Snow White

8-10 min read
16 pages

Snow White and the seven dwarfs, the Brothers Grimm tale to read aloud. A mirror gives the same answer every day, until one day it does not.

A queen sat sewing by an open window in winter and pricked her finger, and three drops of blood fell on the snow on the sill. «A child as white as that snow,» she said, «and as red as that blood, and as dark as this window frame.» She had the child and did not live to see her walk.

The king married again. The new queen was beautiful and knew it, and she had a mirror on the wall that she asked the same question every morning, and for years the mirror gave her the same answer.

Then one morning it said: «You are beautiful, my queen. Snow White is a thousand times more so.»

The queen went white and then very still. She sent for the huntsman and told him to take the girl into the forest and come back with her heart.

In the forest the huntsman could not do it. «Run,» he said. «Run and don't come back.» And he shot a young boar and took its heart home in a cloth, and the queen ate it and was satisfied.

Snow White ran until the trees ended at a clearing, and in the clearing there was a small house with seven small beds in it, and seven plates on the table, and everything in it exactly right for somebody a good deal shorter than she was.

The dwarfs came home at dusk from the mountain where they dug. They found her asleep across two of the beds, and they held the lamp up, and they let her sleep.

«You can stay,» they said in the morning, «if you keep the house and cook. But lock the door when we're gone. She'll find out where you are — mirrors talk.»

The mirror did talk. «Over the seven hills,» it said, «with the seven dwarfs, Snow White is living still.» And the queen took down a box of laces and a comb and an apple, and set out on the road herself, dressed as an old woman selling things.

The first time it was laces, and she laced them so tight that Snow White could not breathe. The dwarfs came home and cut them and she woke.

The second time it was a comb, and the comb was poisoned, and they pulled it out of her hair in time. «The next thing will be better made,» said the eldest dwarf. «Open the door to nobody. Nobody at all.»

The third time it was an apple, red on one side and pale on the other, and the old woman ate the pale side herself, standing at the window where Snow White could watch her do it.

Snow White took the apple and bit the red side, and fell where she stood.

The dwarfs found no lace to cut and no comb to pull, and nothing they knew how to do was any use. They made a case of glass and put her in it and carried it to the hill above the clearing, and one of them stayed with it always.

A king's son came through that country and saw the glass case on the hill, and stopped, and stayed a long time looking at it. He asked for it, and was refused, and asked again, and in the end the dwarfs let it go because he would not leave.

The servants carrying it caught a foot on a root and the case jolted, and the piece of apple came loose in Snow White's throat, and she opened her eyes. «Where am I?» she said. «Somewhere safer,» said the youngest dwarf, «and this time we're coming with you.»

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Text source: Plot by the Brothers Grimm (1812), public domain. The text was written anew for Marytale — it is not a reprint of anyone else's version.

Snow White characters

Snow White: Seven years old when the story begins, and named for the three colours her mother wished for: snow, blood and ebony.
The queen: Her stepmother — but only from the second edition onward. In the Grimms' first printing of 1812 it is Snow White's own mother who wants her dead.
The magic mirror: Answers truthfully and only when asked. Every disaster in the tale follows a question the queen did not have to ask.
The huntsman: Told to bring back the lungs and liver. He lets the child go and brings back a boar's, which the queen eats.
The seven dwarfs: Miners who come home at night to find their table disturbed. They are not named in the Grimm text — the names everyone knows come from the film.
The prince: Arrives after the glass coffin has stood on the mountain for a long time. In the Grimm telling there is no kiss: the piece of apple is jolted loose when the coffin is carried.

Where «Snow White» comes from and who wrote it down

The original Cinderella: no fairy godmother

Snow White

Snow White characters

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