The following is excerpted from The Three Suitors: A Dozen and One Dooms, Drolls, and Dreads, by Julie Jaquith, which is a collection of obscure and little-known fairy tales and Kindermärchen. The present story purports to be one of the earliest instances of the famous “Snow-white” folktale motif—but I think you’ll agree this is not at all like the Disneyfied and bowdlerized version we’ve all come to know.
Enjoy!
—T. J. Quaine
Once upon a time, there was a beautiful young maiden with skin white as snow and cheeks red as blood, and who had long tresses as sable as the shadows in the woods at night. So white and beautiful was she that they called her “Snaw-quhyte,” which is to say, “Snow-white,” and that is just as well, for her real name is quite forgotten.
Snow-white was the daughter of a great Chief, and she was much beloved both of her father and her mother; but when she was still a young lass, her mother died, and soon the great Chief remarried. Now, for all her beauty and her sweetness, Snow-white was a very queer and solitary little girl, who was wont to consort of nights with the unseen creatures of the great, dark Wood. And the Chief’s new wife, who was a deeply pious woman, grew fearful of her little stepdaughter, and could not abide her in the great Chief’s castle. For it was whispered that Snow-white’s mother had been a powerful witch, and that her daughter had dutifully conned the devilish arts.
Now it happened that one day, whilst the great Chief was off at war with another Clan, little Snow-white’s stepmother seized the opportunity afforded by his absence, and bade her stepdaughter quit the castle forever, and nevermore return. The stepmother was a charitable, Christian soul, and although she feared that Snow-white might work her an evil someday, through those black avenues of science whereof she was privy, she could not countenance outright murder, and so she permitted Snow-white to live; but she bade her retainers drive the little girl deep into the great, dark Wood — and the stepmother fervently hoped Snow-white would lose her way, and perish of hunger. And the stepmother knew the great Chief would never question her tale of Snow-white’s disappearance, for he was gullible and uxorious as only great warriors may be.
Little Snow-white begged her stepmother to permit her to remain in the castle with the most pitiful and tearful implorations; but it was all to no avail. She was driven into the great, dark Wood, where she wandered in a state of pitiable distress for many weeks. And little Snow-white lived off the worms, and the insects, and the little, creeping things of the Wood; and by reason of her loneliness and her travails little Snow-white’s heart gradually hardened to Mankind, and she vowed thereat to avenge herself someday upon her cruel stepmother. But Snow-white had learned well the lessons of her mother, and she knew the special signs and language whereby the Little People who dwell in the dark Wood may know their own; moreover, she knew all the special trysting-places where the Little People are accustomed to foregather. And so little Snow-white came among the Little People of the Wood, who were hideous creatures with pale, wrinkled faces like old aged men, and had wicked, yellow eyes that stared and stared; and little Snow-white trooped with them in the fairy-rades, and she danced with them in the fairy-dances, and she sang the songs that the Little People sing and that men may sometimes hear in the hushed, unnatural quiet of the gloaming, and mistaketh for the whispering of the wind in the boughs, or the hollow beat of far-off thunderings.
And the Little People took Snow-white away with them into the dark places where they dwell beneath the earth. And verily, the Little People saw that she was very white and very beautiful, not at all like them, and they lay with Snow-white, after the evil fashion of their kind, and had issue of her; and they permitted her to live amongst them, if she would be their Queen. And little Snow-white assented to this, for she had always coveted power, and nothing could please her more than to be the Queen of the Fairies.
In the fullness of time, little Snow-white grew into a young woman even whiter and more beautiful than she had been aforetime. And sometimes men would behold her flitting through the great, dark Wood amidst the shadows of twilight, with a retinue of the ugly Little People in her wake; and they whispered that a beautiful, evil spirit had come into the land, whom they called the “Snaw-quhyte pharrie,” that is to say, “the Snow-white Fairy.”
Meanwhile, the Chief’s wife had given birth to a son, and he in time grew to be a handsome and upright young man, who was the envy of all the lads in the country, and beloved of all the young lasses. And the Chief’s wife dearly loved her young son. But when she heard the rumors of the Snow-white Fairy in the great, dark Wood, she bethought herself of little Snow-white, whom she had banished thither many years ago. And she remembered the wicked arts that child had learned from her mother, and she knew what evils the Queen of the Fairies could work, and so she cautioned her young son never to linger in the great, dark Wood after twilight, and to beware the Snow-white Fairy of the Wood.
The Chief’s son was a dutiful lad, and a mindful, and so he obeyed his mother’s cryptic adjuration, but one fine afternoon, whilst he was out hunting stag in the shadowy avenues of the great Wood, he suddenly beheld flitting through the trees the fairest and loveliest young lady he had ever seen. The Chief’s son was smitten at the unexpected sight of this wondrous creature, and fell utterly in love with her, as young men will do; and in that moment, he forgot all about his mother’s earnest and solemn warnings. And when he called out to the beautiful maid to come to him, she would not heed him, and she tripped instead deeper into the Wood, as doth the will-o’-the-wisp that flits afore the mazéd traveler. And the Chief’s son let drop his hunting-weapons, and chased after the beautiful apparition.
For hours and hours and the minutes between he followed the lovely girl far into the great, dark Wood, and he quite lost all track of time. And the sun’s rays grew red and somber as they slanted through the trees, and the shadows grew long and deep and full of menace. And before he knew what he was about, the Chief’s son realized that the gloaming had stolen upon him, and that darkness had grown apace. And that is when he remembered his mother’s warning. But it was too late to heed it now, and as he was so utterly smitten by the white and beautiful maid, he simply could not compel himself to turn back.
Suddenly, the Chief’s son stepped into a great, circular clearing in the Wood, and there was the lovely young lady lying on the forest floor as one dead! And the Chief’s son’s heart quivered within him, for he feared that she had collapsed dead. And he remembered the old stories about beautiful young women in the woods chased by eager young men, and how dark evils would sometimes come upon these innocent maidens; and he feared that perchance this girl had been afraid of him, and had dropped dead of her fright.
So the Chief’s son knelt beside the beautiful girl, and cradled her head in his arms, and cupped her lovely face between his hands, and he prayed the Lord assain him, and instill life back into this wondrous creature. And, lo!, the girl’s eyelids fluttered, and she opened her eyes, and smiled, and she kissed the handsome young Chief’s son. And she told him that she was called “Snaw-quhyte,” and that name caused the Chief’s son to half remember something his mother once told him, long ago, but he could not recall precisely what that was, and soon gave up trying anyhow — for he had just now more pressing concerns. And he asked Snow-white if she would be his wife, and live with him forevermore, and she answered him ‘yea, he would live with her forevermore,’ and there was something about her reply and the queer little smile she gave him that made the Chief’s son wonder.
Snow-white took the Chief’s son by his hand, and made to walk with him through the forest, where almost all was now dark as night. And she produced a great, beautiful apple, with cheeks of rosy red, and she bade the Chief’s son eat of it, to celebrate their newfound joy. The Chief’s son did as he was bidden, for he could not refuse a single wish of Snow-white, as it was his chiefest desire in life to make her happy for all her days. But when he bit into the apple, he grew weak and felt as though his soul were flying out of his throat, and he slipped to the ground at Snow-white’s feet. And to the Chief’s son’s immense horror, a rout of hideous Little People stole from out the shadows of the great, dark Wood; and they were frightful little things, a most awful race of abominations, that did not belong among the wholesome things of the earth. And they laid rough hold of him, and bore him away with them to Elphame, that is the land of the Fairies, with Snow-white, the Queen of the Fairies, dancing ever before them.
For it is said that whoever partakes of the food of the Fairies is made powerless by it, and that their soul is filched and their will enslaved. And that is how Snow-white, the beautiful Queen of the Fairies, took her revenge on her stepmother — by stealing that which was dearest to her.
Shortly after the Chief’s son disappeared in the Wood, a huntsman came before the Chief’s wife, with a little parcel all neatly done-up in stag’s hide and catgut, that he said had been given him by the Snow-white Fairy of the Wood, for a message to the Chief’s wife. And in the parcel was the bloody heart of a young man, red as the rosy cheeks of Snow-white.
And when the Chief’s wife learned that her son had been stolen by Snow-white, she threw herself from the topmost window of the Chief’s castle for very grief.
[Textual Note and Commentary]
“Fatua Nivea” (Scotland)
Source: — From a chapbook of Old Scots folktales and ballads, ca. 1530 (probably excerpted from an earlier collection, ca. 1480). First collected and translated by Dr. John Falsworth Havelock in “‘Fatua Nivea, or, The Snaw-quhyte Pharrie:’ The Curious Evolution of a Popular Fairy-Tale,” pp. 119–28, A Folkloric History of Europe (1877). A very early variant of “Snow-white” (AT 709). Motifs: tabu: eating in fairyland (C211.1.); fairies live under the earth (F211.3.), fairies live in forest (F216), fairy queen (F252.2.), fairies entice men and then harm them (F302.3.4.), etc.
This curious story, which possesses obvious parallels with the fairy tale “Little Snow-white” (cf. No. 53 in Kinder- und Hausmärchen, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm [1857]), seems to be the earliest extant version of this famous tale. According to Dr. J. F. Havelock’s excellent analysis of the story, and its folkloric antecedents and milieu, it was probably gathered from the folk-traditions (possibly originally in balladic form) of the Hebrides and Northwest Scotland in the 15th Century. The Latin title (“The Snow-white Fairy”) suggested to him an even more antique pedigree: that it was a garbled remembrance or retelling of ancient Mediterranean traditions of the Classical nymph and goddess-sorceress (e.g., Circë), perhaps derived from the Roman occupiers of the first centuries after Christ. But that theory is hardly tenable — Roman penetration into Scotland was famously halted at the Forth, and it is much more likely that any Latin influence was exerted by the monasteries of the Dark and early Middle Ages, much nearer in time, whose ever-industrious monks conceivably were the first to record the fairy tale.
Even so, the inclusion of the decidedly non-Classical and very Celtic “Little People” must convincingly argue that, at the very least, any basic Latin substrate must have been heavily lacquered over with a local, Gaelic superficies. If this story truly is the archetype of “Little Snow-white,” then it is intriguing to observe how the process of custom or “inverse exegesis” worked to greatly remold and ameliorate the rather ghastly original. It is significant to note that, in this tale, “Snaw-quhyte” is depicted as the malevolent party, rather than the stepmother (though the latter’s behavior toward her stepdaughter is dubious, at best, the general abhorrence for witchcraft at the time would probably condone her dismissal of the suspected witch); moreover, she evolves by the end of the fairy tale into the sinister so-called “White Lady” of fairy legendry, becoming the “Queen of the Fairies,” though in the later versions it is only her name that preserves the aboriginal linkage to this mysterious creature.
The fairies themselves, the dreadful “Little People” of the tale, are undoubtedly the traditional daoine shìth (“Men of Peace”) of Scottish folklore, albeit here they are an unwontedly sinister race of diminutive creatures bearing more features in common with the malignant trows of Orkney legend. Apparently (and perhaps mercifully) for the benefit of later generations of readers, these monstrous beings were converted into the seven little dwarfs of the better-known story, inoffensive and kindly “metallici” of a more Teutonic affinity, who hospitably receive Snow-white, and serve to advance the tale’s moral and didactic message.
Of particular interest is the conservation in subsequent iterations of some of the more unsettling episodes of the present story: the presentation of a heart to the stepmother is conserved though altered, and the sinister and altogether disturbing matter of Snow-white’s miscegenetic congress with the “Little People” is palpably softened, and considerably diluted, into the rather innocuous and plainly euphemistic image of the girl’s merely sleeping in the dwarfs’ beds while they are away from home. The motifs of the poisoned apple, the sleeping-death, and the huntsman are also present, though considerably altered. It should be noted, moreover, that this tale preserves many of the important features traditionally cited in the creation of “white ladies” and “fairy queens” — for example, how these liminal women are outcast from human society, for whatever reason (usually associated with witchcraft and black magic), and are thus “adopted,” as it were, by the fairies, who do not share the scruples of mankind. Incidentally, the notorious wantonness and cruelty of the Fairy Queen was apparently a thing proverbial in Scotland, as witness the curious accounting of this industrious and formidable spirit in the “dittay” indicted against one Andrew Man of Aberdeen, who was accused of being a “manifest and notorious witche and sorcerar:”
“…the Devill, thy maister, com to thy motheris hous, in the liknes and scheap of a woman, quhom thow callis the Quene of Elphen, and was delyverit of a barne, as apperit to the their, at quhilk tyme thow being bot a young boy, bringand in watter, that devilische spreit, the Quene of Elphen, promesit to the, that thow suld knaw all thingis, and suld help and cuir all sort of seikness, except stand deid, and that thow suld be weill interteneit, but wald seik thy meat or thow deit, as Thomas Rymour did…
“Thow confessis that be the space of threttie twa yeris sensyn or thairby, thow begud to have carnall deall with that devilische spreit, the Quene of Elphen, on quhom thow begat dyveris bairnis, quhom thow hes sene sensyn; and that at hir first cumming, scho causit ane of thy cattell die vpone ane hillok callit the Elphillok, bot promeist to do him gude theireftir…
“Thow affermis that the elphis hes schapes and claythis lyk men, and that thay will have fair coverit taiblis, and that thay ar bot schaddowis, bot ar starker nor men, and that thay have playing and dansing quhen thay pleas; and als that the quene is verray plesand, and wilbe auld and young quhen scho pleissis; scho mackis any kyng quhom scho pleisis, and lyis with any scho lykis” (pp. 119–21, The Miscellany of the Spalding Club, 1841).
—Julie Jaquith
[Don’t miss the next issue of The Florilegium, where two intrepid explorers encounter mystery, wonder, and horror on the second planet from the Sun in “The Metamorphic Men of Venus”—the first story in the Interplanetary League series of adventures.]