Hansel and Gretel - History and Analysis

History and Analysis

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm heard "Hansel and Gretel" from Dortchen Wild, and published it in Kinder - und Hausmärchen in 1812. In the Grimm tale, the woodcutter and his wife are the biological parents of the children and share the blame for abandoning them. In later editions, some slight revisions were made: the wife is stepmother to the children, the woodcutter opposes his wife's scheme to abandon the children, and religious references are made.

It is possible that the fairy tale has its origin in the medieval period of the Great Famine (1315–1321), which caused people to do some desperate deeds like abandoning young children to fend for themselves, or even cannibalism.

Folklorists Iona and Peter Opie indicate in The Classic Fairy Tales (1974) 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. The tale bears resemblances to the first half of Charles Perrault's "Hop-o'-My-Thumb" (1697) and Madame d'Aulnoy's "Finette Cendron" (1721). In both tales, the Opies note, abandoned children find their way home by following a trail. In "Clever Cinders", the Opies observe that the heroine incinerates a giant by shoving him into an oven in a manner similar to Gretel, and point out that a ruse involving a twig in a Swedish tale resembles Hansel's trick of the dry bone. 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. A house made of confectionery is found in a 14th-century manuscript about the Land of Cockayne.

The fact that the mother or stepmother dies when the children have killed the witch has suggested to many commentators that the mother or stepmother and the witch are metaphorically the same woman. A Russian folk tale exists in which the evil stepmother (also the wife of a poor woodcutter) asks her hated stepdaughter to go into the forest to borrow a light from her sister, who turns out to be Baba Yaga, who is also a cannibalistic witch. Besides highlighting the endangerment of children (as well as their own cleverness), the tales have in common a preoccupation with food and with hurting children: the mother or stepmother wants to avoid hunger, while the witch lures children to eat her house of candy so that she can then eat them. Another tale of this type is The Lost Children. The Brothers Grimm identified the French Finette Cendron and Hop o' My Thumb as parallel stories.