Doomed to Fail - Ep 152 - Grammar Nerds for the Ages: The Brothers Grimm

Episode Date: November 13, 2024

Meine Damen und Herren gather round as we tell the tale of die Brüder Grimm! Two brothers in a pre-unified Germany who spent their days writing a German dictionary and grammar laws that were meant to be broken! Oh, and they also spent lots of time writing down stories so they didn't get lost! That's the part that you'll know them for! Dig out your Lederhosen, follow a path into the forest, and plan to live happily ever after with us and The Brothers Grimm! Source:The Brothers Grimm by Ann Schmiesinghttps://www.amazon.com/Brothers-Grimm-Biography-Ann-Schmiesing/dp/0300221754   Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

It's a matter of the people of the state of California versus Hortonthal James Simpson, case number B.A.019. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Hi, Taylor. How Fars? Happy whatever day this is. Whatever. Whatever.

Who cares? You know what? Who cares? We're chill people. We're really cool. Yeah. Cool. Welcome to Doom to Fail.

I am Taylor, joined by Fars. who are the podcast that brings you history most notorious disasters and epic failures twice a week, every week. And today, it's my turn. And I think we're on fairy tales. We are. This is my fairytale one that I've been wanting to read this book, and I have it

here on my phone. Oh, I'll tell you about a second. I'm going to make you guess. Hold, please. Let me just, I'm going to just, I mean, there's like one other person, you know. So, one thing that I always talk about is how there's no mythical past. Like, like, Putin thinks there's like a mythical Russia that was like perfect, you know, and trying to get back to that. Right. But trying to get back to a past that was perfect, you know.

And like, that is not a thing. The past was never perfect. The future is not going to be perfect. Like, that will never happen. But people will continue to try to do that by, like, looking into. to into the past and like trying to figure out like what people were like and what they were thinking and there's different ways that we can try to talk about that like what stories were they telling what was their language like um how did they express themselves with language

things like that so um real quick Taylor on that note can I interject for a second yeah yeah so I was listening to this episode of search engine and um they always cover really fun interesting topics and the one they did this week was about democracy and the birth of democracy in Athens and they're like the guy who was like the one talking about it was like hey like well this version we have in our minds of like the Athenian democracy it's it wasn't like that like we had that now we would like be shocked and one of the things that they did that was really fun I thought was once a year they would they would pick one person in Athens and it was part of this process called like the ostracized ostracos or something I forgot what it was but it's where the word ostracizing

comes from we don't think one person like he's to blame for our problems and they would cast them out of the city and was like what the what did I do let's do it again that's so funny I love that what I mean what the fuck nothing it's a mess it always has been that's really funny yeah that poor person um maybe they maybe they deserved it I don't know um so let's talk about some people who are obsessed with the mythic medieval German past very specifically um German stories German language, and they wrote it all down, a lot of oral traditions. So they wrote books like, or stories like, I have it right here that you might know. The Frog Prince.

I'm never even talking about Disney. Rapunzel. There's two of them. I'm making you guess. Hansel and Gretel. Oh, are you, am I supposed to be talking right now? Yeah, yeah, I guess. Oh, what am I get?

The German fairy tales? Yeah, no, guess who wrote these? Oh, oh. Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Rebel Silskin. The Brothers Grim? Yes, it's the Brothers Grim. Look at this beautiful book I have. I have this beautiful Brothers Grimm book that I read, I've been reading a little bit of.

A little bit. It's from 1954. It's gorgeous. It's probably in the library. Yeah, let's talk about the Brothers Grimm. And one thing that I learned that isn't necessarily true, but in part if you one of the ways used to say and they lived happily ever after would be had they not died like they would live happily after had they not died eventually you know um which is fun and very german

was that invented by them uh no so here let me tell you what happened so the brothers grim oh so for this i read the book the brothers grim by anne schmising and it's like the first english version biography of them in like a hundred years and it's from it just came out like last week so that's the one that I've been like wanting to read because I was like what's up with them? What's their deal?

I also kind of thought of them further in the past than like they are but they do most of their work in like the mid-1800s. There are photographs of them like dude that makes sense though because like Germany like we think it's like an old country it's not it's not

no country like that's like how Hitler was able to do what he was able to do because it was like just like a bunch of disparate little, but almost like tribes people that like kind of came together. Absolutely. And the Brothers Grimm are going to tie into that idea of like a perfect German past

and a perfect German like we deserve this because the German people have of this thing. Exactly right. So the brothers Grimms are named Jakob and Wilhelm. Jacob was born on or Jakub Ludwig Carl Grimm was born on January 4th, 1785. A year later his brother Wilhelm Carl Grim was born on February 24th, 1786.

So they are very, very close, and you are exactly right. They live in, like, in Hanna, which is in Hesse, part of Germany, part of the Holy Roman Empire when they're born. So their king and the people that are ruling them are, like, part of this Roman, Holy Roman Empire that goes to France, goes to England, like, all of the kings and queens are all, like, related and intermarry. and like we've talked about that before like that is all happening around around them like as they're born also just like you know it's the french revolution's happening the american revolution is happening when they're born um they'll be ruled germany uh it's exactly right i wrote this down we've talked about this before but germany is not a thing yet it'll be ruled by kings until unification in 1871 um and that's when it will become um like one germany out of like 200 tribes of people like you said um They live in Hesse, which produced the Hesians member. The Hesians came to the United States to fight with the British. Do you remember that? They hired them.

So the British hired the Hesians and they were mean as shit and they were come and they were just like fight and they didn't give a shit. You know, they're just like mercenary hired guys. That's kind of how like I don't know what it is and like it's probably partially my ignorance. But there's something about like the Germanic people in this way that you're describing it that's just. so metal they just sound like the most brutal vicious like just I know I kind of like I think in Dan Carlin sometimes he'll talk about like being in Rome and then all of a sudden like the Germanic tribes come down and they're like a foot taller than everyone and they all have like red and blonde hair and they're just like bra you know yeah coming to kill you um yeah

it's pretty metal and that's too who these people are so the the Hesians Hesse is a very rough land. It's a lot of forests. It's not a lot of place to grow food. So they're like rougher, poorer people than the rest of like the eventual unified Germany. Also, the Brothers Grimm are very anti-Semitic in their stories, in their lives. Do we even have to say that?

I just wanted to say it. I'm not going to talk about it a ton, but like that exists in their thing, which we could have assumed you didn't have to say, but I said to say it anyway. So there were two out of nine children, six of those children survived to adulthood. They have one brother who's kind of a dope who's always kind of, they have to always take care of. He like can't get a job. And then they have another brother who's actually a pretty successful painter and a sister that they love. So, but they're the two obviously most successful kids in their family.

They were pretty well off until their father passed away. So when the father passed away, the boys were young. And they're like pretty much exactly the same age, just a year apart. And their grandparents and aunt were able to give them some money to pay for them to go to school. And pretty early on, Jakub is going to be the patriarch. He's the oldest boy and he's to take care of everyone when he's like a teen after his parents, his parents die. They cannot be understood how much time they spend together. They spend all of their lives together.

they spend they sleep in the same bed when they're kids when they go to college they sleep in the same room two beds two desks later they share the same house like they will always almost always live together um they're they're different in personalities but like they need each other they like they like the menend brothers they're like the men's brothers later they'll take jobs where they'll be like the salary is like this much a year it's for both of you you figure out how to how to divide it up you know like they're hired together at places. It's kind of cute, actually.

Yeah. Like, they're just like, they're just like besties. Like, one of them, I'll tell you we'll get married. And then the other one just loves with them. They all, like, have a great time. They just, like, love it. So, yeah. They went to university in Marburg, Germany.

And their villain, villain origin story is a lot like mine, which is about being poor in college. And how mad that makes me. So they were pissed. Like, they were pissed. They were, like, the rich people were getting scholarships. The rich people were, like, getting these opportunities that they weren't getting. And they were just, like, very not happy about that. But they did find a mentor when they were in Marburg called Friedrich Karl von Savigny, and he was a law historian.

So he was doing some things that are pretty interesting. Like his main thing is that laws cannot be universal across different peoples or different times because people are different. And you like understand things differently. And you can't like a little bit like you can't judge people based on the laws of the past but you also have to like be more um a little more like fluid with it um and so he was trying to see laws and understand the law and its historical context it's like very heady but like that's what he was he was thinking of and they were also thinking as well like how do we understand german and german history in its historical context it's got to be so hard without like the

internet or like oh my god i know because because just from my episode i was like so what was happening in the U.S. when this happened, what was happening in Vietnam? You can't look at anything in isolation on the global. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And for me, that was a pain in the ass. And I'm like, chat to BT in the entire internet and my disposal. I know. Exactly. No, you have to like, and you have to like have to like have your own library. And like, I love it. You know, I love it when I'm like, oh, I actually own this book and I get to like reference it. But like, you know, I don't have to. No. You know, I'll look good internet. Um, so that's their mentor. So they're thinking about contextualizing history.

And while this is also happening, Napoleon is happening. So it's Holy Roman Empire being torn apart by the Napoleonic wars. People are poor. They are hungry. They are starving. All of the things. People will say that the grandbrothers are part of the post-Napoleonic German awakening. So after that being like, we need to be unified now.

Like we need to be our own country. So people were like, we are about to lose potentially our national identity and our history. And the way that they were thinking about Germans, like I said, there were like 200 principalities that eventually became what Germany was in the 1870s. But they're looking at German history in two ways. And their stories, obviously, that's what we know them for, and also in their language.

So in the German language, when they say the German people, the folk, all the things that you're going to hear Nazis say, they don't mean a person who has a certain biological whatever they mean the people who speak german and have always spoken german even though germans always been like a little bit different obviously their dialects so that's what they mean is that is that real so like they all these different groups of people these like tribal people they literally all had the same language it was very similar so like i don't know if you ever heard like um like there's like high german middle german and low german so there's like different ways like people would like you would like write

more formally and high German, you would like write, you would maybe speak more to people like middle German. So it's like different things. Um, what song is in Hungary like the wolf? They say higher like German. Oh yeah. You know. Um, so there's like, that's like the Hokkdoche that you speak in a certain area. So you can like kind of understand each other. But like the yes, I think. I think the answer is like they all spoke some form of what German is. And that's also what where the grandbrothers are going to spend a lot of their time is figuring out like where the words came from and um how like you can interpret people's stories based on like the version of the german they were using linguistics is hard i was like kind of i was like kind of i was reading a little bit

about it was like jesus christ i don't know any this is very very complicated it's fascinating it's like it's like the second you start peeling a layer of like any topic in the world yeah you realize you could dedicate 14 lifetimes that thing and never understand that completely a thousand percent yeah totally i could write like and we're i'm trying to do this in a week you know give me a break people um so after university yakov went to paris for a job but that was the only time they were ever apart but his family was so poor back in in hessa and he went back and stayed with them them again but they have to have a job and so jacob gets a job as a library with the King of Westphalia.

So the King of Westphalia in this time, guess who it is? I want to say something Volk-I-N because of the Westphalia brand, but... That's funny. No, it's Napoleon's brother, Jerome. His name is not Jerome. It's Jerome, J-E-R-O-M-E. But yeah, right? That's funny.

Jerome Napoleon? No, Jerome Bonaparte. I'm so an idiot. You're fine. So obviously, because, like, you remember, Napoleon gave all of his siblings things. And actually, our friend Nadine suggested that I talk about Napoleon's sister more. And I bought a book that I need to read about her. But, but, yeah, so Napoleon's brother not qualified to be king of anything, is king of Westphalia.

And he has a library, and Jacob is his librarian. So there's not a lot to do. Like, they're not, like, reading books all the time. So he gets to spend time hunting for stories so they don't get lost to history. So he doesn't, they don't necessarily find these stories. Like folklore is a new word to entertain. They find them to understand like the people in the past. Does that kind of make sense?

Sort of. So they don't want these things to be lost to history. So they're not like, oh, we're going to make children really happy with these fairy tales. They're like, these myths define who we are as a people. We should write them down because this is the, the people are going to, forget them you know yeah yeah yeah that makes sense it kind of reminds me you know what's funny is what listen is 1 99% invisible at my entire dialogue now is just other podcasts but it's it's the worst you got to get someone to talk about us I'll try to forget that out but they do this one

episode on how you convey for 10,000 years that a site is dangerous like a nuclear dump site you know and they were like the only things that like had persisted over time are fairy tales and um folk songs and then so they like anyways i forgot how it ended it but like that was basically the conclusion they read was like a sign can change language changes like all like our understanding of skull and crossbone has changed over time so you can't have that persist forever but like a fairy tale and like a song like that lasts forever it doesn't have to be perfect it just has to make the idea, you know? Exactly. Just how to get him made the idea.

Yeah. So it's also very similar to Poggio Brockolini, who talked about before. In the Renaissance, finding the, um, all of like Roman work and all of the ancient Greek work. And he went out to find them physically, remember? He would go to like monasteries and find them. But the grandbrothers, they weren't, these stories were not written down. They were in people's brains. So they would hear them and then write them down.

It's going to be the beginning of a term called Heidelberg Romanticism. So they're like, you know, trying to, again, also romanticize the past, but then like get this stuff written down on paper. One of the things that they found is, and they made, they published is the Nebel Leung Leed, Nebel Lungen Lead, which is like an epic poem in German. It begins with, in English, this is what it begins with, in ancient tales, many marvels are told us of renowned heroes worthy of praise of great hard, ship of joys, festivities, of weeping and lamenting, a bold warrior's battles. Now you may hear such marvels told. So it's like the German Ulysses Iliad kind of story, that they were able to like write down and like make that popular again.

It's a mistake to say it's just old women they got stories from. They got stories from a lot of people and a lot of them were women, but a lot of them were younger, like aristocratic women who had like been told. these stories by their mothers and grandmothers, you know, throughout, throughout generations. And when the grandbrothers wrote them down, something that is interesting is that these are oral traditions. And so you can, obviously, when you're telling a story, I'm using my hands, use your hands, use your face, you like do all these things.

Like the other day at Halloween at school, their teacher jumped scared, the kids telling them a scary story. And like, Florence cried. hilarious so like that an oral tradition of a story is very descriptive because of the storyteller but it's written down it's not as descriptive so when you say things like oh she had like really big bright eyes you have to like make it more descriptive in the words so they did change the stories a lot for like the audience and to make more descriptive but the general idea is still there you know and like I said they really were doing this as a scholarly pursuit so what those

necessarily like four children, but children, like, wanted it. So they, um, change some things. They were told, like, you should change this. I don't know if my version has this, but they also at one point did a little bit of a preface. That's like, this isn't necessarily for kids, use your own judgment, which I think still stands. Like, if you are a parent, like, you know, use your own judgment. Well, they're darker. I remember them. They're generally like darker stories. Yeah. They're like a little bit darker. And they made them a little bit less dark there's some things that are a little bit more um adult oriented like repunzel changed a couple times like initially the you know repunzel you know so

repunzel initially like the very first version of the story the woman the witch or whatever who had her in the tower notice that repunzel's clothes were getting tight because she was pregnant and that's how she knew that the guy was coming up there um and then in the first version of the book that I have from the 1950s, they, Rapunzel gets kicked out of the tower. The prince falls out of the tower. His eyes get poked out.

He crawls through the woods, trying to find like berries and stuff. And eventually she finds him. She cries. Her tears bring his eyesight back, which happens in the Disney movie. Her tears bring him back to life. But when he has eyesight back and sees her again,

she has twins. like she has babies she's been taken care of so like that stuff is like alluded to differently in different ways you know I mean even the concept of Rapunzel is kind of scary like when you're a kid you're like wait someone can keep me trapped somewhere for the rest of my life like yeah yeah it's called solitary could find it happens everywhere watch yourself um so they did that um there's also like a lot of work like you just said like this could be your job is talking about this forever But, like, some psychologists have tried to, like, put what they were doing into different, like, into Jungian psychology, into Fordian psychology. Some people say it's because, like, oh, they hated, they hated women. So everything had to be manly and chivalrous. Like, they, or, like, why is a, again, like, why is a stepmother always bad? Like, those are questions that are, like, good to ask, but they didn't originate those ideas, you know?

they were like taking them from other people right so i don't know i'm not going to armchair analyze the grim brothers we don't have time for that um so but one thing that we should talk about is that so the way that the nazis took these stories and made it a thing was like this is our mythical past things were look how brave we were look how brave the german people can be and then my german people obviously like the Grim Brothers meant people who speak German and then they meant the you know people who are ethnically German but during the Nazi regime every house had had to have a copy of it of the fairy tale book like the main book that they wrote so they had they were like a collection and then even after after World War II Allied Occupied

Germany banned the book of fairy tales for a while because it had been like used as like a a way to like a propaganda tool to get people to be like yeah you're totally right like look at this mythical past when we were badass as shit let's go back to that

you know obviously in a terrible way that's that's all really all of it's kind of weird like yeah using that as Nazi propaganda because I think

yeah because I mean you were just saying we hear these stories of like the Germans who are really brave and really strong you know stuff like that they're like hell yeah but I don't think of that

when I think of Rapal no not Rapunzel but like the other ones like other ones like there's you know a lot of it is about like you know people coming to the rescue to other people and things like that interesting okay

I believe but I should read wait sure does that mean it was banned in the US too No, it was being in Germany. Yeah. Interesting. But it's not anymore because people are like, calmed down their fairy tales.

Whatever. So at some point, Wilhelm has heart problems. He's the younger brother, and they sent him away to a hospital, and they gave him electric shock therapy to help with his heart problems. I mean, he's going to get his mind off his heart.

Yeah, which I don't know if it feels like not good for your heart. But then he did end up going back and they were together again. So it was just one time when they were apart. so they're working in this library for for napoleon's brother and they don't have a lot of stuff to do so they are writing and they were in 1812 they published a first volume of children and household tales which is what I was saying the book that that I have that mine says grimm's fairy tales but it's the same thing and there's others you know others is a lot of different versions that they'll publish in their lives one thing that they talk about a lot in trying to find these stories the difference between natural poetry and artistic poetry. So they didn't like, like, their rhyming sort of poetry, but they saw fairy tales as, like, a natural poetry with, like, a storytelling thing.

Like, they would be like, we're storytellers, you know, how people overuse that word. You know, it's funny. As you're talking, I'm thinking, like, was Dr. Seuss deeper than I thought it was? Was that, like, something about, like, history as well? I mean, the laurx is about, yeah, the laurx is about cutting down the forests. Like, it's all about, like, environmental policy and stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

man so many layers of this onion yeah nothing is nothing is face value i feel like you know um so they are working library they get honorary doctorates from the university that they attended in a couple other universities and they're kind of annoyed by that because they're like you know you know like you guys are kind of jerks to me when we were there but now i've honorary doctorates thanks um they do other stories as well so they're famous for the german ones but they also wrote or compiled Norse stories, Irish stories, English stories. So they have others as well that they did. Jakob will never get married, but Wilhelm does get married.

He marries a woman named Henriette Dorothea Dorkin and call her Dorkin in the book I read. But they have known her since childhood. She actually is one of the people who told them some of the stories that they ended up publishing. And she sounds great. They were very happy. They all three lived together. And they lived in a town called Gottingen. Gortingen? Oh, my God. G-O-T-T-I-N-G-E-N. And they worked at the university. And it was in Hanover. So like a different

principality than Hesse, but it was a different kingdom. But they, but they were like, cool, we like it here. Everything was, everything was fine. Until 1837, there's a new king. The new king is named Ernest Augustus, the king of Hanover. He is the, he is the fifth, son of George the third of the United Kingdom and Hanover, which it makes I didn't even look at the thing, but essentially, 1937 is

the year that Queen Victoria comes to the throne in England and the way that the laws were written, a woman could not rule over these German areas. So, you mean 1837, right? Yeah, 1837, sorry. Yeah, 1837. So a woman

couldn't be queen of Hanover. It had to be a man. So somehow, this guy got to be king it's like he was like 19th in line to be king wait what does queen victoria have to do with germany well she was part it was all part of like that holy roman empire and it was a lot of like that like intermarrying between those people because the same time it's like it's after the french revolution but remember how like katham the great was a cousin of one guy and remember how like the czar alexander him and King George were cousins.

No, but I'm saying was, was it part of the United Kingdom? I think kind of. Weird, okay. I think they just like, they like ruled over like these different little principalities in certain ways. Because also like post-Napoleon, so they're like trying to figure out who's in charge of everything. It's a lot. Right.

But anyway, this guy's king. And he decides to immediately dissolve the parliament and dissolve the constitution. And he wanted all of the. civil servants, which included professors, which the Grims were, to sign an oath of allegiance to him. And they said, no. So the Grim brothers and five other professors become known as the Gottengang. Gottengan? That's hard to say. The Gottengang seven. So they are a group of seven professors from this town who said no to the king. And they were kicked out and they sent back to Hesse without jobs, without any money. Later, they're going to be celebrated as a

model for a more liberal Germany and there are statutes of them like all over and people were like talk about how their defiance of this king who was like dissolve the constitution was like very courageous and though there's like a one weird statue where like there's no one in it is just horse footprints and people are like pissed about it because you can't even see the horse footprints and you're like just to do a statue of a horse was there symbolism behind it Yeah, I don't know, I don't know, but it was a funny thing. So politically, they were centrist. The Grims described the liberal idea of equality akin to cutting down all the mountains and burning all the forests and just like flattening everything.

So they were, but they definitely didn't want like whatever king, the new king wanted. So they're back in Hesse, which is great because that's where they're from. They'd rather be there anyway. and they have to start working now to stop the censorship of like this guy and other kings who are coming in and trying to censor like you know different books for different reasons and it's an interesting time in like the written word because the literacy rate in like German areas is going to go up from like 10% to 50% in like 10 years so a lot of people learning how to read because books are becoming more accessible you know for them. Yeah. And that's when the grammas become obsessed with German grammar. Because that's really what they spent the bulk of their work on is like German grammar and words.

They like didn't think that grammar needed to be ruled in like a certain like a really stiff way. They thought people could be more expressive with what they were saying. So they were taking like the different types of German and figuring out like what different words mean in the historical context. And seeing German the language as like a. living organism constantly changing which is fun um and with that i hope i can change some of their stories as well it changed the meaning based on like the different words they were using um they are publishing their grammar books and books on german history and they need to like change the type setting all the time because they have like new letters you know how german has like

other letters like there's like yeah yeah it looks like almost musical notes mixed with like regular yeah like the two s is like the big musical note looking for thing. Yeah. So they were doing that. One thing that I thought was fun, did you know that in German, you capitalize every noun? No. So like if I said like, oh, Fars has a microphone, I would capitalize Fars and microphone, even though it's not a proper noun, it's not the beginning of the sentence. And we still do that today. But the Grims were like, that's dumb. Let's stop doing it. And they would publish their books without capitalizing every noun, but that didn't catch on. People were like, no. everything changes yeah um so they go back to hessa they're working as librarians they're kind of bored they have to keep like at one point there's like a fire or a flood or something they have to save a bunch of books and they have to copy them over and over again just like not super fun um and that's when they start working on their german dictionary so could you imagine writing a dictionary no it sounds like these people were not even storytellers they were like yeah they're like they're professors yeah exactly

well they are yes exactly just like us um so they got to f before they died and the german dictionary would be finished about a hundred years after their death but like um in the book that i read they mentioned that like someone who wrote an english dictionary one of the first english ones under the word dull they wrote writing a dictionary that's an example of something that's dull you're like of course um it was mostly jacob's passion he was the more like introverted of the two he's the one that didn't get married you know he was the older one so he was like, I love this, but like, Wilhelm was like, we could also listen to music and look at art.

And Jacob was like, nah, I just want to think about grammar all the time, you know? Yeah, you seem really dedicated. Yeah. So there's a law called Grimm's law that Jacob in, like, popularized. Like someone else had thought of it, but he's the one who like made it popular. But it's, this is where I was like reading about linguistics and very confused. But he has like a law of like the way that you start and stop German words that like mean different things. It's very confusing, but that's what he was thinking about.

He was thinking about linguistics, thinking about language. Eventually, they will finish their lives in Berlin. They're going to move to Berlin. Berlin is starting to become a more modern city. It doesn't have like the Gothic medieval things that like little German towns do. They live in like an apartment building that's like pretty new. They join parliament for a term, but they don't stay. But they kind of like hang out when people are like having debate.

and things, and they'll, like, you know, get up and say something, bring in the context, talk about the German people, history, all those things. They had a library about 8,000 books, like we were saying, like, you have to have the books at your house. So they would do things, like, so they had, they, this, I saw this again and again, like, you know, they shared a bed when they were kids. Then they shared a room with two beds and two desks when they were in school. And then later they have two studies that are next to each other, and they would, like, run back and forth with the different books, you know, to be. be like, oh, there's this and this and this. And like, we have to keep writing and do these things. It was kind of like a mad rush to finish, but like they didn't not finish their dictionary. But eventually it got finished and like obviously there are dictionary. So yay. Wilhelm, the younger one, died in Berlin of infection at the age of 73 on December 16th, 1859. He was a younger one.

He was the one who was married and had the four kids. The older one, Jakub, died a couple years later in 1863 on September 20th. It says he died from disease. Who knows what that means? He was 78, so, you know, he died. And he was like the much more studious of the two. Of their 8,000 book library, a lot of it was donated. So a lot of it is in different universities in Germany, along with a lot of their papers.

And there are, you know, several, like, grim museums around Germany as well that do different levels of, like, warning parents it could get scary you know and like there's one when people go to and they're disappointed it's because it's all about linguistics which is fair because that's that's hard good for them for like caring enough to yeah do all that I know and it always makes me so nervous like I think it was George Washington who would like have someone ride be with him all the time to just copy all of his papers and like try to get them to safety you know because like we only know what survives yeah you know so that like that idea of being like oh we have to you know rate we have these books we write things down but like there's only seven of them

or like whatever you know it's gonna as things like progress and now now you know there's obviously a ton of information and easy to get and copy but then it was hard you know um i will say these towns in germany are the most charming I know. It's like, God, they're so cute. So cute.

Germany is so cute. We went to, not in Germany, but in Austria, we went to the town from the Sound of Music where they got married in the Sound of Music

and it's just like, oh my God, you're like in the Alps. There's like a lake. There's always like beautiful little houses. And it's like a fairy tale. And that's why, you know?

Yeah. Very, very, very, yeah, it's really interesting. made me think about a lot of things like the i mean yeah because it's so simplistic to look at like little red riding hood it's like oh it's like a story you tell your kids and it's like there's like a whole backstory behind it and it kind of dovetails with like everything else that was going on in world history as well yeah totally also parking back to our conversation or what i brought up last week was how i got into and watched and finished um the three body

problem oh yeah how is it so it's pretty good but the start the reason all the bad things happened was because of little red riding hood oh really spoiler alert the guy tells aliens about little red riding hood and they have no concept of like lying to each other or like telling a fit and they realize that they can't trust humanity and they have to destroy us and it's like oh my god this all happened because of you brothers grim fair that's fun yeah because storytelling is also lying a little bit yeah because you're just making shit up but then like why are you making up

making up I'm sorry a certain thing at a certain time you're doing that because of everything happening around you you know yeah that's cool fun well thanks for sharing that

is this is this the end of the series or are we doing more I might do more later I might take a break I'm trying to find something weird to do next week like weirer and then maybe come back to it

I like it. It's something weird. Yeah. Yeah. Read some stories. They're quite fun. Very cool. And I'm assuming based off of the conversation, earlier, we have no listener mail.

Indeed, we have no listener mail. I do want to say thank you to our friend Kiara, who reached out to make sure that I was okay. When I left social media in a huff. If you do have anything to say, please write to us at Dumbentafelpod at gmail.com and we're head to us on the socials. Yeah, Dunditafelpod. We're on YouTube. We're on all sorts of places.

We're all over. We're everywhere. Tell your friends. Tell your friends. Oh, I do. I just, I'm looking at my email now. Like, not like any more many emails in the last 10 seconds, but the learning. their league starts up again next week and because it took a break I don't know it has like breaks and I'm in a league higher than I should be because of like a number reason and I just like laughed really hard because I'm like they're probably like we really want to kick you out but we don't kick people out for being dumb so now you're in this league that's like going to be even harder so you're going to be further to the end and great like you're stupid so I'm so excited to do it again somebody always has to be on both sides of the bell curve yeah yeah they need they need me to bring everybody down yes

Um, sweet. Well, if that's it, we can go ahead and cut off. Anything else you want to say, Taylor? No, thank you first. Sweet. We'll go ahead and cut it out.