That happened in a 1912 Broadway play, which called the dwarfs Blick, Flick, Glick, Snick, Plick, Whick, and Quee.
In the Grimms’ version, and indeed all nineteenth-century retellings of the Snow White story, the seven dwarfs don’t have names.īut nor was the 1937 Disney film the first version to give them individual names.
The story of ‘Snow White’ was first made popular in printed literature by the Brothers Grimm in the early nineteenth century: the tale of ‘Schneewittchen’ appears in their volumes of classic fairy tales. But enough of this digression into fantasy literature. This can be seen in the countless fantasy trilogies produced in the wake of The Lord of the Rings: the first volume establishes the quest or danger at hand, the second sees that danger doubled, and the third volume sees good triumph over evil (or law triumph over chaos in Michael Moorcock’s trilogies of the 1960s and 1970s). Like the significance of the number in the Goldilocks tale, the wicked stepmother’s three attempts to kill her rival may be seen as an example of the ‘just right’ balance in classic narratives: the first establishes a plot point, the second is a result of the thwarting of the first attempt and so redoubles the efforts, and the third ends with success. How should we analyse the story of Snow White? Like many other classic fairy tales, such as Rumpelstiltskin and the story of Goldilocks, the tale is haunted by the number three: there are three drops of blood that drip from the first queen’s hand, there are three queens (Snow White’s mother, her wicked stepmother, and finally Snow White herself), the wicked stepmother has to come up with three plans to murder the girl at the dwarfs’ cottage, and the dwarfs mourn Snow White’s death for three days before burying her. In the morning she wakes and tells them her story, and they agree to let her stay with them, and look after the cottage while they go out to work. Much like the situation the three bears come back to in the ‘Goldilocks’ story, the occupants of the cottage – seven dwarfs – then return from a hard day mining for gold in the nearby caves, and spot that an intruder’s been nibbling at their food.īut unlike the three bears, who are angry upon discovering a juvenile delinquent in their home, the seven dwarfs are so impressed by Snow White’s beauty that they are overjoyed to see her and leave her to sleep. She has a bit out of each of the food and drink set out at the dinner table, before trying each of the beds, until she finds one that’s comfortable, and falls asleep. Instead, what she finds are seven places laid out for dinner, seven beds: seven of everything. Snow White wanders, lost and forlorn, through the forest until she comes to a cottage, which she enters in the hope of finding shelter.
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