Stranger than Fiction

  Grimm’s (or Grimms’) Fairy Tales are well-known all over the world, but I wonder if most people know that the name refers to the brothers Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. When I was a child I had assumed that the Grimms wrote the tales, but later learned that they collected the tales over a number of years in German-speaking regions of Europe. During my linguistics studies at university, I also learned that it was Jakob Grimm who developed ‘Grimm’s Law,’ which describes regular correspondences between certain sounds of proto-Indo-European to early Germanic and languages that developed from German (like English). It seems that his linguistics theories were inspired by the translations that were done for the tales he and his brother collected. But I did not know much about their personal lives or why they started collecting the folk tales and legends they became known for. So when I learned about The Brothers Grimm: A Biography, by Ann Schmiesing, I was very interested to find out more. ...