Weird Facts I Learned from Books: Cannibalism and Literature

What do cannibalism and fairy tales have in common?

Turns out, a lot.

Do you remember in the long version of Snow White and the Seven Dwarves? Those white hot iron shoes for being a usurper to the throne? Applied during a giant feast? Reading the unexpurgated version of the fairy tale, this incident takes place in the last few lines. “The she railed and cursed, and was beside herself with disappointment and anger. First she thought she would not go to the wedding; but then she felt she should have no peace until she went and saw the bride. And then when she saw her she knew her for Snow White, and she could not stir from the place for anger and terror. For they had ready red-hot iron shoes, in which she had to dance until she fell down dead.”*

For some European history scholars this will sound eerily familiar.

According to Richard Sugg in Mummies, Cannibals, and Vampires: The History of Corpse Medicine from the Renaissance to the Victorian, a similar fate awaited a Hungarian rebel in 1514. György Dósza lead a popular uprising against the Hungarian nobility. The nobility made an example of him in the worst way, they had an iron throne and crown made for him and starved his foot soldiers. They built a fire under the iron throne, “until it was white-hot” and roasted him alive in it and forced his soldiers to eat his remains. Sugg suggests the iron crown, at the very least, was a well known form of capital punishment in the renaissance era.

Now, Snow White, the prince, and their friends did not dine on the wicked stepmother, despite her previous actions but this does not mean cannibalism doesn’t appear elsewhere in the work of the Grimm brothers. Maria Tatar, in The Hard Facts of the Grimm's Fairy Tales, highlights several instances where people were baked into pies and one cannot forget the witch in the gingerbread house, fattening children. Tatar says the brothers rarely toned down the violence in the tales, often only when someone specifically asked. Rather, they did the exact opposite. They made them more violent and gruesome. Which apparently made them closer to the historical reality Sugg recounts in his book.

Well, that is where my curiosity led me this week. Get curious.

*Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales, Barnes and Noble, New York, 1993.