Faerie Tale Theatre Reviews: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

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“For I’ll be your prince, and you’ll be my…dwarf.”
– The Prince’s tune after receiving a surprise audience

I have a confession to make: I feel like I skimped out on Thumbelina’s origins last month. Had circumstances not prevented me from doing so, I would have done a deep dive into other thumb-sized characters in folklore around the world, how they fed into her creation, and the similarities and differences between them. Well this month’s review isn’t gonna leave the history buffs high and dry, baby. I’m going the full hog with Snow White, one of the most iconic fairy tales with a rich, detailed historical background to match, so strap in!

The Fairest One of All might just hold the record for most variants of her story worldwide. In the Aarne-Thompson-Uther classification of folklore, she has a category all to herself! Richilde, Gold-tree and Silver-tree, Myrsina, The Young Slave, Bella Venezia, Bright Star of Ireland, Hajir, La petite Toute-Belle, Der zauberspiegel, Rose-Neige, Lé Roi Pan, La hermosa hijastra, and Anghjulina are but a few folktales from around the globe that retell Snow White’s adventures. Each one shares the tropes common to the story we know (a jealous queen, a magical fairness-rating artifact, multiple assassination attempts, poisoned objects, glass coffins, a prince partly responsible for waking her, etc.) though the details vary. For example, the dwarfs who take Snow White in aren’t always dwarfs, or even miners. Sometimes they’re robbers, sometimes they’re the twelve months personified, sometimes they’re purely magical characters like djinns and dragons!

The biggest revelation one can take away from these retellings, however, is that Snow White usually isn’t menaced by a wicked stepmother but her own mother. Indeed, the German oral tale recorded by the Brothers Grimm in 1812 had the evil Queen be Snow White’s birth mother, until they revised it seven years later to keep the fable more in line with their patriarchal beliefs. See, Jacob and Wilhelm envisioned motherhood as something pure and infallible. They didn’t want to rock the familial boat by suggesting mothers could be capable of spite and cruelty. So they pinned the queen’s jealousy and murderous tendencies on a figure that was already on the outs with the family unit, one seen as new, unfamiliar and untrustworthy: the stepmother. It also doesn’t help that the Queen is the most proactive character in the story, spinning the narrative that clever women with agency and authority are evil, self-serving and dangerous. Between this, Cinderella, and Hansel and Gretel, it’s not much of a stretch to say that the Grimms are the source of the evil stepmother/queen stereotype that’s plagued so many narratives and even negatively colors real women to this day.

Why no, I’m not at all bitter that everything Hilary warned us about could have been avoided if everyone listened to her instead of The Former Guy yelling about periods and emails, thanks for asking.

As for her origins, Snow White and her assorted fair counterparts have roots going all the way back to Ovid’s Metamorphoses. One story featured within, the legend of Chione (whose name translates to “Snow”, by the way) is about a woman described as the most beautiful in the land, which earns her the enmity of the goddess Diana and the lust of gods Apollo and Mercury. Apollo visits Chione disguised as an old woman and…has his way with her, as deities do (blegh). One could also draw parallels to Adam and Eve and the infamous apple, if you’re willing to dig that deep.

That’s not the half of it, though. Scholars may have found precedence that the tale of Snow White might be based on actual historical figures. According to German historian Eckhard Sander, young countess Margaretha von Waldeck fits the bill for a real life Snow White. She was renowned for her beauty, raised by her stepmother, her father owned several copper mines that employed child labor (which explains the dwarfs), she had to travel to the next kingdom “seven hills” over for a goodwill mission, and she died tragically young; the rumor circulating the court was that she was poisoned. Another theory that was initially tongue-in-cheek but turned out to have some credibility was that Snow White was inspired by Baroness Maria Sophia Margarethe Catharine of Lohr. Mirrors from Lohr were said to always speak the truth thanks to their high quality, hence the Magic Mirror. One such Lohr mirror that still exists was owned by Maria’s stepmother, Claudia Elizabeth von Reichenstein. Claudia is described as a domineering woman who favored the children from her first marriage. There’s a history of nightshade poison growing in abundance in Lohr, a mining town stood close to there, and the glass coffin may be another nod to the city’s famous glassworks. While there are sound arguments disproving these hypotheses, I find it fascinating that Snow White has taken such root into culture as a whole that historians and folklorists alike are willing to connect the dots between the story and factual occurrences.

When it comes to modern iterations, though, the Disney film is the one that obviously stands foremost in the public consciousness. It’s inspired nearly every adaptation going forward since 1937, and Faerie Tale Theatre’s is no exception…

Faerie Tale Theatre Reviews: Hansel and Gretel

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“Nibble, nibble, little mouse, who’s that nibbling at my house?”
– The Witch, before showing her claws

Hey, the chimney smoke is in the shape of the Witch, I never noticed that until now…

Oh yes, the review.

It’s easy to forget that fairytales weren’t written exclusively for children all those centuries ago. They were recorded with the intention of preserving cultural heritage passed down orally that was on the brink of being lost. While the Brothers Grimm would later re-edit their findings for a younger, more conservative audience, the German folklore they published had no shortage of, ahem, grimness in their pages. This was due in large part to how awful living conditions were in the Middle Ages. It was an era of deadly plagues, drastic income inequality, wisdom and progress continuously curtailed by superstition and theocracy, human rights perpetually being violated, and the constant threat of war and death hanging over people’s heads.

Ah, sure glad we don’t have to deal with all that in these enlightened times.

When it comes to the origins of today’s tale, scholars tend to point towards a massive famine that overtook Europe in the early fourteenth century. Families would turn elder and younger members out of their homes in order to hoard whatever food was left for themselves; there’s even been reports of people resorting to cannibalism. Combine all that with folks’ fear of witches and the unknown lurking in the woods, and you’ve got the ingredients for a deliciously dark story. Even Jacob and Wilhelm, with their penchant for revisionism, couldn’t curb Hansel and Gretel’s eerie undertones. The only major edit they made later on was changing the mother who threw her children to the proverbial wolves into a wicked stepmother; trust me, I’ll have more to say about that when we get to Snow White.

Now there’s a lot one could unpack with Hansel and Gretel and the deeper significance of the motifs it shares with other fairy tales: the forest serving as both sanctuary and no man’s land, the two faces of the mother and witch belonging to the same patriarchal grotesque, the sanctity of the home and how choosing familial loyalty over independence leads to a just reward, but let’s instead focus on the children themselves. Hansel and Gretel’s journey is symbolic of a child’s rocky passage to adulthood, and how they must rely on their wits to survive a cruel world beyond their doorstep. Similar stories of children undergoing a transformative odyssey through the wilderness into maturity can be found in every culture around the world, from Southern India (Kadar and Cannibals) to South Africa (The Story of the Bird that Made Milk). Certain Russian folktales involve a girl cast out into the woods by her cruel stepmother and traveling to a chicken-legged house belonging to the cannibalistic witch Baba Yaga. She completes the impossible tasks the witch sets for her by being kind to the animals, makes a daring escape using the gifts she’s earned, and returns home, ending her stepmother’s reign of terror. Sound familiar? Even Italian author Giambatta Basile, originator of Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty, created his own take on the fable. Nennillo e Nennella starts off with the usual parental abandonment in the woodlands, but goes off the rails into royalty, piracy and some Jonah and the Whale-type shenanigans (seriously, read this one, it’s a hoot). And it doesn’t stop at the written word, either. Wes Craven’s New Nightmare, the seventh entry in the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, explicitly weaves the story of Hansel and Gretel into its themes as part of Craven’s efforts to return to the series back to its terrifying, more serious fantasy origins. The iconic thriller Night of the Hunter also has shades of Hansel and Gretel: two children are forced out of their home by their stepparent and find shelter in the Depression-blighted countryside with an old crone; the twist is the crone becomes their selfless protector.

The point I’m trying to make is, when done right, this fairy tale can be a rich, emotional experience, a dark but thrilling and ultimately triumphant roller coaster ride that captures a child’s view of the world in all its terror and wonder.

And Faerie Tale Theatre…it doesn’t do it right. It hardly comes close, for a number of reasons. But if you like to plod through long depressing morality plays that consistently thrash you over the head with its mean-spiritedness and bleak atmosphere, then this is the outing for you.

Faerie Tale Theatre Reviews: Little Red Riding Hood

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“Now there’s a tasty little dish…”
– Reggie V. Lupin as he first lays eye on on our heroine

CONTENT WARNING: This review contains several allusions to rape throughout.

You know her the moment you see her, the girl in the red cape and hood walking through the woods. Maybe she’s an innocent child, maybe she’s a bit older and looking for some excitement, but there is always a wolf watching her just out of sight, drooling at the the thought of making her his next meal. When you’re a kid it’s easy to understand this story on the surface level, but as an adult, you begin to notice certain dark undertones – ones which were deliberately planted there from the very start.

Little Red Riding Hood is another fable that was born from oral tradition, but for once, it wasn’t the Brothers Grimm, Charles Perrault, or even Giambatta Basile who got to her first. That distinction belongs to Egbert of Liège, who recorded the earliest known version of her tale around 1023 AD in Fecunda Ratis (The Richly Laden Ship). The scarlet-clad lass in that story receives a red dress from her godfather as a baptism gift. The dress attracts the attention of a mother wolf and she kidnaps her. The other wolves start licking her face, but the girl demands they don’t besmirch her dress because it was a present from her godfather. The poem emphasizes the heavily Christian theme of God holding dominion over animals and protecting those baptized in his name, thus the wolves don’t harm her.

While variations such as Italy’s La finta nonna and Taiwan’s Aunt Tiger existed as early as the fourteenth century, scholars believe it was this poem that would inspire the version Perrault wrote almost seven-hundred years later. It’s similar to the one we all know, but with one cruel twist – the story ends with Red being devoured by the Wolf. No last-minute huntsman to the rescue here, it’s explicitly stated that she is dead (I still remember how shook I was when I discovered a book that kept that ending). German author Ludwig Tüg translated Perrault’s retelling and added the character of the huntsman, but kept the grim conclusion: he kills the wolf but is too late to save Red from her grisly fate. Ironically, it was the Brothers Grimm who gave the story a happy ending, as well as a denouement where Red and her grandmother work together to stymie a second wolf, and more context in the beginning for the underlying moral. The story starts with Red’s mother insisting she stay on the path and beware of strangers, stressing the importance of listening to the wise, experienced mother figure; I’d hail it for being a Grimm fairytale that finally gives some women a bit of respect, but one could argue that the main character needing to be rescued by a strong man in the end renders it moot.

And what of this moral, you may ask? Well, remaining wary of flattering strangers is the obvious one, but strip the tale of all fantasy elements and you have an aggressive male figure stalking and charming an attractive young woman, then taking advantage of her when she’s at her most vulnerable (in a bedroom, no less). The lesson posted at the end of Perrault’s story leaves no doubt that it’s a warning for women to be on their guard around men, lest they consume their bodies in more ways than one. Thankfully, unlike Sun, Moon and Talia, this is clearly portrayed as a bad thing.

There’s plenty of symbolic resonance that backs up this reading of the story. Think of the color red and what it represents: passion, fury, blood. Once the Wolf has youthful, vivacious Red in that pretty cloak within his sights, he marks her as his next victim. Then there’s the wolf himself. Folks growing up in Europe before the Industrial Revolution had good cause to beware of wolves. They would kill their livestock if prey was scarce, and you as well if you strayed too far into the forest. As wolves were also revered animals at the height of paganism, the rise of Christianity saw them marked as creatures of the Devil. Anti-wolf hunts – which Perrault happened to take part in – became the means to drive wolves to near-extinction, as well as demonize and destroy all traces of the old gods. In fact, some early versions dating before Perrault feature our heroine outwitting not an anthropomorphic wolf, but a werewolf. Witches were often accused of shapeshifting into wolves among other animals in order to commit evil deeds such as, oh, tricking a girl into getting eaten.

With that in mind, it’s not shocking that later retellings sanitized Red’s misadventure for fear of scaring kids, even though that was the point of the story in the first place. My introduction to it was a pretty safe version, one where the Wolf merely locked Granny in the closet and the Huntsman chased him away before he could eat anybody. It wasn’t until I was a little older that I was given a book that was truer to the Grimms’ text, vore and all. While I’ll always find the story nostalgic, I find Faerie Tale Theatre’s truer-to-text depiction…interesting.