The Brothers Grimm is the popular name by which the brothers Jacob (1785 – 1863) and Wilhelm (1786 – 1589) are known.  They were the second and third of nine children from a prominent family in the town of Hanau; their father Philip was a magistrate and their mother Dorothea the daughter of a city councilman.  The untimely death of their father in their pre-teens created financial strain and forced the family to rely on support from her mother’s relatives and the brothers into assuming adult responsibilities. They were able to attend the prestigious Friedreichgymnasium and then the University of Marburg, where a law professor inspired an interest in history and philology that led to study of medieval German literature.  In 1808 Jacob was appointed court librarian to the King of Westphalia and arranged for Wilhelm to join him as assistant, and at the urging of German romantic Clemens Brentano they began to collect folk tales, which they published first in 1812, followed quickly by a collection of German legends and a volume of early German literary history. In 1830 they moved to the University of Gottingen in the Kingdom of Hanover, where both became professors and Jacob served as head librarian.  They established a discipline in German studies and Jacob published the well-regarded German Mythology.  During a period of popular political unrest they were asked and refused to sign an oath of allegiance to King Ernest Augustus I and were dismissed. Relying on the support of friends they began work on a lifelong project to write a definitive German dictionary, which continued after finding teaching posts 1840 at the University of Berlin. The brothers were elected to the civil parliament for a brief period after the Revolutions of 1848, but became disillusioned and returned to private life, where Jacob published The History of the German Language and both worked on the dictionary until their deaths.