critical text gave him little pleasure. He therefore left this
department to others, especially Lachmann, who soon turned
his brilliant critical genius, trained in the severe school of classical
philology, to Old and Middle High German poetry and metre.
Both brothers were attracted from the beginning by all national
poetry, whether in the form of epics, ballads or popular tales.
They published in 1816–1818 an analysis and critical sifting of
the oldest epic traditions of the Germanic races under the title of
Deutsche Sagen. At the same time they collected all the popular
tales they could find, partly from the mouths of the people,
partly from manuscripts and books, and published in 1812–1815
the first edition of those Kinder- und Hausmärchen which have
carried the name of the brothers Grimm into every household
of the civilized world, and founded the science of folk-lore. The
closely allied subject of the satirical beast epic of the middle ages
also had a great charm for Jacob Grimm, and he published an
edition of the Reinhart Fuchs in 1834. His first contribution to
mythology was the first volume of an edition of the Eddaic songs,
undertaken conjointly with his brother, published in 1815, which,
however, was not followed by any more. The first edition of his
Deutsche Mythologie appeared in 1835. This great work covers
the whole range of the subject, tracing the mythology and
superstitions of the old Teutons back to the very dawn of direct
evidence, and following their decay and loss down to the popular
traditions, tales and expressions in which they still linger.
Although by the introduction of the Code Napoléon into Westphalia Grimm’s legal studies were made practically barren, he never lost his interest in the scientific study of law and national institutions, as the truest exponents of the life and character of a people. By the publication (in 1828) of his Rechtsalterthümer he laid the foundations of that historical study of the old Teutonic laws and constitutions which was continued with brilliant success by Georg L. Maurer and others. In this work Grimm showed the importance of a linguistic study of the old laws, and the light that can be thrown on many a dark passage in them by a comparison of the corresponding words and expressions in the other old cognate dialects. He also knew how—and this is perhaps the most original and valuable part of his work—to trace the spirit of the laws in countless allusions and sayings which occur in the old poems and sagas, or even survive in modern colloquialisms.
Of all his more general works the boldest and most far-reaching is his Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, where at the same time the linguistic element is most distinctly brought forward. The subject of the work is, indeed, nothing less than the history which lies hidden in the words of the German language—the oldest national history of the Teutonic tribes determined by means of language. For this purpose he laboriously collects the scattered words and allusions to be found in classical writers, and endeavours to determine the relations in which the German language stood to those of the Getae, Thracians, Scythians, and many other nations whose languages are known only by doubtfully identified, often extremely corrupted remains preserved by Greek and Latin authors. Grimm’s results have been greatly modified by the wider range of comparison and improved methods of investigation which now characterize linguistic science, and many of the questions raised by him will probably for ever remain obscure; but his book will always be one of the most fruitful and suggestive that have ever been written.
Grimm’s famous Deutsche Grammatik was the outcome of his purely philological work. The labours of past generations—from the humanists onwards—had collected an enormous mass of materials in the shape of text-editions, dictionaries and grammars, although most of it was uncritical and often untrustworthy. Something had even been done in the way of comparison and the determination of general laws, and the conception of a comparative Teutonic grammar had been clearly grasped by the illustrious Englishman George Hickes, at the beginning of the 18th century, and partly carried out by him in his Thesaurus. Ten Kate in Holland had afterwards made valuable contributions to the history and comparison of the Teutonic languages. Even Grimm himself did not at first intend to include all the languages in his grammar; but he soon found that Old High German postulated Gothic, that the later stages of German could not be understood without the help of the Low German dialects, including English, and that the rich literature of Scandinavia could as little be ignored. The first edition of the first part of the Grammar, which appeared in 1819, and is now extremely rare, treated of the inflections of all these languages, together with a general introduction, in which he vindicated the importance of an historical study of the German language against the a priori, quasi-philosophical methods then in vogue.
In 1822 this volume appeared in a second edition—really a new work, for, as Grimm himself says in the preface, it cost him little reflection to mow down the first crop to the ground. The wide distance between the two stages of Grimm’s development in these two editions is significantly shown by the fact that while the first edition gives only the inflections, in the second volume phonology takes up no fewer than 600 pages, more than half of the whole volume. Grimm had, at last, awakened to the full conviction that all sound philology must be based on rigorous adhesion to the laws of sound-change, and he never afterwards swerved from this principle, which gave to all his investigations, even in their boldest flights, that iron-bound consistency, and that force of conviction which distinguish science from dilettanteism; up to Grimm’s time philology was nothing but a more or less laborious and conscientious dilettanteism, with occasional flashes of scientific inspiration; he made it into a science. His advance must be attributed mainly to the influence of his contemporary R. Rask. Rask was born two years later than Grimm, but his remarkable precocity gave him somewhat the start. Even in Grimm’s first editions his Icelandic paradigms are based entirely on Rask’s grammar, and in his second edition he relied almost entirely on Rask for Old English. His debt to Rask can only be estimated at its true value by comparing his treatment of Old English in the two editions; the difference is very great. Thus in the first edition he declines dæg, dæges, plural dægas, not having observed the law of vowel-change pointed out by Rask. There can be little doubt that the appearance of Rask’s Old English grammar was a main inducement for him to recast his work from the beginning. To Rask also belongs the merit of having first distinctly formulated the laws of sound-correspondence in the different languages, especially in the vowels, those more fleeting elements of speech which had hitherto been ignored by etymologists.
This leads to a question which has been the subject of much controversy,—Who discovered what is known as Grimm’s law? This law of the correspondence of consonants in the older Indo-germanic, Low and High German languages respectively was first fully stated by Grimm in the second edition of the first part of his grammar. The correspondence of single consonants had been more or less clearly recognized by several of his predecessors; but the one who came nearest to the discovery of the complete law was the Swede J. Ihre, who established a considerable number of “literarum permutationes,” such as b for f, with the examples bæra = ferre, befwer = fiber. Rask, in his essay on the origin of the Icelandic language, gives the same comparisons, with a few additions and corrections, and even the very same examples in most cases. As Grimm in the preface to his first edition expressly mentions this essay of Rask, there is every probability that it gave the first impulse to his own investigations. But there is a wide difference between the isolated permutations of his predecessors and the comprehensive generalizations under which he himself ranged them. The extension of the law to High German is also entirely his own. The only fact that can be adduced in support of the assertion that Grimm wished to deprive Rask of his claims to priority is that he does not expressly mention Rask’s results in his second edition. But this is part of the plan of his work, viz. to refrain from all controversy or reference to the works of others. In his first edition he expressly calls attention to Rask’s essay, and praises it most ungrudgingly. Rask himself refers as little to Ihre, merely alluding in a general way to Ihre’s permutations, although his own debt to Ihre is infinitely greater than that of Grimm to
