Hansel and Gretel
"Hansel and Gretel" is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm and published in 1812 in Grimm's Fairy Tales.
Hansel and Gretel, older brother and younger sister, are young children abandoned or lost in the forest, where they fall into the hands of a cannibalistic witch living in a house made of gingerbread, cake, confection, sweets, and many other treats and pastries. The witch intends to fatten the children before eventually eating them, but the girl outwits the villain and kills her. The two children then escape with their lives and return home with the witch's treasure.
"Hansel and Gretel" is a tale of Aarne–Thompson–Uther type 327A. It also includes an episode of type 1121. The tale has been adapted to various media, most notably the opera Hansel and Gretel by Engelbert Humperdinck.
Origin
Editions
From the pre-publication manuscript of 1810 to the sixth edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen in 1850, the Brothers Grimm have made several alterations to the story, which progressively gained in length, psychological motivation, and visual imagery, but also became more Christian in tone, shifting the blame for abandonment from a mother to a stepmother associated with the witch.In the original edition of the tale, the woodcutter's wife is the children's biological mother, but she was also called "stepmother" from the 4th edition. The Brothers Grimm indeed introduced the word "stepmother", but retained "mother" in some passages. Even their final version in the 7th edition remains unclear about her role, for it refers to the woodcutter's wife twice as "the mother" and once as "the stepmother".
The sequence where the duck helps them across the river is also a later addition. In some later versions, the mother died from unknown causes, left the family, or remained with the husband at the end of the story. In the 1810 pre-publication manuscript, the children were called "Little Brother" and "Little Sister", then named Hänsel and Gretel in the first edition. Wilhelm Grimm also adulterated the text with Alsatian dialects, "re-appropriated" from August Ströber's Alsatian version in order to give the tale a more "folksy" tone.
Goldberg notes that although "there is no doubt that the Grimms' Hänsel und Gretel was pieced together, it was, however, pieced together from traditional elements," and its previous narrators themselves had been "piecing this little tale together with other traditional motifs for centuries." For instance, the duck helping the children cross the river may be the remnant of an old traditional motif in the folktale complex that was reintroduced by the Grimms in later editions.
Plot
The story is set in medieval Germany. Hansel and Gretel are the young children of a poor woodcutter. When a great famine settles over the land, the woodcutter's wife ' decides to take the children into the woods and leave them there to fend for themselves, so that she and her husband do not starve to death, as the children eat too much. The woodcutter opposes the plan but finally, and reluctantly, submits to his wife's scheme. They are unaware that in the children's bedroom, Hansel and Gretel have overheard them. After the parents have gone to bed, Hansel sneaks out of the house and gathers as many white pebbles as he can, then returns to his room, reassuring Gretel that God will not forsake them.The next day, the family walk deep into the woods and Hansel lays a trail of white pebbles. After their parents abandon them, the children wait for the moon to rise and then they followed the pebbles back home. They return home safely, much to their stepmother's rage. Once again provisions become scarce and the mother angrily orders her husband to take the children further into the woods and leave them there to die. Hansel and Gretel attempt to gather more pebbles, but find the doors locked and find it impossible to escape.
, 1842
The following morning, the family treks into the woods. Hansel takes a slice of bread and leaves a trail of bread crumbs for them to follow home. However, after they are once again abandoned, they find that the birds have eaten the crumbs and they are lost in the woods. After days of wandering, they follow a beautiful white bird to a clearing in the woods, and discover a large cottage built of gingerbread, cakes, candy and with window panes of clear sugar. Hungry and tired, the children begin to eat the rooftop of the house, when the door opens and a "very old woman" emerges and lures the children inside, with the promise of soft beds and delicious food. They do this without knowing the fact that their hostess is a bloodthirsty witch who built the gingerbread house to waylay children to cook and eat them.
The next morning, the witch locks Hansel in an iron cage in the garden and forces Gretel into becoming a slave. The witch feeds Hansel regularly to fatten him up, but Hansel cleverly offers a bone he found in the cage ' and the witch feels it, thinking it to be his finger. Due to her blindness, she is fooled into thinking Hansel is still too thin to eat. After weeks of this, the witch grows impatient and decides to eat Hansel, "be he fat or lean".
She prepares the oven for Hansel, but decides she is hungry enough to eat Gretel, too. She coaxes Gretel to the open oven and prods her to lean over in front of it to see if the fire is hot enough. Gretel, sensing the witch's intent, pretends she does not understand what she means. Infuriated, the witch demonstrates, and Gretel instantly shoves the witch into the hot oven, slams and bolts the door shut, leaving "The ungodly witch to be burned in ashes". Gretel frees Hansel from the cage and the pair discover a vase full of treasure and precious stones. Putting the jewels into their clothing, the children set off for home. A swan ferries them across an expanse of water and at home they find only their father; his wife died from unknown cause. Their father had spent all his days lamenting the loss of his children, and is delighted to see them safe and sound. With the witch's wealth, they all live happily ever after.
Variants
Folklorists Iona and Peter Opie indicate that "Hansel and Gretel" belongs to a group of European tales especially popular in the Baltic regions, about children outwitting ogres into whose hands they have involuntarily fallen.ATU 327A tales
"Hansel and Gretel" is the prototype for the fairy tales of the type Aarne–Thompson–Uther 327A. In particular, Gretel's pretense of not understanding how to test the oven is characteristic of 327A, although it also appears traditionally in other sub-types of ATU 327. As argued by Stith Thompson, the simplicity of the tale may explain its spread into several traditions all over the world.A closely similar version is "Finette Cendron", published by Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy in 1697, which depicts an impoverished king and queen deliberately losing their three daughters three times in the wilderness. The cleverest of the girls, Finette, initially manages to bring them home with a trail of thread, then a trail of ashes, but her peas are eaten by pigeons during the third journey. The little girls then go to the mansion of a hag, who lives with her husband the ogre. Finette heats the oven and asks the ogre to test it with his tongue, so that he falls in and is incinerated. Thereafter, Finette cuts off the hag's head. The sisters remain in the ogre's house, and the rest of the tale relates the story of "Cinderella".
In the Russian Vasilisa the Beautiful, the stepmother likewise sends her hated stepdaughter into the forest to borrow a light from her sister, who turns out to be Baba Yaga, a cannibalistic witch. Besides highlighting the endangerment of children, the tales have in common a preoccupation with eating and with hurting children: The mother or stepmother wants to avoid hunger, and the witch lures children to eat her house of candy so that she can then eat them.
Other folk tales of ATU 327A type include is the French "The Lost Children", published by Antoinette Bon in 1887, or the Moravian "Old Grule", edited by Maria Kosch in 1899.
The Children and the Ogre (ATU 327)
Structural comparisons can also be made with other tales of ATU 327 type, which is not a simple fairy tale type but rather a "folktale complex with interconnected subdivisions" depicting a child falling under the power of an ogre, then escaping by their clever tricks.In ATU 327B, a group of siblings come to an ogre's house who intends to kill them in their beds, but the youngest of the children exchange the visitors with the ogre's offspring, and the villain kills his own children by mistake. They are chased by the ogre, but the siblings eventually manage to come back home safely. Stith Thompson points the great similarity of the tales types ATU 327A and ATU 327B that "it is quite impossible to disentangle the two tales".
ATU 327C depicts a witch or an ogre catching a boy in a sack. As the villain's daughter is preparing to kill him, the boy asks her to show him how he should arrange himself; when she does so, he kills her. Later on, he kills the witch and goes back home with her treasure. In ATU 327D, children are discovered by an ogre in his house. He intends to hang them, but the girl pretends not to understand how to do it, so the ogre hangs himself to show her. He promises his kiddlekaddlekar and treasure in exchange of his liberation; they do so, but the ogre chases them. The children eventually manage to kill him and escape safely. In ATU 327F, a witch lures a boy and catch him. When the witch's daughter tries to bake the child, he pushes her in the oven. The witch then returns home and eats her own daughter. She eventually tries to fell the tree in which the boy is hiding, but birds fly away with him.
Further comparisons
The initial episode, which depicts children deliberately lost in the forest by their unloving parents, can be compared with many previous stories: Montanus's "The Little Earth-Cow", Basile's "Ninnillo and Nennella", Madame d'Aulnoy's "Finette Cendron", or Perrault's "Hop-o'-My-Thumb". The motif of the trail that fails to lead the protagonists back home is also common to "Ninnillo and Nennella", "Finette Cendron" and "Hop-o'-My-Thumb", and the Brothers Grimm identified the latter as a parallel story.Finally, ATU 327 tales share a similar structure with ATU 313 in that one or more protagonists come into the domain of a malevolent supernatural figure and escape from it. Folklorist Joseph Jacobs, commenting on his reconstructed proto-form of the tale, noticed the "contamination" of the tale with the story of The Master Maid, later classified as ATU 313. ATU 327A tales are also often combined with stories of ATU 450, in which children run away from an abusive stepmother.
Analysis
According to folklorist Jack Zipes, the tale celebrates the symbolic order of the patriarchal home, seen as a haven protected from the dangerous characters that threaten the lives of children outside, while it systematically denigrates the adult female characters, which are seemingly intertwined between each other. The mother or stepmother indeed dies just after the children kill the witch, suggesting that they may metaphorically be the same woman. Zipes also argues that the importance of the tale in the European oral and literary tradition may be explained by the theme of child abandonment and abuse. Due to famines and lack of birth control, it was common in medieval Europe to abandon unwanted children in front of churches or in the forest. The death of the mother during childbirth sometimes led to tensions after remarriage, and Zipes proposes that it may have played a role in the emergence of the motif of the hostile stepmother.Linguist and folklorist Edward Vajda has proposed that these stories represent the remnant of a coming-of-age, rite-of-passage tale extant in Proto-Indo-European society. Psychologist Bruno Bettelheim argues that the main motif is about dependence, oral greed, and destructive desires that children must learn to overcome, after they arrive home "purged of their oral fixations". Others have stressed the satisfying psychological effects of the children vanquishing the witch or realizing the death of their wicked stepmother.
Cultural legacy
Stage and musical theater
The fairy tale enjoyed a multitude of adaptations for the stage, among them the opera Hänsel und Gretel by Engelbert Humperdinck—one of the most performed operas. It is principally based upon the Grimm's version, although it omits the deliberate abandonment of the children.A contemporary reimagining of the story, Mátti Kovler's musical fairytale Ami & Tami, was produced in Israel and the United States and subsequently released as a symphonic album.
Literature
Several writers have drawn inspiration from the tale, such as Robert Coover in "The Gingerbread House", Anne Sexton in Transformations, Garrison Keillor in "My Grandmother, My Self in Happy to Be Here", and Emma Donoghue in "A Tale of the Cottage".Film
Elements from the story were used in the 1994 horror film Wes Craven's New Nightmare for its climax.The most recent adaption of the fairy tale is Gretel & Hansel, a 2020 American horror film directed by Oz Perkins.