THE ORIGINAL STORY OF SNOW WHITE
One day, a queen sat working at a window with an ebony frame, with the snow falling outside. She pricked her finger (presumably she was sewing or knitting, though her precise occupation, other than ‘queen’, is not usually stated), and, watching the drops of blood, she made a wish that her little daughter would grow up to be as white as snow, as red as her blood, and as black as the ebony window frame. And sure enough, the queen’s daughter grew up to have snow-white skin, cheeks as red as her mother’s blood, and hair as black as ebony.
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When the queen died shortly after this, the king remarried a vain woman who became Snow White’s stepmother. This stepmother liked to look in her magical looking-glass and ask it who was the fairest in the land, to which the obliging mirror would always return the answer, ‘You, queen.’
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Except that one day, when Snow White was seven years old and her beauty has surpassed her stepmother’s, the looking-glass returned the answer, when the queen asked it who was the fairest of them all, ‘Snow White is lovelier than you!’ The wicked stepmother can’t be doing with a beautiful rival, so she orders a huntsman to take Snow White out to the woods and kill her. The huntsman can’t bring himself to kill the little girl, so he merely abandons her in the forest.
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Snow White wanders, lost and forlorn, through the forest until she comes to a cottage, which she enters in the hope of finding shelter. Instead, what she finds are seven places laid out for dinner, seven beds: seven of everything. She has a bit out of each of the food and drink set out at the dinner table, before trying each of the beds, until she finds one that’s comfortable, and falls asleep. The occupants of the cottage – seven dwarfs – then return from a hard day mining for gold in the nearby caves, and spot that an intruder’s been nibbling at their food.
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But unlike the three bears, who are angry upon discovering a juvenile delinquent in their home, the seven dwarfs are so impressed by Snow White’s beauty that they are overjoyed to see her and leave her to sleep. In the morning she wakes and tells them her story, and they agree to let her stay with them, and look after the cottage while they go out to work.
They warn her, though, that the evil queen is bound to learn that she is still alive, and seek to kill her again. Meanwhile, the wicked stepmother’s talking mirror is busy blabbing about Snow White’s whereabouts, and when the evil queen asks it who is the fairest in the land, the bigmouthed looking-glass replies that Snow White still is, and adds where the girl can be found.
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Having learned that her plan has been foiled and the girl still lives, the wicked stepmother disguises herself as a pedlar and travels to the dwarfs’ cottage, and sells the naïve Snow White some new laces for her shoes. She ties the girl’s laces so tightly that Snow White falls down, unconscious.
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When the dwarfs return, they undo the laces and revive the girl, warning her to be more vigilant – they, unlike Snow White, have realised that the pedlar was the wicked queen in disguise. When the wicked queen gets home and learns from the mirror that her plan has been thwarted again, she sets off in a different disguise and convinces Snow White to take a comb as a gift. When the comb makes contact with Snow White’s black hair, she drops down again, and the wicked stepmother returns, her mission supposedly accomplished.
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But once again the dwarfs manage to revive Snow White, and the wicked queen learns from the mirror that the girl is still alive. So she contrives a third plan, and sets off for the dwarfs’ cottage a third time, this time dressed as an old peasant’s wife.
She tempts Snow White to eat a delicious apple she has brought with her, and Snow White reluctantly assents when she is reassured that the peasant’s wife will eat half the apple with her. But the queen has cunningly poisoned only half the apple, and makes sure that that’s the half that Snow White munches on. The girl drops down dead, and the queen is overjoyed, when she returns home and asks the magic mirror who is the fairest of them all, to receive the answer, ‘You, my queen.’
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The dwarfs are distraught by Snow White’s death, and lay her to rest in a glass coffin. But then a prince comes by (for some unspecified reason) and is captivated by the dead girl’s beauty as she lies in the glass coffin (a detail bordering on the morbid, but we’ll gloss over that).
He begs the dwarfs to let him take the coffin with him (a detail it’s harder to gloss over), and they reluctantly agree. Which is just as well, since as soon as the prince picks up the coffin, the piece of poisoned apple falls from Snow White’s mouth and she is revived. The prince asks her if she will marry him, and she says yes.
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The wicked stepmother learns that a new queen is getting married (thanks to that perennial blabbermouth, her magical looking-glass), and goes to the wedding to see this new queen. When she sees that it is Snow White, back from the dead, she is so consumed with rage that she falls down dead. And that’s the end of the wicked stepmother, and the end of the story of Snow White, who lives happily ever after with the prince.
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(The above plot summary is based on the version of ‘Snow White’ included in the indispensable book by Iona and Peter Opie, The Classic Fairy Tales.)