Jacob 1785–1863 · Wilhelm 1786–1859 · German philologists & folklorists
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were German academics, linguists and folklorists whose Kinder- und Haus-Märchen (‘Children’s and Household Tales’), first published in 1812, is one of the most-translated books in the world. They were philologists first — Jacob’s law of consonant shifts still bears his name — and their tales were gathered as linguistic and ethnographic evidence, then reshaped across seven editions to 1857. The mirror rhyme is theirs: it appears in the very first edition of 1812 and survives, lightly trimmed, into the final one. Almost every ‘Snow White’ the English-speaking world knows — Disney’s 1937 film included — is downstream of their text.