After the meal, the girl takes the brother’s bones and puts them inside the tree with his heart. The father unknowingly eats his son while the sister refuses to take part. The horrified girl obeys but hides the boy’s heart inside a tree. But when they return home, the stepmother kills the little boy and forces the sister to prepare his corpse for a family meal. In this fairy tale, two children are abandoned and find their way home following a trail of ashes. The grimmest of these early tales, though, is the Romanian story, The Little Boy and the Wicked Stepmother. The father tries to foil the plot by leaving the children a trail of oats to follow but these are eaten by a donkey. In his version, titled Nennillo and Nennella, a cruel stepmother forces her husband to abandon his two children in the woods. One such example comes from the Italian fairy tale collector Giambattista Basile, who published a number of stories in his 17th century Pentamerone. Almost all of these stories also used the forest as a tableau for danger, magic, and death. The cautionary tales that preceded Hansel and Gretel all dealt directly with themes of abandonment and survival. Wikimedia Commons An 1868 rendering of Hansel and Gretel treading carefully through the forest.Īnd it was from this grim chaos that the story of Hansel and Gretel was born. William Rosen in his book, The Third Horseman, cites an Estonian chronicle which states that in 1315 “mothers were fed their children.”Īn Irish chronicler also wrote that the famine was so bad people “were so destroyed by hunger that they extracted bodies of the dead from cemeteries and dug out the flesh from the skulls and ate it, and women ate their children out of hunger.” Others committed infanticide or abandoned their children. In the process, elderly people chose voluntarily to starve to death to allow the young to live. One scholar estimated that the Great Famine impacted 400,000 square miles of Europe, 30 million people, and may have killed off up to 25 percent of the population in certain areas. When the Great Famine struck, the results were devastating. In Europe, the situation was particularly dire since the food supply was already scarce.
Volcanic activity in southeast Asia and New Zealand ushered in a period of prolonged climate change that led to crop failures and massive starvation across the globe. The true story of Hansel and Gretel goes back to a cohort of tales that originated in the Baltic regions during the Great Famine of 1314 to 1322. Wikimedia Commons The origin of Hansel and Gretel is perhaps darker than the story itself. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm never intended that their stories be for children per se, but rather the brothers sought to preserve Germanic folklore in a region whose culture was being overrun by France during the Napoleonic Wars. The brothers were inseparable scholars, medievalists who had a passion for collecting German folklore.īetween 18, the brothers published over 200 stories in seven different editions of what has since become known in English as Grimm’s Fairy Tales. Modern readers know Hansel and Gretel from the works of German brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm. They return home with the witch’s treasure and find that their evil matriarch is no longer there and is presumed dead, so they live happily ever after.īut the true history behind the tale of Hansel and Gretel is not so happy as this ending. The pair manage to escape when Gretel shoves the witch into an oven.
Unbeknownst to them, the home is actually a trap set by an old witch, or ogre, who enslaves Gretel and forces her to overfeed Hansel so that he can be eaten by the witch herself. The starving pair come upon a gingerbread house that they begin to eat ravenously. Wikimedia Commons A depiction of Hansel leaving a trail to follow home. This time, Hansel drops breadcrumbs to follow home but birds eat the breadcrumbs and the children become lost in the forest. The mother, or stepmother by some tellings, then convinces the father to abandon the children a second time. The kids, Hansel and Gretel, get wind of their parents’ plan and find their way home by following a trail of stones Hansel had dropped earlier. Most people are familiar with the story but for those who aren’t, it opens on a pair of children who are to be abandoned by their starving parents in the forest. Unfortunately, the origins of the story are equally - if not more - horrifying. The notorious tale of Hansel and Gretel has been translated into 160 languages since the Brothers Grimm first published the German lore in 1812.ĭark as it is, the story features child abandonment, attempted cannibalism, enslavement, and murder. Scholars believe that these tragedies gave birth to the story of Hansel and Gretel. When a great famine struck Europe in 1314, mothers abandoned their children and in some cases, even ate them.
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