a star. For a list of his essays in periodicals, etc., see vol. v. of his Kleinere Schriften, from which the present list is taken. Ober den altdeutschen Meistergesang (Gottingen, 181 1) ; *Kinder- and Hausmdrchen (Berlin, 1812-15) (many editions) ; *Das Lied von Hildebrand and das Weissenbrunner Gebet (Cas sel, 1812) ; Altdeutsche W alder (Cassel, Frankfort, 1813-16, 3 vols.) ; *Der arme Heinrich von Hartmann von der Aue (1815) ; Irmenstrasse and Irmensaule (1815) ; *Die Lieder der alten Edda (1815) ; Silva de romances viejos (1815) ; *Deutsche Sagen (1816-18, 2nd ed., 1865-66) ; Deutsche Grammatik (Gottingen, 1819, 2nd ed., Gottingen, 1822-40) (reprinted 1870 by W. Scherer, Berlin) ; Stephanovitsch's kleine serbische Gram matik, verdeutscht mit einer V orrede (Leipzig and Berlin, 1824); Zur Recension der deutschen Grammatik (Cassel, 1826) ; *Irische Elfenmarchen, aus dem Englischen (Leipzig, 1826); Deutsche Rechtsaltertiimer (Gottingen, 1828, 2nd ed., 1854) ; Hymnorum veteris ecclesiae XX VI. interpretatio theodisca (Gottingen, 1830) ; Reinhart Fuchs (1834) ; Deutsche Mythologie (Gottingen, 3rd ed., 1854, 2 vols.) ; Taciti Germania edidit (Gottingen, 1835) ; tiber tneine Entlassung (Basle, 1838) ; (together with Schmeller) Lateinische Gedichte des X. and XI. Jahrhunderts (Gottingen, 1838) ; Sendschreiben an Karl Lachmann uber Rein hart Fuchs (1840) ; Weistiimer, Th. i. (Gottingen, 1840) (con tinued, partly by others, in 5 parts, 1840-69) ; Andreas and Elene (Cassel, 1840) ; Frau Aventure (1842) ; Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (Leipzig, 1848, 3rd ed., 1868, 2 vols.) ; Das Wort des Besitzes (185o) ; *Deutsches Worterbuch, Bd. i. (Leipzig, Rede auf Wilhelm Grimm and Rede fiber das Alter (1868, 3rd ed., 1865) ; Kleinere Schriften (1864-70, 5 vols.) .