Jacob Grimm

Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm was born 4 January 1785 in Germany, trained as a jurist, and turned that precision toward words. With his younger brother Wilhelm, he edited the collection that became Grimms' Fairy Tales - not inventing the stories but gathering them from oral tradition. Separately, Jacob formulated Grimm's law, a principle mapping how consonants shift across related languages, and wrote Deutsche Mythologie, tracing the old gods and beliefs beneath European folklore. He co-authored the Deutsches Wörterbuch, a massive historical dictionary of German that outlived him. He died 20 September 1863, having built the scaffolding on which much of modern philology still stands.