Pity the poor stepmother — the most reviled character in folk literature

Fairy stories were not originally aimed at children, and we do not know what the first audience responses were; but as humans do not change in certain essentials it seems likely that reactions centuries ago were similar to reactions now — when it is adults who often find many of them gruesome and unsuitable for those of single-figure age. Wicked stepmothers plot torment and murder; small children are banished alone to forests; wolves dress up in grandmotherly bonnets and shawls to deceive — and eventually to kill and eat — rosy-cheeked little girls; beautiful princesses are locked in high towers or tricked into taking poison to fall asleep for 100 years. These tales would not be out of place alongside True Stories of Serial Killers.

Yet the remarkable thing is that, though as adult readers we may flinch at the horrifying events in Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel or Red Riding Hood, children take them in their stride, never delving deeply into the dark heart, just listening on, trusting in a happy ending.

Whoever the original tellers had in mind it was surely not the academics who have appropriated fairy tales as grist to their analytical mill and extrapolated much apparent historical, psychological and metaphorical meaning in them, in the process stripping away their magic and beauty.

Maria Tatar is a distinguished professor of folklore and mythology, but for the most part she wears her learning lightly in her new book’s long introduction. The rest of it reprints 21 short fairy stories from around the world on the basic Snow White theme. Most of them are little known — with good reason.

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Tatar’s best insights are into Disney’s iconic 1937 film, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, a seminal masterpiece of animation, of which the director himself said: ‘We just try and make a good picture… and then the professors come along and tell us what we do.’