"Snow White and Rose Red," by the Brothers Grimm

In which the titular sisters encounter a very nice bear and a very ungrateful dwarf and between them find a happy-ever-after; and in which the narrator insists on demonstrating that he learned SOMETHING in four years of high school German.



And here's our first fairy tale by Grimm! As described at length in the recording, this Snow White is not the same as that of "...and the Seven Dwarves." The names are different in German: Sneewittchen for the more famous one, and Scnheeweißchen* for this one. They both translate literally to "Little Snow White," but the former is Low German and the latter is High German. There is a dwarf in this one, though!

Much like with Andersen and Verne, there are a multitude of translations of Grimm both in and out of the public domain. A translation by Margaret Hunt from the 1870s is considered the definitive English translation of the nineteenth century. It also, however, has not aged especially well. Instead, I'll be using the version used in the Barnes & Noble Classics edition I got for free a while back, which is an anonymous translation from 1869. Maybe not the best, but definitely usable.

I was, though, very pleased with the number of illustrations I was able to find for this somewhat lesser-known tale. I couldn't entirely decide between three sources, so I used them all! One batch is by Jennie Harbour, from a 1921 compilation edited by Edric Vredenburg called My Book of Fairy Tales. Another is by L. Leslie Brooke, from a 1909 book called The House in the Wood and Other Fairy Stories, and the third is by Alexander Zick from a German edition of Grimm's from sometime in the 1880s, probably. Most of the image files are courtesy of SurLaLune Fairy Tales.

2:37 - They were like the flowers which bloomed on two
rose-bushes which grew before the cottage. (Jennie Harbour)

See more illustrations after the jump!