A few weeks ago, a friend and I watched Jack the Giant Slayer, which combined the titular tale with Jack and the Beanstalk. A couple days ago, I watched Mirror, Mirror, which is a modern retelling of Snow White. Between the two, I’ve become rather fascinated with going back and seeing the origins of the folk/fairy tales we know so well today, and studying how they’ve changed over generations.
To start with, I’m looking into Snow White. I would like to write a more in-depth look at the history of that particular story, but for now, I’m just going to focus on a particular passage that sounds a lot like a passage from a completely different tale. The passage in question is in the original 1812 and 1857 versions written by the Brothers Grimm, but I guess I just didn’t remember it, or maybe it was removed in the adaptations I read. However, in 1916, Joseph Jacobs wrote his own version of the story for his Europa’s Fairy Book, in which he removes the space from Snow White’s name and cuts the number of dwarves from seven down to three. Oh, yes, and Snow White is seven years old in all three versions.
When the final movie installment of The Lord of the Rings was released back on December 17th, 2003 (ten years ago today, in fact), I was eager to see them bring The Hobbit to the big screen. J.R.R. Tolkien’s original book was one of my favorites growing up, holding the rare distinction of being one of the few books I read cover-to-cover more than once.
Ricky of Kokiri 