The surname of Jacob and Wilhelm, the brothers who collected Grimm’s Fairy Tales, was Grimm.
Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm and Wilhelm Carl Grimm were German scholars, linguists, and folklorists. They are commonly known together as the Brothers Grimm. Their best-known publication, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, helped preserve and popularize stories such as “Cinderella,” “Rapunzel,” and “Hansel and Gretel.”
The brothers were born in Hanau, in the Landgraviate of Hesse-Kassel. Jacob was born in 1785, and Wilhelm followed in 1786. Although they are strongly associated with fairy tales, their scholarly work also covered Germanic languages, mythology, law, and dictionaries.
The word “Grimm” is a family name, not a description of the stories’ mood. In English, “grim” can mean harsh or frightening, which sometimes leads readers to assume the name was chosen because of the tales’ darker elements. The association is coincidental: it was simply their surname.