Disney Left Out the Most Gruesome Aspects of the Original Snow White Story
Oh, Snow
White, that classic, if a little retro, fairytale of good triumphing over evil.
It’s a sweet story of an innocent young beauty who is banished by a vain,
cruel, and jealous stepmother and who, with the help of seven lovable dwarfs,
ultimately finds everlasting true love. Walt Disney turned the fable into the
first full-length animated musical feature film in 1937. Snow White and
the Seven Dwarfs is to this day one of the top-10 films of all time
(adjusted for inflation), beloved by generations of children.
It turns
out the American animator left out a few gruesome details. Disney’s well-known
Snow White is a sanitized version of the original German Brothers Grimm
fairytale, which was a lot more, well, grim.
Jacob and
Wilhelm Grimm didn’t actually come up with the story of Snow White or
Cinderella, Rapunzel, or any other storybook princess associated with their
(and now Disney’s) name, for that matter. The Grimms were German scholars,
researchers, and authors who collected folktales that were part of a rich oral
tradition, having been passed down from generation to generation of women
telling the stories to pass the time. In 1812, they published the collection
as Nursery and Household Tales.
Despite
its title, the book was not originally intended for children. The text included
violence, incest, sex, and perhaps most deadly of all—footnotes. In the
Cinderella story, for instance, the stepsisters cut off their toes and heels in
order to fit into the glass slipper.
In
“Little Snow-White,” as the original story was called, the Evil Queen asks a
hunter to take Snow White into the forest to kill, as happens also in the
movie. (In the original version, the child is also only 7 years old, as opposed
to Disney’s 14. Neither seems old enough to consider marriage.)
In the
Grimm version, the Queen orders the huntsman to bring back Snow White’s
internal organs, saying “Kill her, and as proof that she is dead bring her
lungs and liver back to me.”
He kills
a boar instead, and brings back to the Queen the boar’s lungs and liver—which
the Queen thinks belongs to Snow White and so promptly eats. Ewww!
“The cook
had to boil them with salt, and the wicked woman ate them, supposing that she
had eaten Snow-White’s lungs and liver,” as the Grimm brothers wrote.
The Queen
tricks Snow White three separate times in the Grimm version. The first time,
she has Snow White try on a corset, which is so tight, Snow White passes out.
(The dwarfs save her by cutting the laces.) The second time, she sells Snow
White a poisonous comb, which the young girl puts in her hair, causing her to
pass out. (The dwarfs take it out.) The third time the Queen tricks her with
the same poisonous apple we see in the Disney film.
Having
fainted and presumed dead, young Snow-White is placed in a glass coffin in both
book and movie. When the Prince happens by in the Grimm version, he insists on
taking the deceased beauty away, even though he’s never met her. The dwarfs
hesitantly agree, but as they are carrying her coffin out of their house, one
of them stumbles. Jostled from her resting place in the coffin, Snow White
spits out the apple lodged in her throat and is immediately revived. Without
the influence of the Prince’s kiss.
In movie
and in folklore, Snow White and the Prince fall in love and get married (never
mind that in the original tale, Snow is only 7 years old). In the movie, the
seven dwarfs chase the Evil Queen into the forest, where she tumbles off a
cliff—with a push from a convenient lightning strike—and falls to her death.
In the
book version, the Queen attends their wedding where she is meted out a just
punishment of dancing to her death. (Perhaps this last was thought up by a 19th century
noblewoman forced to dance endlessly to the 1812 version of Bruno Mars’s “Marry
You.”)
The more
Grimm version of the Queen’s death goes like this: “They put a pair of iron
shoes into burning coals. They were brought forth with tongs and placed before
her. She was forced to step into the red-hot shoes and dance until she fell
down dead.”
You can
see why Disney wanted to clean up that unsavory image!
E.L.
Hamilton has written about pop culture for a variety of magazines and
newspapers, including Rolling Stone, Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, the New York Post
and the New York Daily News. She lives in central New Jersey, just west of New
York City