Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/212

Rh the mouths of the people, partly from manuscripts and book 3, aud published iu 1812-15 the first edition of those Kinder- und Haw-Hiirchen which have carriel the name of the brothers Grimm into every household of the civilized world, and founded the science of what is now called 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 Fucks in 1834. His first contribution to mythology was the first volume of an edition of the Eeldaic songs, undertaken con jointly 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 mytho logy 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 Napoleon into Westphalia Grimm s legal studies were made practically barren, he never lost his interest in the scientific study of livv aud national institutions, as the truest exponents of the life and character of a people. By the publication (in 1828) of his Rechtsalterthiimer he laid the foundations of that historical study of the old Teutonic laws and constitu tions which has been continued with brilliant success by Maurer and others. In this work Grimm showed the im portance 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 unquestionably his Gesckichte der deulschen Spracke, 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 Geta?, Thracians, Scythians, and many other nations whose languages are known to us only by doubtfully identified, often extremely corrupted remains preserved by Greek and Latin authors. It need hardly be said that Grimm s results have been greatly modified by the wider range of comparison and im proved methods of investigation which now characterize linguistic science, while, on the other hand, 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 been ever written. We now come to his purely philological work, of which his famous Deutsche Grammatik was the outcome. We have already seen how slowly and with what difficulty he attained a sound method of etymological and grammatical investigation. Nevertheless the time was a favourable one for his work. The persevering 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 Hickes, at the beginning of the last century, and partly carried out by him in his Thesaurus. Ten Kate in Holland h id after wards made valuable contributions to the history and com parison of the Teutonic languages. Even Grirnm himself did not at first intend to include all the languages in his grammar; but he soon found that Old High German postu lated 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 Scandi navia 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 inflexions of all these languages, together with a general introduction, in which he vindicated the importance of a historical study of the German language against the a priori, quasi-philosophical methods then in vogue. Iu 1822 this volume appeared in a second edition really a totally new work, for, as Grimm himself says in the preface, it cost him little reflexion to mow down the first crop to the ground. The wide distance between the two stages of Grimm s development in these two edi tions is significantly shown by the fact that while the first eJition gives only the inflexions, in the second volume phonology takes up no less 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 distinguishes science from dilettanteism; up to Grimm s time philology was as it still is in England 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 Rask. Rask was born two years later than Grimm, but his remarkable precocity gave him somewhat the start. Even in his first edition Grimm s Icelandic paradigms are based entirely on Rusk s grammar, and in his second edition he has relied almost entirely cm Rask for Old English. His debt to Rask can only be estimated at its true value by comparing his treat ment of Old English in the two editions ; the difference is very great. Thus in the first edition he declines day, da^yes, plural dcegas, 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-correspond ence iu the different languages, especially in the vowel?, those more fleeting elements of speech which had hitherto been ignored by etymologists. This leads us to a question which has been the subject of much controversy, Who discovered Grimm s law 1 The 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 Ihre, who established a considerable number of &quot;literarum permutationes,&quot; such as l&amp;gt; for /, with the examples Icera = 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