#fairytale witch

[tormenty]

NGL this would probably work on me.

[teatime-tangents-and-toys]

My first review in Witchy Wonders has been posted, centered around the scant offerings of dolls based on Snow White's iconic witch! The cheap eighties doll was actually relatively impressive, while your loyal reviewer took a bit of a hit with the deluxe dolls here, which definitely underwhelmed, and especially for their price. Support on this post is appreciated as such, since this review stung a bit! Disney lovers and Disney cynics, this one goes out to you! You'll each find something to feast on.

Read the full review here!

[adarkrainbow]

I am always bothered by how limited people tend to be when doing fairytale adaptations. Because even when you wish to stay faithful to the text, there is so many opportunities opened for you since the text is literaly designed to be filled with gaps for other people's imaginations to fill... Just take for example the witch from Hansel and Gretel. She is given a set of specific traits, everybody knows the witch stereotypes, she is a stock character... and yet just looking at all the various illustrations made about her throughout the centuries, you see how different she can look depending on the artist.

[froginamoodboard]

Cackle moodboard

Requested by: @violoncelle121

x x x x x x x x x

[totallygallnuts]

Cinderella & Other Fairytale Necromancers. ⁺ ✦ * . ˚ ⨯ ੭ * ‧

The clever witch might find fairytales, and especially these sorts, to be of great inspiration in their works.

The very first page up on my neocities is devoted to ten tales which I found to be fitting for the focus of teasing out the necromantic threads to be found within fairytales. It was difficult to limit myself to just these ten, but maybe in the future I'll revisit this same topic, I'm spoiled for options here. These ten are, in order...

✦ Two variations of Cinderella/Aschenputtel ♡ Vasilisa the Beautiful ✦ The Wonderful Birch ♡ The Juniper Tree & a variant, The Rose-Tree ✦ The Two Caskets ♡ Jack and the Ghosts ✦ Four Eggs a Penny ♡ Friends in Life and Death

You can find it here! 🏰

On this page I've included links to where each may be read online for free, for your convenience. ♡ I have a lot more fun planned surrounding this theme, to share with you in the near future! I won't spoil the surprises, though ✧˚₊‧⋆

[mypartnersaysimcute]

Aro fairytale witch moodboard for anon! Thank you for the request, I hope you like it! :D

[metalalia]

Storytelling Saturday: The Witch’s Feast

They said that I lured children into my home with sugar and gingerbread. They claimed that I wanted to put them in an oven and gobble them up. That’s what they said, when the little brats escaped. Locked the old witch in her own oven, that’s what everyone said, until nobody questioned it any more. Good riddance too. Dreadful woman.

They didn’t consider I’d been young and hungry once, like them. Like them, I’d been turned out by my family, one mouth too many to feed. Not considered pretty enough to find a husband quickly, nor strong enough to earn my bread in the fields. Oh, but I was clever. I’d heard the stories of the witch in the woods. How she ate children. And I thought that there might be something to the tales.

It turned out that I was right. There was an old woman in a cottage in the woods. No gingerbread cottage, though. Just a decrepit shack full of bones, bones of every beast I knew and some I knew not to be beasts at all. She was quite mad, her wits lost to the years. Just enough cunning left in her to catch the foxes and dogs and yes, even rats that she’d lure into her traps with the remains of her previous kills.  I helped her for a while, in exchange for what she and her prey didn’t eat. Eating like an animal gave me a new perspective. I saw the world with different eyes, and I knew what I would have to do. I practiced making my own traps, and creating new ones. I tested my finest out on her. It worked. It worked very well. She was stringy though. Too old for me.

But long after she was gone and I’d boiled her bones for broth, something of her stuck around in me. A certain low cunning. A taste for dog meat. And I wondered. It was unlikely that another like me would come to the shack. But I could make them want to. Oh yes.

Nobody thought to ask what happened to my body. A hundred and fifty pounds of flesh doesn’t turn into smoke, no matter how long you lock it in an oven. Nobody saw how clever I’d really been. What, you didn’t think I’d allow myself to be outwitted by a couple of ten-year olds, did you? What did you think I was fattening that boy up on? I knew he’d jump at the chance for fresh meat, the greedy little wart. His poor starved sister resisted at first, but her hatred of me won out in the end. She had her little victory, though no meal ever weighed so heavily on so young a stomach.

And now? Well, now brother and sister both have something to remember me by. They’ll carry me with them their whole lives. The hunger. The compulsion to feed. The brilliance of my plan. You can call it hedging my bets if you like. I prefer to think of it as scattering the seed. I look forward to the harvest.

[adarkrainbow]

Given I have made two posts already about "Hansel and Gretel", or variations of the story, I'll make this fairytale the Grimm fairytale of this season. And since everybody knows Hansel and Gretel, and I already spoke somehow about it, I'll just leave below several notes, trivia and facts.

I have spoken before about the "original" version of the Brothers Grimm fairytale - aka the first edition of the text, and how it changed and evolved up to the story we know today. Many of these changes are well-known by the public - for example how the wicked stepmother was originally a wicked MOTHER (but the Grimm changed it because they had a mother-worship thing going on) ; or how the whole "duck scene" where the kids are helped crossing the river by birds was added later and not present in the original text. Some are less known, such as the fact that the "heavenly wind" rhyme was not part of the original text, or how Hansel's prison was originally not some sort of stable like in the final text but a tiny hicken coop.

In terms of "sibling stories" when we look at the great patches of historical fairytales and older literary works, you will find a lot of people pointing out to the Italian fairytale "Ninnillo and Nennella" by Basile - but I have to strongly disagree with this claim, because while Basile's fairytale does contain the motif of "boy/girl sblings abandoned several times in the woods, using various objects to find their way back, until it fails and they are lost forever", beyond that the fairytale has little to no relationship with Hansel and Gretel. A more direct ancestry and relationship has to be found in the French fairytale. More precisely in Perrault's Little Thumbling, Le Petit Poucet, which is also a story about children abandoned in the woods due to a lack of food, that found their way back several times before the birds eat the bread, and that end up in the house of a man-eater, an ogre trying to kill them. But we are still quite away from the German tale - and it is another French literary fairytale that forms the "missing link" in this chain. Madame d'Aulnoy's "Cunning Cinders" (Finette Cendron). This story doesn't involve children, but four young women - however it still follows the Hansel and Gretel formula very closely. Abandoned by their parents in the wilderness, manage to get back several times before it fails, end up trapped in the house of man-eaters, and the titular character defeats the ogre by pushing hm into a fiery oven... Of course, beyond that d'Aulnoy has a ton of additional content - such as the ogre having a wife that must be beheaded ; the lost girls being helped by a fairy godmother ; and the second part of the story being an alternate Cinderella.

But all in all it shows a point I made previously, and talked about in my ogre posts: the structure and type of the "Hansel and Gretel" story is originally an ogre tale. All older versions of the story involve ogres, not witches - but since the German do not have "ogres" in their folklore, the ogress was replaced by a witch. And despite this replacement, the witch of the story keeps several ogre traits - such as a motif of "the elderly devours youth", the idea of the witch having a poor eyesight but a keen sense of smell, or the entire "maternal perversion" motif. Which is my next point.

"Hansel and Gretel" is a familial tragedy, like many other fairytales. But the family of Hansel and Gretel is an actually extremely bizarre one. You can see, once you know your folklore and fairytale lore, that despite it being considered a "classic" and a "foundation", this tale is actually a fragmented and pieced-together story that leaves numerous gaps and is much more muddled and confused than its equivalents and predecessors. What I mean by that is that, when you look at the familial relationships in this story, you will discover several remnants of an older and more commonspread familial structure that was erased, and only leaves bizarre analogies in the new set of characters the tale offers.

To be clearer. We know that Hansel and Gretel are siblings, and that they have two parents - the father and the stepmother, formerly mother. The witch is an unrelated character acting as an outside element - or so it seems. The fairytale actually establishes a parallel and a connection between the wicked stepmother and the witch. They are parallel characters, two wicked women that want the death of children, but whereas one wants to throw the kids out of the house to leave them to starve or be devoured by beats, so she can have more food herself, the other imprisons the children in her house and overfeeds them to devour them later. A more direct link is established whenn the children return home, at the end of the tale, and discover that their step-mother is dead.

Some dark and edgy adaptations will have things such as the stepmother being killed by her husband, or killing herself, stuff like that - but by the tale alone, on just reading the words, and the first impression it leaves on a child, is that the stepmother mysteriously dies in unexplained ways right after the children burned the witch in her oven. The fact that the two wicked women end up deceased for the tale to end happily, the fact the stepmother's death is left unexplained while the witch's death is graphic and fully presented, the fact the stepmother's death is announced after the witch was killed... It all leaves the impression that the two were connected, and that by some sort of "parallel magic", killing the witch triggered the stepmother's death.

This is something many adaptations picked up upon, and you find versons where the witch and the mother look a lot alike, or are played by the same person, or are the same being. (One can compare it to Russian variations of the stories of Baba-Yaga, where wicked stepmothers sometimes send their nice stepdaughters a la Vasilisa the Fair, to the Yaga's house claiming the Yaga is their "sister"). All in all this continues the idea that the witch is a perverse take on the mother figure - nourishing and protecting children only to gulp them down into her stomach. Which, by the way, is the very symbolism and essence of ogres: fathers that kill, mothers that eat.

But while this is the most famous of the "perverse family connections" in the tale, there is another people tend to forget: the connection between Gretel and the witch. I talked heavily of the difference of treatment the witch has between Hansel and Gretel in a previous post ("Why was Hansel the meal of the witch?"). People have noted the strange discrepancy of Hansel being the one locked up and fattened up to be eaten, while Gretel became an abused slave. Many modern adaptations played on this element by having the witch planning on not eating Gretel, but making her an apprentice in witchcraft, an heir to her house, and treating her like a daughter/witch in training. After all, she does malnourish her, so she seems not keen on the idea of eating her at first...

But these modern adaptations actually picked up on something deeper and more fascinating. You see, the witch not locking up Gretel and treating her as her slave seems to be a leftover from older variants of the tale, because there is a widespread archetype in fairytales known as "the witch's daughter" or "the ogress' daughter". In many ogress or man-eating witches tales, the antagonist has a daughter that assists her in her chores. Sometimes the daughter will secretely help the protagonist escape and be an ally - but these are quite rare, and most of the time the daughter is the one the witch/ogress charges of killing-cooking the protagonist. Then the protagonist tricks the daughter, kills and cooks her instead of themselves, and serve her to their monstrous mother, who believes she is eating the protagonist, when in fact she devours her own daughter. It is a very typical structure in those tales, found from the Baba Yaga legends to the Kabyle tales of the teryel.

The witch's daughter archetype also exists in fairytales where the witch is not a man-eater, but rather an antagonist that imprisons people, or that imposes impossible tasks - and here, the daughter will be a more benevolent figure that will secretly help the protagonist escape the witch and/or overcome the trials and tasks the mother imposes. In fact, in several of those stories, the protagonist fights for the right to love and marry the witch's daughter.

All in all, the fact that Gretel is treated as a slave and assistant to the witch, that she is to help feeding and fattening her brother, etc, etc, implies that her character in the story of the Grimm is a leftover of the "ogress' daughter" or "witch's daughter" of older stories. As a result it makes even more sense for adaptations to have the witch treat Gretel as some sort of surrogate daughter, and it makes the whole family picture of the German story very messed up. The witch who tries to eat the children might be their mother/step-mother, and Gretel might be the witch's daughter.

Another motif that has been picked up by various adaptatons is the motif of birds. I remember long ago I stumbled upon a fascinating art series depicting the witch as a half-bird half-human creature - unfortunately the pictures are now lost in the vast pit of the Internet. More recently, another artist posted an image of Hansel in his cage, with the witch appearing a large, black bird above the cage, wearing a witch's hat.

All those art pieces reflected a true fact: "Hansel and Gretel" is a bird story. You have the birds that devour the bread crumbs, but also the pretty bird that leads the children to the witch's house, and the ducks that helps them cross the stream in the added ending of the Grimm. Some variations also have Hansel claim, when he keeps looking back at the house, that he is seeing a "pretty bird" instead of a "pretty cat" like in the Grimm's final text. As a result, some people did identify the birds that eat the breadcrumbs and/or the bird that leads the children to the house with the witch. The anime "Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics" notably depicted the pretty bird luring the children to the house as the witch's familiar.

A last note: The idea that the witch's house is made of tons of various candies and sweets was popularized by various modern adaptations and retellings of the story. In the Grimm tale, the house isn't made of candy. It isn't even made of gingerbread as so many people believe! While it is common for people to think of this tale as "the one with the gingerbread house", I don't know where that comes from. In the text of the Grimm, the house is merely made of bread, plain old bread, with sugar for the windows. There are however cakes that are said to cover the house, as ornaments. Maybe people in retellings decided to mix together the "cake"and the "bread" and decided to make it "gingerbread"? I don't know.