Snow White and Rose Red

7-9 min read
15 pages

Snow White and Rose Red, the Brothers Grimm tale to read aloud. A bear knocks at the door in winter and asks to sleep by the fire.

A widow lived in a cottage with a garden, and in the garden grew two rose trees, one white and one red, and she had two daughters who were like them and were named after them.

Snow White was quiet and stayed in; Rose Red ran about the fields all day. They went into the forest together and nothing there ever hurt them — the hare ate out of their hands, and once they slept all night on the moss and their mother did not worry.

One winter evening somebody knocked. Rose Red opened the door and it was a bear, and both girls got behind the table.

«Don't be frightened,» said the bear. «I am half frozen. Let me lie by your fire.» So the mother let him in and he lay down on the hearth, and after a while the girls were beating the snow out of his coat with a broom and pulling his ears, and he took it all in good part.

He came back every evening that winter and lay by the fire, and when the spring came he said he had to go and look after his treasure from the dwarfs, who would steal it now that the ground was soft.

In the summer the girls met a dwarf in the forest with his long white beard caught fast in a split tree trunk. He shouted at them for standing there. Snow White took her scissors and cut the end of his beard off, and he picked up a bag of gold from the roots and went off without a word of thanks.

They met him again by a river, being pulled towards the water by a fish on his line that was bigger than he was, with his beard tangled in the line. They cut the beard again. He called them both a great deal of things and went away with a bag of pearls.

The third time an eagle had him by the coat and was carrying him off, and the girls took hold of his legs and held on until the eagle let go. That time he was rude about the tear in his coat, and went into a hole in the rock with a sack of jewels.

On their way home they came past that hole, and the dwarf had the jewels out on a flat stone, counting them in the evening light.

He turned round and saw them and started shouting again — and then the bear came out of the trees.

The dwarf begged. He offered the bear the jewels, all of them, and then he offered him the two girls instead, and the bear did not answer him at all. One blow, and the dwarf never moved again.

The girls had run, and the bear called after them: «Snow White, Rose Red, don't be afraid, wait for me.»

They knew the voice and stopped. And when he came up to them the bearskin fell away, and there was a young man standing in the path in a coat all of gold.

«I am a king's son,» he said. «That dwarf put the skin on me and took my treasure, and I have been a bear in this forest for years. He could only be undone by dying, and he took a long time about it.»

Snow White married him, and Rose Red married his brother, and their mother came to live with them and brought the two rose trees, and they grew under her window and gave white and red roses every year.

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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.

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Snow White and Rose Red

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