Rumpelstiltskin, Snow White, Hansel and Grethel, Cinderella, Tom Thumb - how many movies, cartoons, TV shows have dipped into the stories collected by the Grimms and woven innumerable variations on the themes they traced: children in peril, evil stepmothers, mistreated princesses...? Return to the source with these lovely tales, some famous, some still little-known.
The Brothers Grimm (German: Brüder Grimm or German: Die Gebrüder Grimm), Jacob Grimm (1785 – 1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786 – 1859), were German academics, linguists, cultural researchers, and authors who jointly collected folklore. The Grimms are among the best-known story tellers of European folktales, and their work popularized such stories as "Cinderella", "The Frog Prince" (Der Froschkönig), "Hansel and Gretel" (Hänsel und Gretel), "Rapunzel", "Rumpelstiltskin" (Rumpelstilzchen), and "Snow White" (Schneewittchen). As children, the brothers spent their formative years first in Hanau and then in Steinau until their father's death in 1796 which caused great poverty for the family and affected the brothers for many years. They attended the University of Marburg where because of Friedrich von Savigny they became interested in philology and Germanic studies—a field which they would go on to pioneer—and simultaneously became interested in folklore, which grew into a life-long dedication to collecting German folk tales. In addition to writing and modifying folk tales, the brothers wrote collections of well-respected German and Scandinavian mythologies and in 1808 they wrote a definitive German dictionary (Deutsches Wörterbuch) that remained uncompleted in their lifetime.
