Johann Wilhelm Wolf (Cologne 1817 – Hofheim 1855) grew up with a Romantic interest in his native city’s historical past and religious life, and from his school days onwards collected religious and secular legends. Little is known of his university studies; his reading of the Grimms’ folk tales, Deutsche Sagen and Deutsche Mythologie, inspired an ambition (as it did with Hoffmann von Fallersleben and Franz Josef Mone) to explore the nearby Low Countries for similar materials. His avowed aim was to trace and document Germanic culture on Belgian soil, and from c.1840 Wolf explored both written and oral sources to this end. Niederländische Sagen was published in 1843, with a glowing dedication to Leopold von Ranke. A follow-up, Deutsche Märchen und Sagen, appeared in 1845 with a dedication to Jan Frans Willems. The title used “Deutsch” in its greater-German sense, as including Flemish, Dutch, and Frisian. His work was warmly received in both the Netherlands and in Belgium, where he was made a corresponding member of a number of Flemish scholarly societies
From 1843 Wolf ran a periodical dedicated to legend research, Wodana, Museum voor nederduitsche oudheidskunde (“W., Museum for Netherlandic antiquities”) and published treatises on traces of the cult of Wodan and Thor in the Low Countries, extrapolating from modern folklore in the manner of Grimm’s mythology. A more explicitly political periodical was established in 1845: De Broederhand, tijdschrift voor hoogduitsche, nederduitsche en noordsche letterkunde (“The brother’s hand: magazine for High German, Nether German and Nordic literature”), with the express aim of embedding the cultural interests of the Flemish Movement in a greater-German whole (“Nether German” here, as a linguistic category, vaguely encompassed Flemish, Dutch, and Rhinelandic or Saxon Low German). Wolf also contributed a Flemish-themed contribution to Wilhelm Stricker’s Pan-Germanic Germania, Archiv zur Kenntniß des deutschen Elements in allen Ländern der Erde (1845).
Established in Gent, Wolf married another German expatriate resident there, Marie von Plönnies, daughter of the well-known poet Luise von Plönnies. After 1848, the German entanglements of Flemish nationalism waned, and the family moved to Hessen-Darmstadt, where Wolf continued to collect oral material and hunt for the traces of pagan Germanic worship. His Deutsche Hausmärchen appeared in 1851, and Hessische Sagen in 1853. By this time, his Catholic commitment began to outflank his mythological interests, leading to a number of devotional publications from 1851 on, mainly on the Virgin Mary. He founded a book series for popular devotion in 1852, Katholische Trösteinsamkeit, which merged his nationally German and his Ultramontanist traditionalism.
Wolf popularized Grimm’s mythological interpretation of popular traditions in his Die deutsche Götterlehre: Ein Hand- und Lesebuch für Schule und Haus: Nach Jacob Grimm und anderen (1852), and started a series of Beiträge zur deutschen Mythologie in the same year, dedicated to Jacob Grimm. In 1853 he founded the Zeitschrift für deutsche Mythologie und Sittenkunde, initially as a repository for material collected from informants in the field and to give a broader oral-folkloric base to mythological studies. It attracted a large number of collaborators both from the older philological tradition of mythological studies and from the younger, emerging tradition of mythologically-interested folklore scholars.
In 1854 Wolf was struck down by a melancholic crisis, which deepened into mental illness. He died in a sanatorium in Hofheim in 1855; his friend and adept Wilhelm Mannhardt took over the direction of the Zeitschrift and finished the second volume of his Beiträge (1872).
