Starting with snow white

Telling Tales 
147). Both of these authors 
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Richilda has no need to rid herself of Blanca’s presence because she does not become aware of the 
beauty until later in life. While these episodes (expulsion and adoption) do exist, they are executed by 
Blanca’s father, who, choosing to marry Richilda, divorces Blanca’s “good mother” and puts both under 
the care of others.

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do so, Musäus in his 
Volksmarchen der Deutschen
, and the Grimms’ in their 
Kinder- und 
Hausmarchen 
(Children’s and Household Tales). However, these versions assume vastly 
different forms, and, as a result, speak to different audiences. This, I argue, is part of the 
reason that both versions remain critically relevant 
Snow White 
precursors, yet it also 
eliminates “Richilda’s” opportunity to be viewed as a “classic” in the way that the 
Grimms’ version is understood. 
Even though “Richilda”
 
stands as representative of cultural character, its novelette 
form restricts its ability to be positioned a classic 
Snow White
fairy tale variant in the way 
that the Grimms’ “Sneewittchen” or even Basile’s “The Young Slave” are considered to 
be. Blamires points to the “misleading” nature of the title of the larger work even 
[
Volksmahrchen der Deutschen 
(Folktales of the Germans)], “since what Musäus wrote 
were decidedly literary tales, more like short novels or romances in terms of length, 
rational and satirical in tone, minimizing or excising everything to do with magic or the 
supernatural” (
Telling Tales 
52). In sorting out this difference concerning literary form 
and of folk narrative versus fairy tale specifically, Andrew Teverson uses Steven Swann 
Jones’ taxonomy of folk narratives, wherein “the fairy tale, like other folk narratives, 
employs ‘ordinary protagonists to address issues of everyday life’” (Jones qtd. in 
Teverson 29). By this definition, Musäus has indeed still produced a folk narrative and 
fairy tale. However, in its “realistic setting” with its “specified time and place,” 
Teverson’s definitions position the tale closer to Blamires’, where the narrative would be 
understood as a novelle or novelette (Teverson 28).

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This literary distinction or division of “Richilda” from the fairy tale form extends 
still further, into the work’s failure to “
depict magical or marvellous events or 
phenomena as a valid part of human experience
” (Jones qtd. in Teverson 29). There is 
no miraculous conception by which the beautiful Blanca (Snow White) comes to be. 
Further, Richilda’s (the step-mother’s) mirror is a work of alchemy—part scientific and 
part religious—which will “represent every thing concerning which [she] enquire[s] in 
distinct speaking images” (“Richilda” 10). Despite the phrasing here, the images 
alone 
speak for themselves. In other words, the mirror does not respond through spoken 
language, but through silent images. Although images other than Richilda, herself, 
appear in the mirror, at times, the magical or marvelous quality of a mirror that responds 
verbally is absent. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, when the Countess intends to 
do away with Blanca, she does not employ witchcraft, but consults Sambul, the court 
physician to generate poisons for her. Ronald Murphy finds that through this exchange, 
of “turning [Blanca’s] apparent death into a medically induced sleep, Musäus makes the 
moment of crisis in the narrative fully responsive to reason and avoids any real need for 
supernatural agency to overcome death” (115). Here especially, it is not an insignificant 
component of the tale where the magic has been minimized. It is the crux of the tale.
Logic and rationale displace the marvelous in each of these ways, thereby further 
distinguishing “Richilda” from the fairy tales of Basile and the Grimms. Where the 
magical or marvelous can be found in both Basile’s and the Grimms texts—in their 
miraculous births, growing caskets, talking dolls and mirrors, and witchcraft— Musäus 
narrative tones down or mutes these elements entirely.

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Other portions of the tale are also rationalized, but with a more satirical slant. For 
example, there is an extended bit of narration about the fickleness of men’s romantic 
passions, which are described as a medical affectation of royal inbreeding. Here, Musäus 
takes pains to describe a man’s conscience “as delicate, sore, and ticklish, as the 
membrane called the