The brothers Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm, were born towards the end of the 18th century but lived long enough to be photographed in old age in 1847. The two stooped scholars, beaky-nosed, straggle-haired and dressed in shabby frock coats, look uncomfortable posing. A book lies on the table before Wilhelm, the outgoing one; Jacob, the introspective one, is turned reluctantly towards the camera. The Grimms are today associated only with fairy tales, but their influence was far wider: they helped shift the gaze of northern European culture away from the dominant French neoclassicism and towards Volksgeist (‘spirit of the people’), with its roots in the distant past. In 1846, when the writer William John Thoms came up with the term ‘folklore’ to define the study of the ‘manners, customs, observances, superstitions, ballads, proverbs, etc, of the olden time’, he called on the English to find their own Grimm to rescue the old stories from extinction. 

Ann Schmiesing, a professor of German and Scandinavian literature, has written a double biography of the brothers, the first in English in over fifty years. This can’t have been an easy task. The book is impeccably researched and scholarly (the Grimms would expect nothing less). But the brothers’ main work of writing, cataloguing and researching is difficult to bring alive for the general reader. Against the odds, however, Schmiesing draws a vivid and often light-hearted picture of the Grimms’ circle of collaborators and friends, from gatherings of passionate medieval revivalists to endless bickering over authenticity. She loves her subjects and she conveys the delight of discovery and connection.

The Grimms were born (Jacob in 1785, Wilhelm a year later) in Hanau, the most important town in the landgraviate of Hessen-Kassel. Their father was the town clerk. Aged five and six, the brothers moved to Steinau an der Strasse, where their father took the job of chief magistrate. The