It’s the birthday of Wilhelm Carl Grimm (b. 1786), who with his brother Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm (b. 1785) collected and studied folk stories and poetry from many languages, basically founding the modern study of folk lore and freaking out generations of children with horrifying tales.

The oldest two of six children, the Grimm brothers began life in secure circumstances, but their father died in 1796 and the family then struggled. Their mother died twelve years later, and 23-year-old Jacob was suddenly the head of the family. Both Jacob and Wilhelm studied law but even in law school joined a movement among intellectuals to preserve oral fairy tales in danger of being lost in the age of industrialization. They published their most famous work, Kinder– und Hausmaerchen (literally, Children’s and Household Tales; or, Grimm’s Fairy Tales) in two volumes, 1812 and 1815, a collection of roughly 200 tales, including “Hansel and Gretel,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Sleeping Beauty,” “Snow White,” “The Golden Goose,” and “Rapunzel.” In spite of the Grimms’ claims that the stories were purely Germanic and that their primary source was a peasant woman named Dorothea Viehmann, many of the tales were supplied by the brothers’ middle-class connections or even from written sources. Viehmann herself was not a peasant but a tailor’s wife and Huguenot as well, so her stories had a French influence.

The brothers rewrote the tales they’d collected and Wilhelm in particular is responsible for making them elegant and readable without sacrificing their folkloric nature. In subsequent editions, they changed the content more and more, making the stories more suitable for children (and thus selling more copies). This meant removing sexual content but not violence, which could be pretty horrifying. For example: in “The Juniper Tree,” a stepmother decapitates her hated stepson, then props his head on his body with a scarf and tells her daughter to slap him. When the head falls off, the daughter thinks it’s her fault. The mother says they’ll hide her actions by cooking the boy in a stew, which they serve to the father, who loves it. (I don’t know why Disney hasn’t snatched this one up.)

Jacob and Wilhelm worked together for most of their lives, with desks in the same room, although Jacob eventually worked more in philology and particularly grammar; his work has hugely influenced contemporary linguistics. Wilhelm continued working on folklore. They wrote many books independently and collaborated on eight and were among the foremost scholars of their time. By the end of their careers, they were writing the German Dictionary (think Oxford English Dictionary). Wilhelm died in 1859 and Jacob in 1863; the dictionary was only up to F, and was finished by generations of other scholars.

Note: yesterday was the birthday of the famous diarist, Samuel Pepys (b. 1633). Pepys was the administrator who whipped the English navy into greatness. But he did not do so when his children were home from school on winter break. My apologies to Pepys and I’ll try again next year.

Have a lovely Saturday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.