Snow White — just a fairy tale or was she real?
You might think you know the story of Snow White, but the first version the Brothers Grimm published is somewhat different and somewhat darker.
You may even be surprised to find that there are real historical figures that are thought to have inspired the tale. So where did this story come from? And if Snow White was real, then who was she?
Snow White was first published in 1812 by the Brothers Grimm in their collection of Children’s and Household Tales. However, the Snow White you’ll be most familiar with if you are English-speaking is their final edit of 1848. This is the most commonly translated version that leaves out many of the gruesome details of the first edition to make it more sanitised and Christian.
Only recently has the first edition been translated into English by renowned folklorist Jack Zipes in his book The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm: The Complete First Edition.
In brief, the story goes that a queen sits sewing by her window in winter, pricks her finger and then wishes for a daughter as white as snow, red as the blood drops and black as the ebony wood of the window frame. She gives birth to Snow White but dies in childbirth, after which the king takes a new queen who is beautiful but vain.
She daily asks her mirror, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?” The mirror replies that she is and all is well, until it starts saying that Snow White is even fairer. The queen commands a huntsman to take her to the woods, cut out her liver and lung and bring it back for her to eat. In the woods, Snow White begs him to have mercy, so he kills a young boar and brings it home, whilst she runs away promising to never return. The organs are cooked and the stepmother eats them happily.
Snow White comes across a cottage in the woods and sleeps in one of the 7 small beds. When the dwarves return, she tells them her sorry tale and they offer her to stay in return for doing their housework, warning her that she isn’t safe from her stepmother and to let no-one in.
Once the mirror reveals Snow White is not dead, the queen disguises herself as a merchant and heads to the seven hills to the seven dwarves’ cottage. Snow White foolishly opens the door to look at the pretty ribbons. She then lets the disguised stepmother re-lace her corset, but it is so tight that she is unable to breathe and collapses. The stepmother is satisfied she’s dead and leaves.
The dwarves return, cut the corset open and she is revived. Once again they warn her to answer to no-one and once again the mirror reveals to the queen that Snow White isn’t dead.
Dressed as another merchant, the queen tricks Snow White with a poisoned comb that she sticks in her hair, which again makes her collapse and appear dead. The dwarves rescue her again when they return and remove it, warning her once more.
Only the third time, Snow White doesn’t answer the door to the stepmother now disguised as a farmer. But she does take the poisoned apple through the window and drops dead.
This time the dwarves can’t help her. But she looks too beautiful and alive to bury her, so a glass coffin is made with her name on it and is placed on the mountain peak. A prince finds her there, asks the dwarves if he can take her to his castle because he is so enchanted by her and they agree.
When his servants carry her coffin, one trips, which dislodges the poison apple from her throat. She wakes and he asks to marry her.
They invite the stepmother to the wedding and when she arrives and recognises Snow White she is rigid with rage and shock. Iron shoes are then brought to her and she is forced to dance on hot coals until she drops dead.
The End.
Where does this story come from?
There are many other stories of this type, which the Aarne-Thompson-Uther index classifies as type 709. Among such similar tales which originate from across the world and vary in gruesomeness are Myrtle/Myrsina, Bella Venezia, Gold Tree & Silver Tree, The Young Slave, Maria, the Wicked Stepmother, and the Seven Robbers, The Crystal Casket, Death of the Seven Dwarfs, Syair Bidasari, Padmavat, Nourie Hadig and La Petite Toute-Belle.
Going back further than even the past few hundred years, some scholars have even suggested that the story has long distant roots in the ancient Greek and Roman tale of Chione, daughter of Daedalion, as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
But while some story motifs might echo this ancient myth, there are actually two compelling, real historical figures whose lives could have been the inspiration for Grimm’s Snow White. Both take us to Germany only a few hundred years ago.
Snow White candidate #1: Margaretha von Waldeck — forbidden love, a wicked stepmother and death by poison
Margaretha von Waldeck was a 16th century noble. She was the daughter of Count Philip IV and his first wife Margaret Cirksena, who sadly died when Margaretha was only 4 years old. It was a great loss, because her mother had been known to be a kind and particularly charitable woman.
Two years after she passed, Margaretha’s father married Katharina von Hatzfeld, who was reported to have been extremely strict, possibly even cruel. We could easily speculate her role as the wicked stepmother.
It was also a matter of public record that young Margaretha was famed for her beauty, according to Bad Wildungen city documents. Whether this irked her stepmother Katharina, we can’t know for certain, but given her mistreatment of her stepdaughter it seems likely.
We also don’t know for sure whether she was blonde or brunette. Although we think of Snow White as a black-haired beauty, a recent study suggests otherwise. Gudrun Anne Dekker identifies Margaretha as having had Nordic features with blonde hair since her mother came from East Frisia, a coastal region to the North Sea where fair features are typical.
Even in an early draft of the Grimm’s tale from 1808, Snow White was described as having “yellow hair”. Only later did the trinity of white snow skin, red blood and black ebony hair appear.
Now, when you search the web for Margaretha von Waldeck you’ll find a lovely portrait of a pale skinned, dark-haired woman, who looks very much like what we’d expect from Snow White.
However, this painting is not Margaretha von Waldeck at all — it’s actually a portrait by Thomas Lawrence of Marguerite, Countess of Blessington. The portrait even dates from 1822, 268 years after Margaretha died. So, unfortunately, we don’t have a visual record of the real Margaretha, whether blonde or brunette.
But more important to the case for placing Margaretha as the origin for Snow White are the circumstances under which she died, aged only 21.
When she was 16, her father and stepmother sent her to the Brussels court to improve her father’s relationship with Germany’s ruler, the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. He hoped Margaretha’s presence would help to compel the emperor to release a fellow German noble, Philip I, from prison.
Unsurprisingly, Margaretha’s beauty attracted a lot of attention at court and she was pursued by several high-ranking nobles. But it was the Emperor’s son, crown prince Philip II of Spain, who unfortunately became her most adamant admirer.
If she had mutual feelings of love for him, any affections between them would have been deemed scandalous and politically damning, since she was a Lutheran and he a Catholic. This was a time of great unrest and tension between Catholics and Protestants.
So, when Margaretha died at the age of 21 from poisoning, as suggested in the Waldeck chronicles, we could be forgiven for suspecting murder.
Some have speculated whether it was her stepmother’s doing to prevent a scandal, and although this would fit nicely with the fairy tale motif, it couldn’t have been her. Stepmother Katharina had already passed away eight years before Margaretha died.
Instead, German scholar Eckhard Sander believes there truly was a plot against her. In his 1994 study Snow White: Fairy Tale or Truth? Sander claims that Philip II’s father, Charles V, the emperor and King of Spain, couldn’t allow his heir to develop a relationship with the unsuitable Margaretha.
So, he had Spanish Authorities poison Margaretha to play off her death as illness, not murder. Evidence from three surviving letters to her father show that Margaretha was in a steadily declining state of ill health. Perhaps her sickness was the result gradual poisoning, perhaps it had a natural cause.
However, Sander’s research shows that Margaretha wrote a will suspiciously shortly before her death. It was written with frenzied handwriting, which may indeed be proof of the symptoms of dying from poison.
But what about apples and dwarves — do they have any place in this story?
There was a historical event in the Waldeck region, where Margaretha’s family originated, of a man who had been arrested for selling poisoned apples to children. It may be that the Grimm’s decided to incorporate this idea into their first version of Snow White.
As for the seven dwarves, we know that Margaretha’s father owned several copper mines in the region. The majority of workers were children, who used to live in groups of about 20 in a single room house. Many believe that it is the former copper mining village of Bergfreiheit that inspires the tale — so much so, that the town has dubbed itself Schneewittchendorf (Snow White village).
It’s a compelling case for the origin of Snow White, but there is one more historical figure whose life story aligns with the Grimm’s tale even more closely.
Snow White candidate #2: Maria Sophia von Erthal — a truth-speaking mirror, tiny miners with bright hoods and another wicked stepmother
A study group in the town of Lohr, Bavaria, believes that the real inspiration for Snow White was a different noble: Maria Sophia von Erthal, daughter of an 18th century landowner.
Initially, the idea of Snow White as a real historical figure from Lohr was a bit of a joke. Karlheinz Bartels published the idea in 1985 as an April fool’s joke, which only over time developed into an earnest study that uncovered genuine evidence.
Bartels was one of three members of a study group who called themselves Fabulologists. The group consisted of Bartels, a pharmacist, museum curator Werner Loibl and cobbler Helmut Walch. The term Fabulology was invented by Bartels with the intention to describe a deductive reasoning method for examining folk and fairy tales, whilst deliberately keeping a distance from established academic terms.
The group would sit together in the Mehling tavern, theorising about folk and fairy tales with the help of the local wine. But despite the light-hearted nature of their discussions, the idea that Snow White could have come from Lohr somehow stuck.
It particularly struck a chord with museum curator, Loibl. One night, going through archives of historical mirrors at the Spessart museum, it suddenly occurred to him that perhaps there really could be a connection between these mirrors and the “mirror, mirror on the wall”.
Lohr had a strong history of glass and mirror manufacture at the time the Grimms wrote their tale. More importantly, the mirrors of Lohr boasted a unique feature. The region’s new manufacturing techniques had made it possible to produce large-scale mirrors with never before seen clarity, with a reflection so accurate that it was said to “speak” the truth.
Royals and nobles across the land were keen to possess these exquisite and often ornately framed mirrors, which became a favourite gift in European crown and aristocratic circles. So, it didn’t seem far-fetched to Loibl that the mirror in the tale could have originated from Lohr. He considered then, that if the mirror had indeed come from Lohr, perhaps it wasn’t so foolish to imagine that Snow White had too.
Upon researching the records of Lohr castle, the study group found the baptismal certificate of Maria Sophia Margaretha Catharina von Erthal. Maria Sophia was born in 1725 and lived in Lohr castle with her father Prince Philipp Christoph and her stepmother Claudia von Venningen, Countess of Reichenstein. So the group began to investigate whether she could be a possible candidate.
Like the fairy tale character, Maria Sophia was recorded to have had an almost saintly nature. She was characterised as kind, charitable to the poor and needy, and was loved by the people as the very embodiment of Christian compassion.
Maria Sophia’s life story also features the wicked stepmother. Her father married Claudia Elisabeth von Venningen after the death of his first wife, when Maria Sophia had not long turned 17. Stepmother Claudia has been recorded to have been a power-hungry, ambitious woman, who deliberately favoured her own children and took advantage of her husband’s regular work absences to exert her power.
This could explain the King’s lack of participation in Snow White’s ordeals, as well as providing a possible real-life figure for the role of the cruel stepmother in the fairy tale.
Even dwarves, apples, poison, glass coffins and iron shoes can be linked to the Lohr region. But first, one further look at mirrors offers a truly convincing piece of evidence.
The most compelling artefact to support the theory has to be the discovery of one particular mirror which had been hanging in Lohr castle while Maria Sophia lived there. Produced in 1713, this 5ft2 tall mirror is lavishly framed with an ornate headpiece that reads “amour-propre” — French for “self-love” — in gold lettering.
Mirrors with such mottos were also typical to Lohr and it could indeed be said that such inscriptions “spoke” to the beholder. If this mirror really had belonged to self-important Claudia as is thought, it could not have been a more apt link to the stepmother’s vanity in the tale.
Again, we can only guess whether Claudia was jealous of her stepdaughter’s looks. Unfortunately, there seem to be no photographs of Maria Sophia in existence.
When searching the web for images of Maria Sophia von Erthal in relation to Snow White, many websites use a portrait of a beautiful young noblewoman with a crown and sash. The photograph actually seems to be Duchess Sophie Charlotte in Bavaria. Some websites have also labelled this same photograph as Maria Sophie, but either way, it unfortunately has no connection with Maria Sophia von Erthal.
The only visual depiction we have of Maria Sophia von Erthal is a painted miniature. Since it is more like a caricature that shows a lady in noble dress with a powdered wig, it sadly doesn’t help much in relating her to Snow White by appearance.
For the origin of the dwarves in the story we look once again to local mines. The nearby town of Bieber, set among the seven mountains to the west of Lohr, is thought to be the most likely inspiration. The smallest tunnels could only be accessed by very short miners or children, and they allegedly wore bright hoods to make themselves more easily seen in the dark tunnels.
As for poison and apples, the Fabulologists point to the many local orchards and abundant growth of the poisonous deadly nightshade plant in the region. The glass coffin could easily be linked to Lohr’s famous glassworks, whilst iron shoes could have been made in nearby local foundries.
The key missing ingredient is the prince. Sadly, Maria Sophia never married because her stepmother prevented it. To escape her cruel treatment, Maria Sophia moved away from her childhood castle in Lohr to Bamberg.
She lived a long life, but eventually went blind and died at age 71. However, she did continue to live a charitable life. She was buried in the Bamberg church cemetery, where the epitaph on her headstone read: “The noble heroine of Christianity: here she rests after the victory of faith, ready for transfigured resurrection.”
It was highly uncommon for a woman’s grave to have been honoured with a headstone, so she clearly was a venerated figure in her community.
The Grimms penned their first draft of Snow White not long after Maria Sophia died in 1791. So where Maria Sophia’s life ended, her influence on the fairy tale may have begun.
So who’s the truest Snow White of all?
Today, both Margaretha von Waldeck and Maria Sophia von Erthal’s home towns are keen to assert themselves as the home of Snow White, but in truth, we may never be able to say for certain.
It could be that one, both or neither are the true origin, but like the Fabulologists believe, it may be best to take it with a pinch of salt and leave room for a little imagination.
