Jacob Grimm

Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) was a German philologist, jurist and folklorist, born in Hanau in Hesse, who with his younger brother Wilhelm collected the stories published from 1812 as Children's and Household Tales, the most translated German book after Luther's Bible. Jacob was the more rigorous scholar of the two: his German Grammar established the historical study of the Germanic languages and formulated the sound shift known as Grimm's law. The brothers worked as librarians in Kassel and professors at Göttingen, from which they were dismissed in 1837 for refusing an oath to a king who had revoked the constitution. They spent their last decades in Berlin on the German Dictionary.