Starting with snow white

particular version as it has been told, becomes complex. “Richilda”
 
does not lend itself 
to improvisational variation, or the performative act of storytelling because it depicts its 
plot and characters in a particularly contrived construct, and the longer form allows for 
this. 
Yet the Grimms’ success in their work was not singularly scholarly (based in the 
study of folklore), cultural, or artful in a formal or stylistic sense. Although the Grimms’ 
project began in the veins of scholarship and nationalism, their work and art transformed 
over time. They honed their craft, adapting to cultural changes and societal needs, the 
most pertinent being educative. While their initial impulse may have been to create a 
collection of “traditional tales before they disappeared in the face of increasing literacy,” 
the fact remains that six subsequent editions were produced with “stylistic and verbal 
changes,” Blamires argues, a move “calculated to appeal to a child readership” (
Telling 
Tales
148; “A 
Workshop
” 81).
26
Yet Blamires also suggests that this “editorial” process 
signals the Grimms’ commitment to scholarship, wherein they compared and combined 
multiple versions in attempt to “reconstruct the original form of a work” (“A 
Workshop
” 
79). While this may have been part of the reason for editorial changes to subsequent 
26
While editorial changes were made toward an educative purpose, the ordering of tales does not seem 
significant in contributing to such changes.

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editions, one should also recognize Warner’s point that “Wilhelm began altering other 
stories because they were off-colour by the standards of the day” (60). In other words, 
scholarly principle combined with and perhaps was even overrun by the adaptive 
necessity to editorialize. Only these types of revisions would allow the Grimms’ stories 
to be heard based on the context of their changing society. Specific revisions to their 
tales highlight this new focus on child readers. 
For example, one of the tale’s central characters did not even exist in the Grimms’ 
1812 manuscript version. Blamires importantly notes, “Not until the 1819 edition do we 
get the figure of the wicked stepmother; up to that point it was Snow White’s own mother 
who was her jealous persecutor” (“
A Workshop” 
78). This initial version, however, 
lacked moral definition; it presupposed that the offspring of both mother and anti-mother 
might evolve into the same female type. In this framework, the model and her antithesis 
do not act in opposition but are one and the same.
Another significant change from the manuscript to printed version involved how 
Snow White was discovered. Initially, “Snow White’s own father […] finds her 
supposed corpse in the glass coffin when he returns from abroad” (“
A Workshop” 
78).
Subsequently, doctors bring her back to life, and she is “married to a handsome prince” 
(“
A Workshop” 
78). However, by the time the 1812 version was printed, Snow White is 
“given to a prince who has fallen in love with her beauty” (“
A 
Workshop”78). While the 
first version reads much more to the tune of folklore, with natural (non-magical or 
marvelous) intervention, but that of a doctor, in the latter version, Snow White’s recovery 
depends upon her somewhat magical or entrancing quality of beauty. This quality finally 

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brings her into acquaintance with a prince and enables the scene where a servant 
stumbles, when carrying the coffin, serendipitously bringing her back to life. Warner 
argues that in the nineteenth century, with the rise of printing technology, “The fairy way 
of writing, packaged and pictured for younger readers, became a model of 
communicating moral values, political dreams, and even scientific knowledge,” and 
importantly, “Fairy tales settled into the canon of childhood education” (Warner 108)
Specifically, as these intents related to the Grimms work, Maria Tatar contends, “[the 
Grimms] were part of a tendency that had become a trend by the early nineteenth century.
[…] [Their tales] appeared in print just when folktales were moving out of barns and 
spinning rooms and into the nursery” (