Once upon a time in the middle of winter, when the flakes of
snow were falling like feathers from the sky, a queen sat at
a window sewing, and the frame of the window was made of black
ebony. And whilst she was sewing and looking out of the window
at the snow, she pricked her finger with the needle, and three
drops of blood fell upon the snow. And the red looked pretty
upon the white snow, and she thought to herself, would that I had
a child as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the
wood of the window-frame.
Soon after that she had a little daughter, who was as white as
snow, and as red as blood, and her hair was as black as ebony,
and she was therefore called little snow-white. And when the
child was born, the queen died.
After a year had passed the king took to himself another wife.
She was a beautiful woman, but proud and haughty, and she could
not bear that anyone else chould surpass her in beauty.
But snow-white was growing up, and grew more and more beautiful,
and when she was seven years old she was as beautiful as the day,
and more beautiful than the queen herself. And once when the
queen asked her looking-glass,
looking-glass, looking-glass, on the wall,
who in this land is the fairest of all.
It answered,
thou art fairer than all who are here, lady queen.
But more beautiful still is snow-white, as I ween.
Then the queen was shocked, and turned yellow and green with
envy. From that hour, whenever she looked at snow-white, her
heart heaved in her breast, she hated the girl so much.
And envy and pride grew higher and higher in her heart like a
weed, so that she had no peace day or night. She called a
huntsman, and said, take the child away into the forest. I will
no longer have her in my sight. Kill her, and bring me back her
lung and liver as a token.
The queen, believing that she had eaten snow-white's lung and
liver, could not but think that she was again the first and most
beautiful of all, and she went to her looking-glass and said,
looking-glass, looking-glass, on the wall,
who in this land is the fairest of all.
And the glass answered,
oh, queen, thou art fairest of all I see,
but over the hills, where the seven dwarfs dwell,
snow-white is still alive and well,
and none is so fair as she.
Then she was astounded, for she knew that the looking-glass
never spoke falsely, and she knew that the huntsman had betrayed
her, and that little snow-white was still alive.
And so she thought and thought again how she might kill her,
for so long as she was not the fairest in the whole land, envy let
her have no rest.
Thereupon she went into a quite secret, lonely room, where no
one ever came, and there she made a very poisonous apple.
Outside it looked pretty, white with a red cheek, so that
everyone who saw it longed for it, but whoever ate a piece of it
must surely die.
These are stills from a video assignment I did for class. The assignment was to interpret a fairytale but the Grimm brothers, I wanted to do Snow White for a couple of reason: I wanted to use my dad as the Huntsman and the snow was perfect for it. I put some of the original text in the post - abridged version.
In the original story, the queen eats the lung and liver that is delivered to her, but I thought the heart, as they use in the Disney version, would make it clearer especially considering we're not making an entire film, if we were, I would do lung and liver.
