Mirror, Mirror on the Wall: Who is the Real Snow White? The Historical Debate Behind the Deadly Origins of Disney's First Fairy Tale

 

        The evil queen commands the huntsman, “Kill her and as proof that she is dead bring her lungs and liver back to me.”

The huntsman doesn’t kill her.  Instead, he sets out into the forest and slaughters a wild boar.  He brings the liver and lungs of the boar back to the evil queen and his ruse works.

Greedily, the evil queen devours the entrails that the huntsman brings to her in a frenzy of cannibalistic ecstasy.

In a few years, a magic mirror tells the queen that she has been deceived by the huntsman, and she sets out once again to kill the young maiden.  This time she believes she has accomplished her goal after pretending to be a farmer’s wife and convincing the maiden to eat a poisoned apple.

But the queen has been fooled yet again.  The girl did not die.  The poisoned apple has only caused her to lapse into a sort of coma after becoming lodged in her throat.  Her seven companions, all suffering from dwarfism, encase the dead girl in a coffin made of glass.

Surprisingly, the story doesn’t end there.  The very next day, a young prince sees the beautiful dead young girl in the glass coffin and wishes to kiss her.  The dwarfs give in to the prince’s necrophile tendencies, the prince kisses her; brings her back to life and they both fall madly in love with one another.

The whole thing ends with the evil queen dancing herself to death on a bed of hot coals while her feet are encased in a pair of iron shoes at the wedding of the prince and the young maiden.

Such is, roughly, the story of Snow White or Sneewittchen as it was entitled in its original low German, as retold by the Brothers Grimm in the year 1812.  Snow White is Tale 53 in their magisterial collection of folklore Grimms’ Fairy Tales.

With cannibalism, murder, necrophelia and brutality the original German folktale as retold by the Brothers Grimm is a far cry from the gentrified Disney version from 1937 that most of us are acquainted with today.  But even Walt’s Disney’s portrayal of Snow White, which was the first feature length animated American film ever released, contained many archetypal elements of the original fairy tale including the magic mirror, the evil queen/step-mother and the iconic seven dwarfs.

To say that the tale of Snow White has had a long and storied history would definitely be an understatement.  But is any of it real?  Well, perhaps, fairy tales really are true, at least that’s what some historians in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries would have us believe.

        

Margaretha von Waldeck

        In 1994 German historian Eckard Sander published a book entitled: Schneewittchen: Märchen oder Wahrheit?, which in English translates to Snow White: Fact or Fiction?

In his book Sander claims that the character of Snow White was in fact based upon Margaretha van Waldeck, who lived from 1533 to 1554.  Margaretha was the daughter of Philip IV the count of Waldeck-Wildungen in modern day central Germany from 1493 to 1574.

Town documents from the time period apparently make reference to Margaretha’s great beauty and we know that her father married Katharina von Hatzfeld, a much younger woman, when Margaretha was sixteen years old.

Additionally, historical records also indicate that Philip owned many copper mines, and at this time children were routinely employed in Europe’s copper mines because of their diminutive size which made them more effective miners.  It is possible that, seeking to escape her evil stepmother, Margaretha may have spent many hours as a young girl around these children who worked in the copper mines, and that these child laborers have been remembered by history as the seven dwarfs.

There are historical mentions of the strictness of Katharina von Hatzfeld as a stepmother towards Margaretha, and it is interesting to note that Margaretha died at the young age of twenty-one in 1554.  At the time, Margaretha had many suitors all around central Europe and would have been the object of jealousy from many affluent young women.  Although the cause of Margaretha’s premature death is not known for certain, many even at the time speculated that poison could have been the reason.

Superficially, it seems as if Margaretha von Waldeck would be the perfect candidate to be a real life Snow White, but there are a few problems.

For one thing, at the time of her death, Margaretha was far away from Waldeck-Wildungen in central Germany and away at the Royal Court in Brussels.  At the time of her actual death there would have been no contact between Margaretha and her evil stepmother/queen Katharina.  Also, through her correspondence, Margaretha mentioned to her father, as well as many others, that her health was steadily declining up until her death though the true nature of her sickness has never been discovered.  

When Margaretha died at the age of twenty-one her stepmother Katharina von Hatzfeld was never suspected in her death, and despite whisperings of foul play around the court in Brussels, young Margaretha von Waldeck was ruled to have died of natural causes.

On some levels Margaretha von Waldeck’s life story makes a compelling argument for being the inspiration behind the tale of Snow White.  But among German historians, Eckhard Sander is not alone in claiming that he has discovered the true origin of the story of Schneewittchen.

Even more recently, around the year 2007, a group of local historians in Bavaria believed that they had, in fact, unearthed records of the real Snow White.

Maria Sophia von Erthal

        Local historians in Lohr, Bavaria, believe that Snow White is based on a young woman named Maria Sophia von Erthal who was born in June of 1729.

Maria, like Margaretha, was the daughter of a landowner with the pretentious name of Prince Philip Christop von Erthal.  This Prince Philip also remarried upon the death of his first wife to a woman named Maria von Venningen.

Supposedly, locals in Lohr, Bavaria, at the time believed that Maria von Venningen was quite evil, even brutal, towards her stepchildren.  

What is interesting about the evil stepmother von Venningen is that she was said to have a talking mirror, which is still on display today, in the castle where the family resided.

This particular mirror was named the “talking mirror” in the eighteenth century because of how smooth and even its glass surface actually is, which is something that was extremely rare at the time, when all mirrors had to be made by hand and many were in fact made of inferior reflective glass.  This mirror would have been manufactured at the legendary glassworks in the city Mainz located in Bavaria and it would have been in the residence during Maria Sophia von Erthal’s lifetime.

The "talking" mirror in Lohr, Bavaria

        

        Just west of the town of Lohr in Bavaria, nestled among seven mountains, is the small town of Bieber.  Bieber, like Waldeck-Wildungen, was home to many thriving mines in the early eighteenth century.  At the time due to the narrowness of the tunnels many of the shortest people possible were employed as miners and would have worn hoods for protection from falling dirt and debris.  Is it possible that these miners wearing hoods are, in Maria von Erthal’s case, just like the child-miners befriended by Margaretha van Waldeck two hundred years before, the real inspiration behind the caricatures of the seven dwarfs?

Anything is possible.  Maria von Erthal presents many interesting circumstantial similarities to Snow White.  For instance, the fact that her stepmother was rumored to be evil towards her stepchildren and that she was said to have a “talking” mirror by the locals are both compelling pieces of evidence for arguing that the life of Maria von Erthal may have been the true inspiration behind the Bavarian folklore of Schneewittchen.  

The main problem with arguing that Maria von Erthal was in fact the real Snow White is that, since the Brothers Grimm transcribed their tales from local traditions in year 1812, there simply would not have been enough time between say 1740 and 1812 for the story of Maria von Erthal’s life to become ingrained enough in the folk traditions of the Bavarian people to have been recorded as a verbatim local legend.

The story of Snow White, like much folklore, may have ancient rather than early modern or late medieval origins.  Today, many historians point to the Roman story of Chione (which translates to snow) as contained in Ovid’s epic verse masterpiece Metamorphoses.  Ovid recounts the tale of Chione as one of rape and revenge at the hands of Greek gods and goddesses in detail even more gruesome than those originally recorded by the Brothers Grimm at the start of the nineteenth century.

Though there are several claimants to the title of the “real” Snow White, and while the debate still rages in the historical community when it comes to the origins of the folk tale as recorded by the Brothers Grimm in 1812, one thing is certain.  

Snow White, or Schneewittchen, is an old bloody story of deceit, death and revenge that is remembered by us today, mostly, thanks to the gentrified and censored magic that is Walt Disney.