Starting with snow white

Snow White
tale, that of the Brothers Grimm. Of the three, 
it was their “Sneewittchen” (“Little Snow White”) that came to be understood as 
the 
version retold again and again, refusing to be forgotten. 
10
I use “cultural consciousness” and “cultural sensitivity” interchangeably to refer to the author’s 
awareness of and engagement with his cultural moment and of the (social, political, moral) conditions 
surrounding his artistic production. 

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28
 
A Starting Point for Discovering the Early 
Snow White 
“Classics” 
I begin this journey into the 
Snow White 
tale by inspecting “Snow White” or 
“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” entries in fairy tale reference texts. Therein, I 
suggest that a pattern begins to emerge which informs one’s initial ideas regarding 
“classic” versions of this tale, or the more traditional lineage of the 
Snow White 
tale. For 
example, in the “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” entry in 
The Oxford Companion to 
Fairy Tales 
(2000), the first few lines announce, “Early written versions appear in 
Giambattista Basile’s 
Pentamerone
(
The Pentameron
1634-6), J.K. Musäus’s 
Volksmarchen der Deutschen
(1782), and Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm’s 
Kinder- und 
Hausmarchen 
(Children’s and Household Tales, 1812-1815)” (Goldberg 478).
11
While 
the tale is referenced to have “circulated widely in Africa, Asia Minor, Scandinavia, 
Ireland, Russia, Greece, Cerbo-Croatia, the Caribbean, and North, South, and Central 
America” only these 
three
literary precursors are referenced in the entry, under a heading 
intuitively recalling Walt Disney’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” (1937), a later 
adaptation recognized in critical and popular contexts (Goldberg 478). Although the 
entry begins from a more scholarly angle, gesturing toward a few earlier 
Snow White 
tales, when the entry’s title aligns these with a modern “classic” (Disney’s version), I find 
that it formatively aligns these three precursors with a broader audience’s idea of a 
“classic” version of the tale. 
11
The
 Pentamerone 
(1634-6), 
Volksmarchen der Deutschen 
(1782), and 
Kinder- und Hausmarchen 
(1812-
1815) contain the 
Snow White 
versions of “La schiavottella” (“The Young Slave”), “Richilda,” and 
“Sneewittchen” (“Little Snow White”), respectively. 

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29
In a more recent encyclopedic collection, the second edition of 
Folktales and 
Fairy Tales: Traditions and Texts from around the World 
(2016), Vanessa Joosen’s 
“Snow White” entry declares, “the best-known version of the German fairy tale 
‘Sneewittchen’ or ‘Snow White’ was published in the 1857 edition of Jacob and Wilhelm 
Grimm’s 
Kinderund Hausmarchen (Children’s and Household Tales)
” (944). Also 
recognized, is Disney’s version: “the first fairy tale to be adapted to a full-length 
animated film […] in 1937” (Joosen 944). While Jones’ catalogue of “more than 400 
variants of ‘Snow White’ from Europe, Asia Minor, Africa, and (to a lesser extent) the 
Americas” is accounted for, these versions remain ambiguous in this general reference 
and are only further distinguished by their “similarities to ‘La schiavottella’ (‘The Young 
Slave’) from Giambattista Basile’s 
Lo cunto de li cunti (The Tale of Tales, 
1634-36),
12
as 
well as to ‘Richilde’
13
from Johann Karl August Musäus’s 
Volksmarchen der Deutschen 
(Folktales of the Germans, 
1782-86)” (Joosen 945). Other modern variants are 
acknowledged more specifically in the latter portion of the entry (successors of the 
Grimms and Disney); however, the only 
early versions
of the tale cited are Basile’s and 
Musäus’. If so many versions, variations, and adaptations of the tale and its motifs exist 
(“ways in which the protagonist is killed,” for example), why are these two in particular 
(alongside a third, the Grimms’ tale) so consistently recognized as 
the precursors
(Joosen 
945)? And, how does one begin to recognize a single resonant precursor? These 
12
Lo cunto de li cunti 
(1634-36) was the initial title under which the 
Pentamerone 
was subsequently 
published.
13
“Richilde,” ending in -e (as opposed the -a ending I use) is often used in scholarship concerning Musäus’ 
work. However, given that the primary text used for this chapter ends in -a, I have utilized this spelling in 
all cases, excepting those in citations from other texts or critics.

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30
questions prove significant, as they not only came to inform how scholars and more 
popular audiences at last came to view the Grimms, as this chapter will show, but also 
how later audiences engaged Walt Disney’s modernized 
Snow White 
version. 
 
Steven Swann Jones’ Folkloric Classification of 
Snow White 
Folklore’s methods are decidedly a part of the process for classifying what counts 
as a 
Snow White 
version or variation, and one can scarcely find a study of 
Snow White
without mention of Steven Swann Jones’ influential and wide-reaching analysis in 
The 
New Comparative Method: Structural and Symbolic Analysis of the Allomotifs of “Snow 
White
.
”
Here, Jones defines “the theoretical model of the folktale” as “its structurally 
identifiable, typologically distinct pattern of 
episodes
” (
New Comparative 
26; emphasis 
added). He further argues that it is this model that enables one to understand “specific 
texts” in the “context of the entire tale type” (
New Comparative 
27).
In their earlier classification of the 
Snow White
tale and its variants, folklorists 
Aarne and Thompson crafted a model of 5 
characteristics
distinguishing a 
Snow White 
version or variation: 
I. 
Snow-White and her Stepmother
II
. Snow-White’s Rescue
III
. The Poisoning
IV
. Help of the Dwarfs
V
. Her Revival
(
New Comparative 
21-22) 
In his contradiction of this “flawed” framework and misidentification of pertinent motifs 
that may or may not be present (“red as blood/white as snow, the magic mirror, the 
compassionate executioner, the dwarfs, the poisoned lace, comb, and apple, the glass 

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coffin, and the red hot shoes”), Jones argues that there are “nine episodes (or action traits 
to use the historic-geographic terminology) that are consistently repeated, significant 
events in [the 
Snow White
] tale” (
New Comparative 
21). These take place over the 
course of two parts.