Grimm tales came from townsfolk, not peasant cottages alone
Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786–1859) gathered Kinder- und Hausmärchen mainly from educated urban acquaintances, then revised the language across a lifetime. Romantic nationalism cast folk narrative as pure German culture even when sources wore city clothes.
Born in Hanau to a Reformed Protestant clerical-legal family, they moved to Steinau in 1791 when father Philipp Wilhelm became Amtmann. His pneumonia death on 10 January 1796 shattered finances; aunt Henriette Zimmer later sent the boys to Kassel’s Lyceum Fridericianum (1798) and on to small Marburg University, where class snobbery stung.
Scholarship in linguistics and folklore intertwined: fairy-tale collecting sat beside grammatical work that helped found Germanic philology.
At Marburg, a university of about 200 students, they needed a dispensation even to study law because of their social rank. Their law professor Friedrich von Savigny steered them toward history and medieval German literature and introduced them to romantics such as Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim. Poverty stayed close: Jacob went to Paris in 1805 as Savigny's research assistant, later quit his studies to support the family, and in 1808, the year their mother died, became court librarian to the King of Westphalia.
Poorly paid library jobs left time for research, and in 1812 they issued the first volume of Kinder- und Hausmärchen with 86 tales, soon followed by volumes of German legends. Wilhelm married Dortchen Wild, a pharmacist's daughter who had supplied several tales, in 1825, and Jacob lived with them. In Göttingen Jacob published German Mythology in 1835, but in 1837 both lost their posts as members of the Göttingen Seven, who defied King Ernest Augustus. Broke again in 1838, they began the German Dictionary, whose first volume did not appear until 1854.
Source: Brothers Grimm
