This was a sort of dnf / did not read to be honest.
The idea appealed to me but the writing was really small and I just couldn't get into the story .

Biographies aren't something I'm usually drawn to, but I was intrigued by this biography on the Grimm brothers and was hoping to learn more about them as someone who only knows about them from their collection of fairytales.

This is a very detailed biography of the lives of the Grimm brothers, covering their lives from birth and exploring how events throughout their childhood and teenage years as well as political and social changes shaped their lives and their works. It is so detailed and fact heavy that I feel it's only really going to be fully understood and appreciated by other people with an academic background specialising in the same or very similar topics, it does not feel like it's designed for an everyday, general audience.

I found this biography very hard to read and, unfortunately, don't feel like I really took in many of the details about the Grimm brothers and their works. This is not something I would recommend reading unless you are studying the life and works of the Grimm brothers or have a background in studying the life and works of people.

A thorough and detailed biography of two brothers who are a household name, yet ultimately few know much about them. I enjoyed reading about their lives and how the stories came to be - my own impression, while considering myself a lover of all fairytales, was actually quite far from the truth. This is a very academic text, challenging preconceptions and I learned a great deal.

“And if they have not died, then they are still living today.”.

As most people, I too grew up on fairy tales and as I got older was introduced to the first fairy tales before they were Disney-fied, the Grimms Fairy Tales. The ones that were more macabre, gory, and dark than those of Disney’s retellings. Due to the twisting of these original tales by the Brothers Grimm, there are a lot of misconceptions that revolve around these brothers and not enough truth. Schmiesing delves into the brothers history and attempts to dispel as many misconceptions as possible whilst letting you relive the lives of these two brothers.
This biography is the first I’ve ever read on Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. I find it endearing concept how close to one another they were in life and their work. There were many facts that I learned about them and their accomplishments in just the first chapters of this book.
If you are not a scholar and are just reading this for funsies, take it piece by piece, and only if you’re really interested in the content. It takes time to absorb all the information being unpacked in this hefty biography. However, if you have the time, then pop a squat and learn more about these wonderful brothers.

#ThxNetGalley #AnnSchmiesing #TheBrothersGrimm

Everyone knows the Brothers Grimm and their fairytales, many of which have been changed or adapted throughout the years. It was interesting to read who they really were and how those amazing fairytales came about. Such an interesting read.

This well-researched scholarly work reads more like a textbook than a narrative for a lay audience. It’s too dry and detailed for me. DNF

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC.

This biography is well written and I learned a lot about the brothers.

It is just so interesting to dive deep into the stories I grew up reading and listening to at night.

I may be a nerd when it comes to facts but I like to read between the lines and have a better understanding of things.
This book helps me with that aspect.

Special thanks to #NetGalley and #YaleUniversityPress for the #ARC. The opinions expressed are my own.

It would be difficult to find a person who has not enjoyed a story from the library of the Brothers Grimm. Not many know the life stories of the brothers. Ann Schmiesing's well researched and skillfully written biography is as engrossing as the fairy tales that have entertained many generations of children, teens and adults. So much of this information was new to me. Now I'll need to see how much of their history I can find worked into their fiction.

This is a very well researched book, the pages are packed with information about the Grimm Brothers life. This does mean that the biography is rather dense and is probably best read in several sitting unless you are a serious academic. I like many others grew up reading Grimm's fairytales but new very little at all about the brothers who collected and preserves the tales. I knew so little about them in fact that until reading this book I didn't know there first names and thought Jacob and Wilhelm where twins! I am very glad to have read this book and learned so much about the brothers whos collected stories brought and continue to bring such joy to my life.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for this ARC.

This is a meticulously researched and brought the brother back to life. Also, I loved learning about the stories they’ve had an impact on. Definitely worth a read.

The fairytales compiled by the Brothers Grimm were the first stories I read on my own. More precisely, they were the texts I utilized learning to read in my native tongue. The animated adaptations and the stories my grandmother used to tell me were mostly attributed to the Brothers Grimm. Until some years ago, I didn't even know the names of these brothers or how many siblings there were under the Brothers Grimm “umbrella.”
The Brothers Grimm by Ann Schmiesing is a meticulously researched book that pulls the reader in. Most of the time, I felt like I was walking through life along with Jacob and Wilhelm, seeing all the hardships they had to overcome and all the ways they cared for their parents, siblings, and friends. And I felt for them.
The analysis done by Ann Schmiesing of the fairytales the brothers compiled was illuminating. The writer sheds light on the misconceptions most of us probably have about the way they were gathered and written down. Most importantly, this biography also focuses on all the other literary projects the brothers worked on and are rarely if ever spoken about.
Ann Schmiesing succeeds at painting the historical context Jacob and Wilhelm lived in, all the political changes, the wars, and the political stance they took. But the turmoil of the time did not stop them from following their bookish passions. This is what I like most about this book: I could feel the passion of the biographer for the subject and also the passion of the two brothers for study and literary creation.
I wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone interested in the lives of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, interested in the origins of some of the most well-known fairytales today, or simply interested in knowing more about the story of a name we hear often but don't know much about.
Thank you to the author, publisher, and NetGalley for giving me access to a copy of this book.
4/5

The Brothers Grimm by Ann Schmiesing is extremely well researched and thorough, covering the Grimm family history, and the brothers' education, careers and families. There is a lot of information about their passion for collecting Germanic folktales and their dedication to keeping this aspect of culture alive. The style of writing is very academic, however, so this might not appeal to the general reader who wants a lighter, more entertaining read.

DNF at 30%

As someone who really loves learning history of all periods, I picked this up because I know a) very little about the Brothers Grimm aside from them collecting fairytales and b) very little about that time period in Germany. In a lot of ways, this book satisfies that. Unfortunately, it does so in more granular detail than I was really looking for and the writing style itself leans towards dry and academic.

For folks who are really into biographical details, The Brothers Grimm is a much better choice because Schmiesing provides a great view of their early lives, the situation of the family and the context of the part of Germany that they lived in. As someone who typically doesn't read a lot of biography and favors history that spends less time on individuals lives, this was just too much for me. I did really like the parts that were more focused on German attitudes and context of the time period though.

Remembered now primarily for their folk tales, the Brothers Grimm were scholars of the highest order and prolific in many areas of scholarship, including a vast German dictionary project and discoveries in the field of linguistics. Certainly not mere storytellers. In this first English language biography for 50 years, their lives and times are explored in comprehensive detail and all has been meticulously researched. Although extremely interesting, it is admittedly dry, dense and academic in tone, and not for the faint-hearted. I was forced to take it slowly but overall definitely found it worth the effort and concentration needed. It’s been described as magisterial and that seems the apt word to me. An impressive work.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this arc!

This was a really neat read. Of course I’ve heard of the Brother’s Grimm and read their famous fairytales, but I had no idea the men themselves were so interesting too!
Well-researched and well-written.

With fourteen chapters (plus intro and epilogue), this is a very thorough and detailed biography of Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm, the German folklorists that gave us many of our most beloved fairy tales, covering everything from their childhood, the political upheavals of a nascent Germany, the social context of the Grimms' home, their ties to literary movements, their personal life as adults, and their waning years.

It's very dense and dry, however, and not very readable for the general public as Schmiesing writes like your typical academic that overwhelms you with too many facts you're not likely to grasp in full unless you have a background in the topic. And it doesn't really provide anything new about the Grimms, merely updates and packs some more bits and pieces for a newer audience. If you're interested in the Grimms as people as much as in their work, and don't mind the overwhelming dryness and droning fact-dropping, this might be a good source of information.

I was brought up with Grimms’ fairy tales - by far my favourites in that genre, I especially loved the more perverse, bloodthirsty entries. But before reading Ann Schmiesing’s remarkably-comprehensive biography I knew hardly anything about the brothers responsible for their circulation. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm came from a family that wasn’t wealthy but was solidly middle-class. Born in the late 1700s, they were based in Hessen-Kassel a mountainous, German-speaking region in what was then the Holy Roman Empire – neither lived to witness the unified Germany they yearned for. Their early childhood was relatively calm, idyllic even, but their father’s death before they’d reached their teens resulted in a fairly impoverished existence. As the brothers grew up, increasingly closely bonded, they developed an interest in the culture of German-speaking areas and peoples, spurred on by Napoleon’s invasion and the subsequent French occupation. Both Jacob and Wilhelm had an overwhelming desire to ensure aspects of German peoples’ cultures were uncovered and somehow preserved. So, they started to compile a collection of what’s known as Märchen - a broad category of folk tale from fairy to fable.

These kinds of stories rooted in oral traditions were often considered inferior forms, insufficiently literary to be worth exploring. The fairy tales that were in demand tended to be more like Perrault’s French versions, carefully polished, laced with literary flourishes and shored up by appropriate moral frameworks designed to make them more palatable. The Grimms however favoured a stripped-back, unadorned style believing the nature of the stories, their collective cultural significance, should be enough to attract a readership. The popular account of how they did their research depicts the two brothers travelling through surrounding areas, tirelessly tracking down older, rural women – both brothers thought women were the natural keepers and tellers of tales – desperate to record their remembered stories before it was too late. But, as Schmiesing points out, this notion was as much myth as many of the pieces the Grimms later published. The overwhelming majority of contributors to the Grimms' collection were young, middle-class, educated women – older, peasant women were conspicuous by their absence – often part of the Grimms‘ wider social circle so very little actual field work was needed.

However, Jacob and Wilhelm’s research was wide ranging in other ways, they delved into medieval literature, ancient legends, and produced studies of the history and structure of German languages that played a major part in the evolution of linguistics as a discipline. Their first fairy tale collection appeared in two volumes between 1812 and 1815 under the title Children’s and Household Tales (Kinder- und Hausmärchen.) Editions that were later extensively revised, particularly by Wilhelm. These first volumes caused conflict between the brothers and their publisher. Produced in time for Christmas sales, their publisher wanted to reach a broad market. He thought the Grimms' insistence on featuring scholarly notes and appendices might be off-putting and that the lack of illustrations to break up the text was a mistake. He was also worried about how parents might react to some of the more gruesome pieces.

As time passed, Jacob and Wilhelm’s personal fortunes continued to ebb and flow but they retained their commitment to preserving popular oral narratives. However, later editions of Children’s and Household Tales were quite extensively altered. These reflected contemporary gender norms, women featured in the stories became less independent; and the stories themselves were much longer. The 1819 edition was massively revised by Wilhelm, in some places far more moralistic, much less macabre in others. Wilhelm also added or highlighted Christian references; omitted or toned down sexual references from incest to pregnancy before marriage, and generally reinforced contemporary patriarchal attitudes. These changes were justified on the basis that this was a non-static genre by its very nature, so variants, adaptations and revisions simply reinforced that fact. Wilhelm attempted too to find ways of replicating aspects of oral culture in these written forms – incorporating visual imagery, sayings and puns. This and later editions were given a boost by a shorter English translation which appeared in 1820s, complete with illustrations it proved so popular it revived publishers‘ interest in the Grimms' originals.

Alongside her discussion of the Grimms' best-known work, Schmiesing places the brothers within their wider socio-political, historical context – from their ties to an emerging German Romanticism, to the influence of translations of classic German texts on composers like Wagner. Schmiesing’s level of detail is impressive but I found her text a little overwhelming and dense at times, even though she's consciously targeting a general rather than academic readership. Schmiesing also fills in what’s known of the brothers as individuals, their personal attributes, friendships and close relationships, Wilhelm outgoing but physically frail, Jacob reserved and vehemently anti-social. She highlights the ways in which they managed to engineer an existence in which they could be near inseparable: Wilhelm married an old friend, and the couple lived with Jacob until first Wilhelm’s then Jacob’s death. But, I found the sections centred on the Grimms‘ work on Märchen by far the most compelling – the publishing history, the ordering of stories, stories included, stories discarded. I was intrigued too by Schmiesing’s assessment of the brothers’ legacy – I’d have liked more about this. After the brothers‘ deaths, their fairy tale collections gradually grew in popularity, boosted by the growth of German nationalism. Although Schmiesing stresses the brothers' interest in German culture was centred on a shared language rather than ethnicity, their work was reinterpreted from a National Socialist perspective. The stories became so widely celebrated, and circulated during the Nazi era they were briefly banned post WW2 by the Allied administration – in contrast the East German administration insisted the works were ripe for recuperation and recognition as important cultural artefacts that had been exploited and wrongly appropriated by the Nazi regime. Today the book commonly known as Grimms' Fairy Tales has positioned the Grimms in the top fifty most-translated authors worldwide, although this partly tracks back to other forms of appropriation particularly watered-down, Disneyfied adaptations.

A fascinating and well researched history into two icons of literature. This is a long read but it's so engaging.

If you are looking for an informative read of the history of the Brothers Grimm you will find it in this book. While not technically considered academic it felt that it pushed this lay person in that direction. I would recommend this book if you are looking for a literal view inside the world of the Grimm Brothers. Thank you to NetGalley for providing the ARC.

WOW! I loved this book. I loved learning about the actual brothers who brought so many of our childhood fairytales to be. This is fascinating and well researched and written. I highly recommend.