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The Brothers Grimm (German Die Gebrüder Grimm), Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, were German academics who were best known for publishing collections of folk tales and fairy tales[1] and for their work in linguistics, relating to how the sounds in words shift over time (Grimm's Law). They are among the best known story tellers of novellas from Europe, allowing the widespread knowledge of such tales as Rumpelstiltskin, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Cinderella, and Hansel and Gretel. When the eldest brother Jakob was eleven years old their father Philipp Wilhelm, died and the family moved into a cramped urban residence.[2] Two years later, the children's grandfather also died, leaving them and their mother to struggle in reduced circumstances. The Brothers tended to idealize and excuse fathers, leaving a predominance of female villains in the tales—the infamous wicked stepmothers, for example, the evil stepmother and stepsisters in “Cinderella”, the nefarious crone in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”, and the foster mother witch in “Rapunzel”,[3] however this opinion ignores the fact that the brothers were collectors of folk tales, not their authors
Another influence is perhaps shown in the brothers' fondness for stories such as The Twelve Brothers, which show one girl and several brothers (their own family structure) overcoming opposition.[6] The two brothers were educated at the Friedrichs-Gymnasium in Kassel and later both read law at the University of Marburg. It was the inspiration of Friedrich von Savigny there, who awakened in them an interest in the past. They were in their early twenties when they began the linguistic and philological studies that would culminate in both Grimm's Law and their collected editions of fairy and folk tales. Though their collections of tales became immensely popular, they were essentially a by-product of the linguistic research which was the Brothers' primary goal.
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