Planning this blog proved very difficult for me. Not only was the subject material very depressing, but I couldn’t figure out what angle I wanted to take. For Sleeping Beauty, I went from the earliest stories to the most recent, focusing on the major changes that occurred over time.
That was impossible with Snow White. No one seems to know the path the story traveled. There are certainly stories that feel older than others; but I can’t analyze the changes over time based on feelings.
There are some ancient myths with some fascinating clues that I’ll go over next week. There’s also a 2nd century AD compilation by Xenophon called Ephesiaca, which charts the wanderings of “Anthia,” and there are decisive Snow White themes throughout. He includes hints of Snow White variants from across the known world of his time, incorporating many of the stranger elements found in them. It is not the original for all the varied adaptations, however; rather, it’s clear Xenophon incorporated a blend of Snow White tales already in existence into his story.[1]
After that, it’s a tangled mess. The cultural borrowing which occurs over thousands of years of trade and war made it impossible for scholars to definitively say “this is where Snow White came from, and this is how she journeyed from one place to another, and finally ended up in Germany.”
Which means I had no idea how the stories progressed and changed for the last 1900 years. I could go the route of earliest written, but I didn’t like some of the earliest written tales. They made me sad – sadder than the strange tales already made me feel. I didn’t want to blog about them.
And this is why marriage is so wonderful: I talked to Andrew about my frustrations, and he suggested I look at characters in each story and write about how they add to the lesson that there is an enemy seeking to destroy us. It wouldn’t matter when the story was written, or why it changed over time. I could base it upon what felt older, and I could only do the stories that interested me. The guiding principle would be how the divine lesson was manifested in each particular tale.
So that is what I shall do. I’ve chosen stories from all the major categories of Snow Whites. We’ll be going from the Icelandic north to the Grecian south, and from the Celtic west to the Russian east. We’ll cover sadness and heartache, triumph and victory.
And yes, I’ll probably try and find some semblance of historical order to the stories – that is my right as an historian, after all.
Most importantly, we will learn how the schemes of the Enemy – although terribly persistent and fierce – are always overthrown in the end.
Sources
[1] Graham Anderson, Fairytale in the Ancient World (New York: Routledge, 2000), 51-57.
