I finally got back into reading alternate versions of Snow White, which I mentioned a week or two ago. Because I had the idea to put together a re-telling of it which highlighted a lot of pagan motifs contained within the story.

Anyway, I found a good annotated version of the Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs story over at Sur La Lune Fairy Tales (which is a great site). There is a lot of interesting information contained in the notes, actually. Some of the stuff that jumps out at me:

White as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood: The three colours, white, red and black represent the three aspects of the Triple Goddess: maiden/mother/crone.

…The King took to himself another wife: In the first edition, the version closest to its oral sources, Snow-White’s jealous antagonist is her own mother. In the edition of 1819, the Grimms here added the statement that Snow-White’s mother died during childbirth, and that her father remarried, so the jealous Queen was made her stepmother

…While seven was often considered the age of transition from child to adult in past centuries, the stated age is often ignored in illustrated or film versions of the story and made to appear much older. Since the story does not mark a significant amount of time, the image of a seven-year-old child marrying the prince at the end of the story fails to appear romantic, but rather abusive. In some versions of the story, the child continues to grow into a young woman as she sleeps, proof that she is not quite dead although not quite alive either, but nonetheless justifying the dwarfs coffin-side vigilance.

Plus I also found this other version of the story which is called the Death of the Seven Dwarfs:

On a high plain between Brugg and Waldshut, near the Black Forest, seven dwarfs lived together in a small house. Late one evening an attractive young peasant girl, who was lost and hungry, approached them and requested shelter for the night. The dwarfs had only seven beds, and they fell to arguing with one another, for each one wanted to give up his bed for the girl. Finally the oldest one took the girl into his bed.
Before they could fall asleep a peasant woman appeared before their house, knocked on the door, and asked to be let inside. The girl got up immediately and told the woman that the dwarfs had only seven beds, and that there was no room there for anyone else. With this the woman became very angry and accused the girl of being a slut, thinking that she was cohabiting with all seven men. Threatening to make a quick end to such evil business, she went away in a rage.

That same night she returned with two men, whom she had brought up from the bank of the Rhine. Together they broke into the house and killed the seven dwarfs. They buried the bodies outside in the garden and burned the house to the ground. No one knows what became of the girl.

Apparently, in the Aarne-Thompson type index of folklore, Snow White is type 709. Here’s more tales from Europe which are of that type as well, and share a lot of common elements. Here is some information about the numerical folktale typing system.

Also, I was thinking briefly about if and how the seven dwarves in Walt Disney’s version would match up with the seven deadly sins.

The dwarves are:

- Happy
- Grumpy
- Dopey
- Doc
- Sneezy
- Sleepy
- Bashful

And the sins are (along with their corresponding demons & animals - although this site has some different associations with animals than shown here):

- Pride (Lucifer - lion)
- Envy (Leviathan - dog)
- Gluttony (Beelzebub - pig)
- Lust (Asmodeus - goat or ass)
- Anger (Satan - leopard or boar)
- Greed/Avarice (Mammon - wolf)
- Sloth (Belphegor - donkey)

OH WAIT! Here we go, apparently I’m not the first to think of this. But that unfortunately doesn’t delve into which ones relate to which dwarf.

Anyway, here are some links to amateur fantasy art work of Snow White over at Elfwood.

- Snow white checking out an apple in colored pencils
- A kind of creepy and (I think) sexed up older looking Snow White
- Snow White with huge things on her head.
- Another even more sexed up picture of Snow White, this time laying passed out from her apple, with her dressed hiked way up.
- This one’s actually really nice of her all asleep with her arms across her
- This one’s really cool also
- “Evil” Snow White
- This one is mainly interesting to me because of the caption the author wrote.
- A black and white photo of somebody posing as the passed out Snow White
- Snow White’s momma

Interestingly enough, I realized that EVERY SINGLE ONE of the drawings of Snow White which I found on this site was drawn by a girl. HMMMMMM…