This story is completely unrelated to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, although it does also prominently feature a dwarf. I have no idea why the brothers Grimm decided to have two protagonists named Snow White. I know we do often see overlapping names in folklore, but usually the name in question is, like, Hans. Snow White is not exactly the kind of name you just use because it’s a popular name in your culture and the first one you thought of.
Snow White and Rose Red are two little girls who live in the woods with their mother. One winter night, a bear knocks at their door and asks permission to warm himself at the fire, which their mother allows. The two girls have a great deal of fun playing at the hearth with the talking bear, and he returns every night for the rest of the winter. In the summer he has to leave, to protect his treasure from wicked dwarves, but promises to return.
That summer, the girls meet a dwarf whose beard is stuck in a tree. They cut him loose with some kitchen scissors, despite his horrible manners, and he runs off with a bag of gold. Some time later they find the same dwarf in danger of being pulled into the river because his beard is tangled in a fishing line. He’s dreadfully rude to them, but they still help cut him loose. He grabs a bag of pearls and runs away. They then find him about to be carried off by an eagle, and rescue him again. He insults them and runs off with a bag of jewels.
Later they find him admiring all his jewels. A large bear appears suddenly, and the dwarf is very afraid. He offers the bear all his jewels, and then suggests that the bear eat Snow White and Rose Red.
The bear kills the dwarf with one blow. The girls have started to run away, but the bear calls after them, and they recognize his voice—it’s their bear. His bearskin falls off, revealing him to be a handsome man.
He explains that he’s a prince who was cursed by the dwarf, and the spell was broken by his death. Also, the dwarf stole the gold, pearls, and jewels from him.
When the girls grow up, Snow White marries the bear and Rose Red marries his brother.
This is one of those stories that was just fun and cute the first time I read it, but the more times I come back to it the more questions I have.
First of all. The dwarf. Was he just, like, stupid? If you are cursing a man to be a giant wild animal, then your death should absolutely not be the way to break the curse. You are asking to get murdered. Why would you make someone bigger and stronger than you, and then tell him that to be free, he just has to kill you? It took him a single blow. The dwarf was clearly not at all challenging to kill.
How long was the bear enchanted? Was it just a matter of finding the dwarf so he could kill him? This seems like a pretty easy spell to break.
At first I thought maybe the dwarf had an enchanted beard. He was so upset when the girls cut off bits of it to free him those two times—I thought maybe it was a Samson situation, and his strength was in his hair, so he wouldn’t be vulnerable to bear attacks until after they rescued him. But the beard never comes up again after the second time he yells at them for saving his life.
The other big thing is the timeline. Before I reread this story to make this post, I had remembered that the story started when the girls were kids, and that the bear turned into an adult man at the end. But I guess I had thought the story was set over a longer period of time? Like, they met the bear when they were little girls, but they were older by the time the spell broke.
(I’m willing to assume that we kind of put a pause on a character’s aging while they’re under a transformation spell, so I’m not generally bothered much by age gaps in transformation stories—like, the years you were alive while you weren’t in your own body don’t have to count. You go back to exactly the body you left, so you aren’t physically older, you still have the, like, brain chemistry of a younger person, and it’s not like you had a lot of opportunity for emotional/mental/social development while you were cursed.)
But if he was already an adult man when he was cursed, and he met these girls as children, that’s a little weird. But then maybe my original mis-remembering would have been weirder? Marrying a woman you watched grow up is not great; is marrying a woman who you hung out with for a single winter when she was a child better?
I think the thing that really throws me here, though, is the fact that they’re still little girls when the spell breaks. Like, him watching them grow up as a bear seems less concerning than him watching them grow up as a man. Especially if we’re pausing the aging while he’s a bear. If he was cursed at 20, then he might meet the girls when he’s 20 and they’re 10, but then if he knew them as a bear for years, by the time the spell breaks all three of them would be basically 20. But if they spell breaks when he’s still 20 and they’re still 10, then by the time they’re 20, he's 30.
It just says the spell breaks, and they get married “some time afterwards.” How much time afterwards? And, like, do they spend that in between time together, or does the prince go home, and meet them again years later, when they’re adults? I just…I worry about this timeline. I need to know details.
But these are the things I think about when I’m deliberately overthinking it. (The timeline, anyway. I’m always lowkey bothered by the dwarf’s poor curse planning.) Generally I think this is a really cute little enchanted bridegroom story, where no one betrays each other, or lies to each other, or kidnaps each other, or has to go on a whole huge redemption quest after screwing up. Although does it still count as an enchanted bridegroom story when the bride plays no part in the spell-breaking? Like, is ‘you must obtain a bride to break the spell” what qualifies it as an enchanted bridegroom story, or can we just count anything where someone is enchanted and sort of acquires a bride in the course of spell-breaking?
Anyway. I just think it’s sweet. Though giving the dwarf an enchanted beard would have brought it all together a little better.
(In the retelling that is on my list of things to write, the bear is cursed when he’s a kid and he meets the girls when he’s still a kid, which is a little to negate any age gap concerns, but mostly because it worked better for my timeline and because I thought ‘little boy figuring out how to be a bear’ was just more fun? I feel like the three of them can just have a much more interesting time if they’re all the same age and there’s no adult supervision.)
(BTW there is a retelling of this story called The Shadow of the Bear, by Regina Doman, which I haven’t read in years, but remember enjoying very much. It has two sequels based on Snow White and the Seven Dwarves and Sleeping Beauty, which were also great. I think there are several more books that are technically in the same series, but these three all have the same characters, and the others are about someone else. They are quite Catholic. But I very much do not enjoy Christian Fiction, as a genre, and still liked these. So if you’re looking for new fairy tale retellings to read—I think there’s a lot more retellings of this story now, but this was the only one I could find for many years, and I haven’t gotten around to reading any others.)
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