Ála flekks saga: A Snow White Variant from Late Medieval Iceland

• Main Authors: Hui, Jonathan YH, Ellis, Caitlin, McIntosh, James, Olley, Katherine
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: University of Leeds 2019
• Subjects: Iceland
• Online Access: https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/291482; https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.38644

There has been very little scholarship on the transmission of the Snow White tale-type in medieval Icelandic literature, or in any pre-modern literature. Scholarship on most folktale-types tends to focus on modern variants, with particular attention usually paid to a variant which has come to be seen as the ‘standard’ version of the tale-type. In the case of Snow White, tale-type number 709 under the Aarne-Thompson classification system, the ‘standard’ version is the 1857 edition of the Grimm Brothers’ Sneewittchen, published in their influential collection of fairytales; it was on this version that Disney would base their 1937 animated film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the cultural impact of which continues to the present day. Not all variants of the tale-type will have the very same motifs as the Grimms’ version, of course, as is evident from the variation within the fifty-seven tales found in Ernst Böklen’s 1910 collection of Snow White variants. In particular, ancient and medieval variants of well-known fairytales need not bear immediately recognisable similarities to the ‘standard’ versions of the fairytale that we know today, firstly because different variants of the same tale-type will often be dressed in generically different clothing corresponding to contemporary literary trends, and secondly because, unlike many younger variants, an ancient or medieval variant could not have been based on a modern ‘standard’ variant as we know it.