There is another Brothers Grimm tale called Snow White and Rose Red which also includes a character called Snow White. However, this Snow White is a completely separate character from the one found in this tale. The original German names are also different: Schneewittchen and Schneeweißchen. There is actually no difference in the meaning (both mean "snow white"), but the first name is more influenced by the dialects of Low Saxon while the second one is the standard German version, implying a class difference between the two Snow Whites.
Another possibility is that the story of Snow White merged with the story of Elizabeth I of England and her rival and ultimately her victim Mary Stuart (Mary Queen of Scots). Her biographers described Mary as having skin of snow, blackest hair, and lips blood red. She was considered a beauty all her life. The story goes that Mary brought two venetian mirrors from France and wanting to give Elizabeth, her cousin, a gift, sent her one mirror and had her portrait placed into the other matching frame. The two were wrapped in straw and sent to Elizabeth. Elizabeth was much older than Mary Stuart and not as beautiful. In addition, Elizabeth had never had a real mirror, just rubbed metal plate. When she first saw herself in the Venetian mirror, she saw her age and her flaws clearly for the first time. Then she looked at the portrait of her beautiful cousin and her hatred was complete. She felt Mary was mocking her. Mary was young and would surely take the throne form her old maid cousin, eventually. The rumor is that you could hear Elizabeth screaming all the way to Westminster and that she threw her shoe and broke the costly mirror. She simultaneously hatched the scheme to imprison and kill Mary, and abduct her son to be raised as her heir.
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Famous quotes containing the words snow white, snow, white, rose and/or red:
“Meanwhile Snow White held court,
rolling her china-blue doll eyes open and shut
and sometimes referring to her mirror
as women do.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“Each person sweeps the snow before his own door, and never minds the frost on another family’s roof.”
—Chinese proverb.
“I think one of the nicest things that we created as a generation was just the fact that we could say, Hey, I don’t like white people.”
—Nikki Giovanni (b. 1943)
“O my luve’s like a red, red rose That’s newly sprung in June;
O my luve’s like the melodie That’s sweetly play’d in tune.”
—Robert Burns (1759–1796)
“I was here first introduced to Joe.... He was a good-looking Indian, twenty-four years old, apparently of unmixed blood, short and stout, with a broad face and reddish complexion, and eyes, methinks, narrower and more turned up at the outer corners than ours, answering to the description of his race. Besides his underclothing, he wore a red flannel shirt, woolen pants, and a black Kossuth hat, the ordinary dress of the lumberman, and, to a considerable extent, of the Penobscot Indian.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)