Starting with snow white

Hard Facts 
21). And, “ever responsive to the 
values of their time and increasingly sensitive to pedagogical demands, [they] 
transformed adult folk materials into a hybrid form of folklore and literature for children” 
(
Hard Facts 
xxii).
27
Significantly, the Grimms could not have generated such 
adaptations if not for their initial interest in capturing oral versions of a tale. It was this 
folkloric interest, paired with their own artistry, and keen awareness of the ways in which 
print culture was evolving that enabled them to adapt and speak to a dual audience—one 
vested in scholarship and a second, developing audience of child readership (which 
necessarily included the parents of those child readers).
Being attuned to new versions and translations of even their own tales, the 
Grimms in some respects editorialized to pander to this developing audience. Tatar 
27
In recognizing these trends and the Grimms’ interest in appealing to them, I do not mean to suggest that 
the Grimms were responsible for the shift into the nursery. Rather, they became engaged in the broader 
movement which imagined this collection for a new audience and purpose. 

---

64
makes note of the Grimms’ admission (in the preface to the second edition of the 
Nursery 
and Household Tales
) to compromising tales with deletions of “every phrase unsuitable 
for children” such that “their collection could serve as a ‘manual of manners’” (
Hard 
Facts 
19). No longer intent on reproducing the purest version of a tale, the Grimms’ 
subsequent editions were devised to meet the evolving needs and demands of new 
populations of literary stakeholders, parents and children. “Printing technology” 
propelled these groups, according to Warner, and they in turn propelled the industry, 
which “would soon make books with pictures one of the most exciting and successful 
ventures of the nineteenth century” (105). In fact, playing off of one of the most popular 
illustrated translations, Edgar Taylor’s 1923 British translation of the Grimms, “Wilhelm 
Grimm put together fifty of the best known stories—more or less what became the classic 
canon of texts” into a “single, low-priced volume” (
Hard Facts 
19-20). I agree with 
Tatar that this does not necessarily indicate “that the Grimms were rank opportunists”; 
instead, it shows that they were dually academics and artists who used the full range of 
their assets to keep a pulse on their cultural moment, adapting their practice as the time 
called for them to (
Hard Facts 
21).
 
Conclusion 
And so, unsurprisingly, the fact remains that even those critical studies which 
appear to offer a more detailed classification or broader scope of the 
Snow White
tale’s 
history resolve with a compulsory emphasis on the Grimms. If we return to Kawan’s 
study of the interrelationships between 
Snow White
variants, it becomes clear that insofar 

---

65
as she demonstrates how oral culture may have influenced printed versions of the tale, 
through her emphasis on absences or gaps in these potential early variants, she also 
intentionally or unintentionally guides her audience toward the fullest, and most authentic 
representation of the tale—that of the Grimms. Although she recognizes “six widely 
independent versions (or eleven, if we count the Grimms’ variant material instead of their 
published tale[s]), [that] emerged in about half a century, from 1782 to 1833, in Germany 
and Russia,” this only further establishes the Grimms’ version(s) as foundational in that 
these comprised half, or nearly half, of those in circulation. Germany was the primary 
location of this tale, her study seems to say, and the Grimms were the “original” creators.
Further, she goes on to laud their reputation for having crafted what has “now [been] 
firmly established as the quintessential version of