Story feature: Snow White and Rose Red

An underrated classic from the fairy tale pantheon

My favourite fairy tale as a child was The Grimms’ Snow White and Rose Red; a story that celebrated the love between sisters and innocence in a world where some people can be mean. Although this Substack has been going for over a year now, it’s time that I introduced you to a beloved childhood fairy tale. Having a favourite fairy tale as an adult is akin to choosing a favourite child, but this one remains firmly entrenched as the first tale I fell in love with. You can hear my version below (apologies, but the cat interrupted so there are a few edits!)

Like many stories of my childhood, the kindness of the girls in the face of such ingratitude set the foundation for my values, and alongside Dick Bruna’s Snuffy and Enid Blyton’s The Book of Brownies - all stories of kindness - they formed the basis for my basic personality, for my kindness and compassion to others who cannot be kind.

But this story doesn’t have its origins with the Brothers Grimm. It was Karoline/Caroline Stahl who first appears to have written the tale The Ungrateful Dwarf in 1816. Born Caroline Dumpf in Latvia in 1776, this story wasn’t added to the Grimms collection until 1837 after appearing in a collection by Wilhelm Hauff in 1826. “He made many changes by creating more of a harmonious bourgeois home life for Snow White and Rose Red, giving the dwarf greater characterisation and adding the love story.” (Zipes, p. 772) It doesn’t seem to have any other origins, which suggests Stahl herself wrote it.

The story begins with one of many children of a poor family, Snow White, helping an “ugly dwarf who could not have been more than a yard high,” to get his beard out of the wood. The dwarf tells her to cut it off and then grabs his “sack with money from beneath the tree. Although it would have been proper for him to have politely thanked his rescuer and to have given her a rich reward from his bundle of money, he did neither one nor the other, but crept away grumbling about his accident without a greeting or word of thanks.” (Zipes, p. 772)

The second time, she is with her sister, Rose Red. They are fishing and catching crabs, and the dwarf “revealed himself to be ungrateful and impolite and left.” The third time both sisters are together, the same happens until a bear arrives and the dwarf offers up the girls instead of himself but the bear didn’t listen, “he roared and ate him skin and hair and then when on his way.” (Zipes) The girls found the jewels and the family’s fortunes are transformed.

The Ungrateful Dwarf certainly reads like someone who has had an unpleasant interaction with someone she calls a dwarf (potentially a slur for people with a disability, or an insult or it could be indeed a magical creature). Her first book Fables, Fairy Tales and Stories for Children (Fabeln, Mährchen und Erzählungen für Kinder), which included The Ungrateful Dwarf and The Two Wicked Sisters and the Good One. These themes of punishing those who are unkind are common in her work. It’s possible that, as she worked as a teacher and governess who “preached good conduct and celebrated virtues, particularly those that reflected the interests of the upper classes, in rewriting traditional oral and literary fairy tales,” (Zipes, p. 841) and many of her tales were didactic, they were teaching tales. She also published a poetry collection in 1817.

Although she married in 1808 and lived in Germany, she was widowed 12 years afterwards and “returned to the Russian Empire and worked as an educator in Dorpat, Pskov and Belarus” (Wikipedia). By 1828 she had written another eleven books, mostly for children. “Her fairy tales for children and stories for young people, published partly abroad, partly in Riga and Dorpat, gained great fame and enjoyed considerable success among young readers in the first half of the 19th century.” (Wiki)

I have many questions about both Stahl and her work but ultimately I want to know if Snow White and Rose Red was a literary fairy tale (i.e. written not reimagined from an oral tradition) because there is no evidence of the story before then? Or was it an oral tale that just didn’t get recorded earlier? Or, because Stahl was a teacher and governess, was it something she made up to help teach manners in unruly children?

We’ll probably never know the answer. Once it was in the Grimm’s collection it became a firm favourite, appearing in the Andrew Lang Collection (Blue Fairy book in 1889) and then Snow-White-Fire-Red, a Rapunzel-esque story appeared in Thomas Frederick Crane’s work. And although Disney hasn’t co-opted it just yet, Snow White and Rose Red remains a common lesser known fairy tale that’s included in many fairy tale collections, alongside 12 Dancing Princesses, The Six Swans and Rumpelstiltskin. And while it continues to be underrated, it’s still one of the favourites for me and I’m sure, plenty of others.

References:

Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. The Complete Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Jack Zipes, translator. New York: Bantam, 1987.

Lang, Andrew, ed. "Snow White and Rose Red." The Blue Fairy Book. New York: Dover, 1965. (Original published 1889.)

Stahl, Caroline. "The Wicked Sisters and the Good One: A Fairy Tale." Marvels & Tales 14.1 (2000). Web. <https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/marvels/vol14/iss1/8>.

Karoline Stahl - Wikipedia

Sur La Lune || Snow White & Rose Red History

Zipes, Jack, ed. The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001.