Generations of children have been thrilled by the stories of the Brothers Grimm. They were the writers of the fairy tales we all grew up with. They include Hansel and Gretel, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Rumpelstiltskin, Snow White, the Frog Prince, and Rapunzel. The Grimm Brothers never got rich on their stories, but Walt Disney sure did.
The Grimm Brothers didn't actually write their stories. They were preservers. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were scholars, amateur ones at first, who tracked down all the old German folktales they could find and put them to paper. The Brothers Grimm came from a family of nine, but these two were particularly close, just a year apart in age. They shared an interest in the old stories. Most of their lives they followed a similar path. They lived in the same home, though Wilhelm married while Jacob did not. Both were serving as librarians in Kassel during the most productive part of their careers as fabulists. Eventually, both became professors at the University of Gottingen and lost their jobs in 1837 for political associations. Unemployed, in 1838 they took on the major writing task of their life. No, it wasn't a great new fairy tale. It was a dictionary.
Most Americans are probably unaware of this, but the Brothers Grimm are noted as the foremost lexicographers of Germany. They are Germany's equivalent of Noah Webster. However, Webster, to the best of my knowledge, never wrote any fairy tales.
The Brothers Grimm were back in the news recently when some of the books in their library, missing since World War II, were rediscovered. Many of the books in their library ended up in the University of Poznan library in Poland after the Second World War. However, some had been lost, or more precisely, overlooked. Prof. Eliza Pieciul-Karminska and Renata Wilgosiewicz-Skutecka from the Poznan Library recently undertook the task of searching through their collections to see if they could find any more books that once belonged to the Grimms. They found twenty-seven. That sounds like a large number, and it is, but that should be tempered by the fact that the Brothers Grimm had 8,000 books in their library. It's not that surprising 27 were lost, and it's possible that still more will be found in the Poznan Library.
Finding books from someone's large library may not ordinarily be important, but in the case of the Grimm Brothers, their books were research tools and they filled them with annotations. In an article entitled The working library of Brothers Grimm and the portion of their book collection found at University Library, Poznan, in Biblioteka magazine, authors Pieciul-Karminska and Wilgosiewicz-Skutecka wrote, “It [the collection] is particularly valuable primarily as a source of knowledge on the research methods used by the two researchers. In the footnotes and indexes to their publications of fairy tales or folk legends, both Jakob and Wilhelm were very meticulous in providing their written source material, i.e. the sources that they held in their book collection, the items of which had purposefully been acquired by the duo to preserve for subsequent editions of old relics of European and German literature. Equally important for the research on the literary output and research activity of the Grimm Brothers is the analysis of handwritten underlining, notes and annotations that the texts were typographically enhanced by during the reading.” Sleeping Beauty has awaken from her long sleep.
