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Most of us are familiar with the folk tales of the Brothers Grimm, from Sleeping Beauty to Cinderella and all our childhood favorites in between. But to appreciate the full legacy of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, you need to look beyond their famous fairy tales. You have to understand the political and social context of the time and place they were living and how their love for the German people — and those people’s language — shaped a lifelong dedication to their craft.
In this episode of Multilinguish, we dive deep into the work of the Brothers Grimm, taking a look at their world-recognized collection of fairy tales, their professional careers as linguists and language scholars and how these threads were tangled in with one another. We examine some of their most consequential projects to get a sense of just how wide their interests and passions extended.
Multilinguish: The Brothers Grimm, Between The Lines
In the first part of the episode, content producers David Doochin and Thomas Devlin discuss the historical context playing into the growth of the German cultural and national spirit, or Volksgeist, and explore how the Grimms’ fairy tales tied into that spirit. Their colleague in Berlin, Karina Indytska, reads a few passages from some of the Grimms’ tales, translated from their original versions to give a sense of the stories in their un-”Disneyfied” forms.
After the break, Thomas and David dive into the work of the Grimms from a linguistic perspective, focusing on how they sought to elevate the German language in the people’s consciousness by documenting and analyzing it in a way that had never been done before. They discuss some important projects undertaken by the brothers around Germanic linguistics, highlighting the intentions behind them and the impacts they had both at the time and long into the future.
Show Notes
This episode was produced by David Doochin and edited by Brian Rosado. Jen Jordan is our executive producer. Our logo was designed by Ally Zhao. Special thanks to Karina Indytska for recording passages for this episode.
How The Grimm Brothers Changed German Linguistics (And Fairy Tales) | Babbel Magazine
The Grimm Brothers’ Other Great Project Was Writing a Giant German Dictionary | Atlas Obscura
The Fairytale Language Of The Brothers Grimm | JStor Daily