Category: Brothers Grimm

Glass-Coffin Girls

Glass-Coffin Girls

The story of Snow White, as told by the Brothers Grimm, is only one of many narratives involving girls who have fallen into a deathlike state and are displayed in a glass coffins. In this episode, we examine the sordid details of the Grimm’s original 1812 version of the tale and compare it with analogous stories  dating back to the 12th century.

We begin with a review of the Grimms’ original story, many aspects of which have been subsequently muddled and obscured not only by Disney but by later alterations made by the Grimms. These include the identify of the Evil Queen, the malevolence of her intent, the purported benevolence of the Huntsman, and particularly, the nature of Snow White’s resurrection.

"Snow White Receives the Poisoned Comb" Hans Makart (1872)
“Snow White Receives the Poisoned Comb” Hans Makart (1872)

After  this, we have a look  at the immediate predecessor to the 1812 story, a children’s play of the same name by the (unrelated) German author Albert Ludwig Grimm. Though it  features dwarves who aid Snow White, a magic mirror addressed in rhyme, poisoned fruit, deception involving the heroine’s purported death, and glass coffin, it proves to be a very different story.

The next tale explored is the 1782 novella Richilde, by the German writer Johann Karl August Musäus.  Surprisingly, the title character here, Richilde, is the wicked stepmother rather than her step-daughter Bianca, whose name in Italian (i.e., “white”) might be compared to “Snow White.” Set in medieval Brabant (Belgium), this one has Bianca courted by a prince whom the jealous stepmother hopes to see married to her own daughter.  A further complication is presented by the fact that the prince here is already married.

Richilde Title Page
Richilde Title Page

We then take a look at the rarely mentioned Russian story,  “The Tale of the Old Mendicants,”  (my translation) published in the 1794 collection, An Old Song in a New Setting, or a Complete Collection of Ancient Folk Tales, Published for a lover of them, at the expense of the Moscow merchant Ivan Ivanov (my translation). In this one, the role of the Evil Queen is played by an innkeeper jealous that her guests have complimented the beauty of her daughter rather than her own. The alms-collecting monks of the title are used by the mother to deliver a poisoned shirt to the Snow White character, Olga the Beautiful.

Our next offering comes from the 1634 volume by Neapolitan writer Giambattista Basile,  Il Pentamerone, or The Tale of Tales, the very first collection of fairy tales, with which the Brother Grimm were definitely familiar (and one featured in our earlier “Dark Fairy Tales” episodes, both One and Two ). The  story in question is “The Little Slave,” which combines elements of Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, and Cinderella. Here, the Snow White character, Lisa, again falls into a death-like swoon and is kept within not one but seven glass coffins in a locked room. The story resolves itself with the aid of a doll, a whetstone, and a knife.

Il Pentamarone
Il Pentamarone

Our earliest story paralleling Snow White, is quite a bit older — from the 12th-century,  the Lai of Eliduc by Breton writer Marie de France. While serving a king in England, the Breton knight Eliduc  falls in love with his lord’s  daughter, Guillardun, who falls into a swoon during an ocean voyage.  Eliduc (who is not exactly innocent when it comes to Guillardun’s condition) transports the body of his love back to France and keeps it on the altar of a deserted woodland chapel.  In this case, the story resolves itself thanks to a very clever weasel.

After our more detailed  examination of these strangely paralleled stories, we take a quick look at the wide range of more recent variants that were committed to print after the Grimms published their work and at a rather ugly controversy that engulfed German town, Lohr am Main, after it claimed to be the birthplace of the Snow White Legend.

Our episode ends with Mrs. Karswell’s reading  a  particularly dark and brutal tale about seven dwarves collected by Swiss historian and folklorist Ernst Ludwig Rochholz in his 1856 volume, Swiss Legends of the Aargau.

Lohr am Main Snow White state.
Lohr am Main Snow White state.
#29 The Bloody Chamber

#29 The Bloody Chamber

Bluebeard and his bloody chamber full of murderous secrets is widely known as one of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales, but it’s part of a larger family of folk tales and ballads we examine in this episode.

Our show begins with a brief summary of this tale in which a young woman is courted by the mysterious and strangely whiskered nobleman, Bluebeard.  After lavishly entertaining the woman and her family in his castle,  it’s agreed they should marry.  Soon thereafter, Bluebeard departs on a journey leaving his bride keys to all the rooms of his estate, all of which to which may use —  but one.  Curiosity, however, getting the better of her, she unlocks the forbidden door and must face Bluebeard’s murderous rage at her disobedience.

1870s poster for Covent Garden pantomime
1870s poster for Covent Garden pantomime

Perrault’s 1697 story, which draws upon older folk tales, is primarily known thanks to its inclusion in collections of fairy tales intended for children.  Today, however, you’re unlikely to find the gruesome yarn anthologized for younger readers.  If included at all, it may be sanitized, as it was in the 1970 children’s record from which we excerpted a clip at the show’s open.

Along with fairy tale collections and cheaply printed chapbooks, the Bluebeard story was largely preserved through theatrical representation.  We look at a number of productions from the late 18th and early 19th century that treated the story in a semi-comic or melodramatic fashion, often combining elements of the Italian Commedia dell’arte, such as Harlequin and his antics.  Wilkinson provides of some readings of the comedic dialogue as well as stage directions which often made the “bloody chamber” a lavishly designed and spooky centerpiece of the production.

Particularly important to how were think of Bluebeard today is the 1798 production Blue Beard, or Female Curiosity!, which moved the story to Turkey in order to exploit a growing fascination with the East.  This image of Bluebeard and indeed its importance in the English-language repertoire is suggested by the inclusion of the play in the 1993 Jane Campion film, The Piano, a story set during this period.  The theatrical tradition of representing Bluebeard’s wives as bloody heads severed from their bodies is demonstrated in this scene as well as many 19th-century photographs of such stagings.

1868 Harper's magazine article w/ illustrations by Winslow Homer.
1868 Harper’s magazine article w/ illustrations by Winslow Homer.

Also discussed is 1 1903 Christmas staging of Mr. Bluebeard in Chicago, famous not so much for its musical numbers (such as the song “Raving,” which we hear excerpted) but more for a landmark fire, which claimed the lives of 602 theater-goers.

While there have been dozens of films that play with the theme of women marrying men with mysteriously deceased wives, only a few have directly addressed the tale.  We very briefly discuss the 1944 Bluebeard with John Carradine, the 1972 Bluebeard with Richard Burton, and the 2009 French film, Barbe-Bleue (Bluebeard), which is the most traditional of the lot.

In the next part of our show, we look at related folktales including the Grimm’s story “Fitcher’s Bird,” which features bloody chambers that must not be opened, a skull dressed as a bride, a woman rolling in honey and feathers, and a wedding that’s diverted into an execution party.  We also look at the English tale “Mr. Fox,” in which a woman spying on her bridegroom discovers his habit

The Grimms also gave us “The Robber Bridegroom,” in which a bride-to-be visits her intended’s home “out in the dark forest,” where she makes unnerving discovery similar to that in Mr. Fox (but with an added element of grisly horror thrown in).

1870s poster for Covent Garden pantomime
1870s poster for Covent Garden pantomime

As a sort of musical tonic to all these tales of women and the bloody chambers they might end up in, we close the show with two traditional ballads in which the woman more satisfyingly gains the upper hand, and ends up slaying the serial killer she is to wed.  The frist of these, is a Dutch ballad  “Lord Halewijn” and the second “Lady Isobel and the Outlandish (or “Elf”) Knight.

We close with a peculiar tidbit from modern life, a weird parallel between ancient folk ballads and a true-crime oddity.

#14 Singing Bones & Scrumptious Children

#14 Singing Bones & Scrumptious Children

This episode looks at some particularly gruesome fairy tales and folk ballads telling of murderers convicted of their crime through magical intervention of the bones or blood of their victims.

We begin with a look at the story of Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber of Fleet Street as it shares a common theme of accidental cannibalism with Grimm fairy tale central to our episode, “The Juniper Tree.” Some Victorian urban legends are identified as possible sources of the story, which first appeared in an 1846 penny dreadful entitled The String of Pearls, a Romance.  We also hear a snippet of a song about the Demon Barber written by R.P. Weston and sung by English music hall revivalist Stan Holloway, the artists who also gave us the song about Anne Boleyn’s ghost  “With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm,” featured in our “Lost Heads” episode.

We then have a look at  “The Juniper Tree” published in 1812 in the original edition of Grimm’s collection Children’s and Household Tales, that is, what we call Grimm’s Fairy Tales. The grisly tale would never lend itself to the Disney treatment, though it did serve, extremely loosely, as inspiration for an Icelandic film of the same name, starring a young Björk.

Grimm's Fairy Tales, 1812 edition
Grimm’s Fairy Tales, 1812 edition

“The Juniper Tree” tells of an evil stepmother who contrives to kill her stepson in a particularly brutal way, covering her crime by cooking the child’s remains into stew served to the family.  The tale also includes of blood, a vengeful bird, and a fiery, magic juniper tree. English, Austrian, and Romanian version of the tale, are also noted for noteworthy bits of horror, and we hear a a musical rendition by the Russian ensemble Caprice of the song sung by the bird in this Grimm story.

Illustration for "The Juniper Tree," artist unknown.
Illustration for “The Juniper Tree,” artist unknown.

The next story, introduced via an audio oddity from the 1962 film, The Wonder World of the Brothers Grimm, is “The Singing Bone.”  Like “The Juniper Tree,” this one revolves around the outing of a murderer though a song.  In this case, the song telling the tale of murder of one brother by another produced by a flute made of a bone of the murdered brother.   We also have a look at a number of variations on this tale and a tool used by folklorists,The Aarne–Thompson Tale Type registry, where one can find synopses of tales listed the “Singing Bone” (#780) category, such as:

“780B: The Speaking Hair: A stepmother buries a girl alive. Her hair grows as wheat or bush and sings her misfortunes. Thus she is discovered and dug up alive. The stepmother is buried in the same hole.”

Just as bones communicate the identity of their murderer, the blood of a victim in other tales can bring a killer to justice. We hear a number of tales of this sort, including the Icelandic “Murder Will Out,” featuring a bleeding skull impaled with knitting needles.

The idea that human remains could identify their killer was not just the stuff of folk tales. The idea that a corpse would bleed in the presence of its murderer (called ‘cruentation’ from a Latin word for “staining with blood”)was, in past centuries, an accepted element of criminal law in Germany, Denmark, Bohemia, Poland, and Scotland, and even the United States.  We hear a snippet from Shakespeare’s Richard III, featuring the practice as well as an example of cruentation used as late as the early 1800s in the US.

The “Singing Bone” story has parallels in the world of folk music.  The murder ballad “Two Sisters” (also  “Twa Sisters,” “The Cruel Sister,” “Binnorie,” or in America, “The Dreadful Wind and Rain”) tells of the murder of one sister by another over an issue of romantic jealousy.  Like “The Singing Bone,” the victim’s bones are found and made into a musical instrument that produces a song convicting the murderer.  Often the hair, or in an older version dating to the 1600s — veins, are turned into the strings of a harp.  We hear a version of the song by The Askew Sisters and by the German group Broom Bezzums, and American versions by Kilby Snow and Tom Waits, also a rather different take on the song from Sweden, where more than a hundred versions also exist.

We saved a final tasty morsel for the end of the show, a surprising historical account, which precisely parallels the Sweeney Todd story, not from 19th-century London, but a place and time far, far removed.