The brothers did not invent the Snow White story. Variations on the tale have been traced as far afield as Scandinavia and Turkey – and most are deeply problematic from a modern perspective. There are clear echoes of the story in legend of Chione, as told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In that version, Chione (“Snow” in Latin) is the most beautiful woman in the land. But her beauty makes her a target for the gods Hermes and Apollo. First, Hermes puts her to sleep with a touch of his caduceus and then rapes her. Next, Apollo approaches her disguised as a crone and, again, rapes her. In a Sicilian telling, meanwhile, Snow White is not the daughter of a king, but an innkeeper. And she escapes her wicked mother to live with a band of robbers. They, too, assault her.

The Grimms’ take is predictably, well, grim. In their version, it is Snow White’s mother, not stepmother, who grows jealous of her daughter’s beauty. After Snow White flees, she orders a hunter to bring back her heart as a token. But the hunter cannot bring himself to kill Snow White so instead he brings the mother a boar’s heart – which she, believing it to be her daughter’s, greedily consumes. Snow White, too, is not the innocent intimate of nature she becomes in Disney’s film. Instead, she breaks into the dwarfs’ cottage, steals their food and trashes their beds trying to squeeze herself into them.

In the original story, the dwarfs themselves were not named. And to contemporary audiences, their height would have been the least significant thing about them. Dwarfs in Teutonic folklore were commonly believed to be a species of fairy, closely associated with mining, deep woods and remote mountains. Sometimes, they were beautiful and strange; most often, they were depicted as grave old men with beards. 

As with all fairies, though, you had to be careful in your dealings with them: while occasionally the “earth-men” might help recover stray animals or direct lost children, they were capricious and greedy, too. Those who stole from them could face cruel and swift punishment – or they would find the treasures turning to dead leaves when they reached home. For 19th Century readers, therefore, Snow White’s trespass was dangerous as well as uncouth.