Is Snow White Actually a Conglomerate of Other Fairy Tales?
Snow White is one of the most popular classic fairy tales. It owes a large part of its popularity to Snow White and Seven Dwarfs, a full-length animated movie by Disney.
Let's limit our exploration to the 'original', written by the Brothers Grimm, published in their second edition of Children and Household Tales.
The story begins with yearning. The queen is wishing for a child after she pricks her finger and three drops of blood fell on the white snow.
We already have several popular elements of other fairy tales:
fairy tale number three (repeated in this very story at least ten times) is very popular in numerous tales (Wolf and Three Little Pigs has it in the title, of course, but the collection of Brothers Grimm has 17 (!) fairy tales with number three in their titles) as a way to repeat or escalate some action;
symbolic power of colors (red, white, black) is well exploited in other fairy tales (remember Red Riding Hood?);
woman yearning to become a mother is also an often used element (Tom Thumb aka Thumbling by Brothers Grimm, for instance);
After the birth, the mother dies, and the father remarries. Stepmother pans out as a wicked person and father doesn't protect his own kid.
First wicked and dangerous step-mother coming to thoughts is from Hansel and Grethel, but the corpus of fairy tales is loaded with similar examples (Mother Holle, Juniper Tree, ...);
absent and/or incompetent father is a regular element as well (Hansel and Grethel, again, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty (https://steemit.com/sleeping/@tolovaj/summary-of-the-sleeping-beauty), Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin, ...)
When Snow White escapes, she finds a sanctuary in the house in the woods where she gets some help from magical beings.
- a cottage in the forest can serve as a great hideout (Three Litle Men in the Woods, Snow White and Rose Red, Town Musicians of Bremen, Little Brother and Little Sister, ...), but in most cases, the solution is just temporary;
- magical helper is a popular element after which the whole literary genre got its name (fairy!): we got fairies in Sleeping Beauty, a wolf in Golden Bird, a dwarf in Rumpelstiltskin, and even Virgin Mary helps in Mary's Child, ...
Despite magical helpers the main character (in our case Snow White) can't escape the cruel destiny: she dies (or at least seems so). Then another helper comes by, a resurrection follows and we got a happy ending.
just like the good fairy from Sleeping Beauty couldn't protect the title character, the wolf's bits of advice from Golden Bird was promptly ignored, or a test by Bluebeard (https://steemit.com/bluebeard/@tolovaj/what-makes-the-story-of-bluebeard-so-controversial) was not passed, Snow White couldn't resist stuff brought by the evil queen;
Snow White has seven (!) magical helpers and this was still not enough, but still, we should mention the clever usage of another magical number in the mix;
a theme of resurrection (or at least the huge importance of sleep) is well-presented among classic fairy tales too (Sleeping Beauty, of course, but also Red Riding Cap, Brave Little Tailor, Beauty and the Beast (https://steemit.com/beauty/@tolovaj/short-summary-of-beauty-and-the-beast), ...);
last helper is in many cases a future life partner (Prince Charming being the obvious example), but we can find other helpers as well (a servant in Rumpelstiltskin, a hunter in Red Riding Hood, or even Mother Goat in Wolf and Seven Kids).
The last element to mention is an act of revenge. Brothers Grimm as lawyers by education loved to punish bad guys and Snow White is not an exception.
- cruel punishment is one of the signature elements in the Grimm's Fairy Tales (in Juniper Tree, the stepmother is killed by a stone falling on her head, witch in Hansel and Grethel is burned in the oven, wicked step-sisters in Cinderella lost their eyes, ...), yet they were not alone (wolf in Three Little Pigs dies too, sisters in Beauty and the Beast are turned into statues, ...).
Yes, of course, we could use several other fairy tales and similarly analyze them. But I believe none of them share so many with so many others like Snow White.
What do you think?
Image credits and further readings:
https://thefairytales.substack.com/p/snow-white-illustrations
https://hubpages.com/education/snow-white-original-story-by-brothers-grimm