s did not keep the Grimms apart from eachother. Jacob kept living in his brother's household and took care of Wilhelm's children--Herman, Rudolf, and Auguste--as though they were his kids. In 1841, the two brothers went to Berlin, where they were given authority and elected members of the Academy of Science. Both wrote well-known books. Jacob wrote many more than Wilhelm did, and his German Grammar is one of the world's greatest books in language study. Collecting the FolktalesTo the people of Hesse in middle Germany and in other places, the quiet, educated Jacob Grimm and the more friendly, happy Wilhelm became well known for their books. They spent about 13 years in collecting "from the lips of people" the stories that went into their folktales. The Grimms said in an introduction, "As their simple poetry delights and their truth can interest anyone, and because they remain an inheritance in the house, they are also called House Stories." In collecting the stories, the brothers sometimes drastically edited the tales to stress their point of view about religion, politics, and morality. For example, with “Little Red Cap,” or Little Red Riding Hood, in the original story, the wolf eats the grandmother and Red Cap. They changed it so that someone who was not even mentioned in the original finally did with the wolf away in the end. Sometimes there were several versions of the stories, and then the Grimms combine them. Their notes, which appeared in an early English edition, reveal a lot about the stories, their origin, and their characters. The Grimms, for example, traced the origin of Briar Rose, one of their stories set in a castle surrounded by briar patches, to the story of Brunhild and noticed the setting of the stories that appear in many countries. The stories were kept alive by the German peasants of the time--the cowherder, the woodcutter, and the wood-carver--who had no hope of rising above their positions i...
