Snow White has so many versions!

Disney’s live-action Snow White is in cinemas and reviews are not good.

However, I don’t expect one lackluster live-action adaptation to sour audiences on the franchise. Most of us read this story in nursery school. If you are anything like me, you had no idea that Disney’s version of the fairy tale adapts a 19th-century German folk tale (Story Number 53) from Grimm’s Fairy Tales (1812), written by the Brothers Grimm.

Initially titled Schneewittchen, the original tale featured many of the components modern audiences associate with Snow White, including seven dwarfs, an evil queen, and poisoned apples.

The seven dwarfs remained nameless until a production of the story came to Broadway in 1912. But even then, the names (Blick, Flick, Glick, Snick, Plick, Whick, Quee) could not have been more different from what we know today.

The adaptation was such a success that it paved the way for a silent Snow White film (1916) that Walt Disney watched at the tender age of 15. Two decades later, Disney used his home as collateral to secure the $1.48 million loan to make the animated Snow White.

Released in 1937, the film was a massive hit, earning a whopping $480 million. As the first Disney feature-length animated movie, it also laid the foundations for the entertainment juggernaut Disney has become.

Researchers believe Margaretha von Waldeck and her (alleged) lover Phillip II of Spain inspired the original Snow White. Margaretha was a famed beauty who was sent to live with her uncle by her strict stepmother.

Eventually, she joined Mary of Hungary’s court and caught Phillip’s eye. But religious differences prevented Margaretha (Lutheran) and Phillip (Catholic) from nurturing a relationship. Margaretha was 21 when she died in 1554, and blamed her failing health on poison.

You can see why comparisons to Snow White are encouraged, particularly when you consider that Margaretha’s father employed children to work in his copper mines and people called them ‘Poor Dwarfs’ because of the impact of malnutrition and questionable working conditions.

The children could have inspired Snow White’s seven dwarfs. However, the Brothers Grimm did not write the original Snow White. That honor goes to Johann Karl August Musaus who published a collection of German folk tales called Folkmarchen der Deutschen.

The Snow White you know today is specifically based on the story Richilde. In Richilde, a queen is talking to a magic mirror she got as a baptism gift when it reveals that her stepdaughter Blanca is the most beautiful woman in the land.

Outraged, the queen sends a basket of poisoned apples to Blanca, who lives in a castle with her dwarf servants. When the dwarfs thwart this plot, the queen circumvents them by sending Blanca a poisoned letter. She opens it and falls into a coma.

The dwarfs take her body to the castle’s crypt in a glass coffin. But then a handsome prince uses a relic he retrieved from the holy land to wake Blanca. The story ends with the dwarfs making burning steel slippers which they force the queen to wear before she’s locked away in the highest tower.

The Grimm Fairytale makes Snow White the servant to the dwarfs. And when the queen poisons her with an apple, it does not take true love’s kiss to wake Snow White. Instead, the piece of poisoned apple she ate falls out of her mouth when the prince lifts her coffin.

In his book Kindermarchen, which came out before the Grimm Snow White, German author Albert Ludwig Grimm (no relation to the Brothers Grimm) includes a play in which a stepmother sends two hunters to kill her stepdaughter, but seven dwarfs save her.

The Russian Snow White (written by Alexander Puskin in 1830) was raised by dragon-slaying dwarfs after an angry Queen discards her in the forest because beggars told her the baby was the fairest in the land. So, Snow White as a franchise is centuries old. I urge you to give those earlier Snow White folk tales a read. They have more grit than the modern version.