"Hansel and Gretel" (; ) is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm and published in 1812 as part of Grimms' Fairy Tales (KHM 15).
Hansel and Gretel are siblings who are abandoned in a forest and fall into the hands of a witch who lives in a house made of bread, cake, and sugar. The witch, who has cannibalistic intentions, intends to fatten Hansel before eventually eating him. However, Gretel saves her brother by pushing the witch into her own oven, killing the witch. The children then escape with the witch's treasure.
Set in medieval Germany, "Hansel and Gretel" has been adapted into various media, including the opera by Engelbert Humperdinck, which was first performed in 1893.
Origin Sources Although Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm credited "various tales from Hesse" (the region where they lived) as their source, scholars have argued that the brothers heard the story in 1809 from the family of Wilhelm's friend and future wife, Dortchen Wild, and partly from other sources.; ; ; A handwritten note in the Grimms' personal copy of the first edition reveals that in 1813 Wild contributed to the children's verse answer to the witch, "The wind, the wind,/ The heavenly child," which rhymes in German: "Der Wind, der Wind,/ Das himmlische Kind."
According to folklorist Jack Zipes, the tale emerged in the Late Middle Ages Germany (1250–1500). Shortly after this period, close written variants like Martin Montanus' Garten Gesellschaft (1590) began to appear. Scholar Christine Goldberg argues that the episode of the paths marked with stones and crumbs, already found in the French "Finette Cendron" and "Hop-o'-My-Thumb" (1697), represents "an elaboration of the motif of the thread that Ariadne gives Theseus to use to get out of the Minoan labyrinth". A house made of confectionery is also found in a 14th-century manuscript about the Land of Cockayne.
Editions
From the pre-publication manuscript of 1810 (Das Brüderchen und das Schwesterchen) to the sixth edition of Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Grimm's Fairy Tales) in 1850, the Brothers Grimm made several alterations to the story, which progressively gained in length, psychological motivation, and visual imagery, but also became more Christian in tone, shifting the blame for abandonment from a mother to a stepmother associated with the witch.
In the original edition of the tale, the woodcutter's wife is the children's biological mother, tr. "Hansel and Gretel (The Complete First Edition)", pp. 43–48; tr., pp. 122–126; but she was also called "stepmother" from the 4th edition (1840). The Brothers Grimm indeed introduced the word "stepmother", but retained "mother" in some passages. Even their final version in the 7th edition (1857) remains unclear about her role, for it refers to the woodcutter's wife twice as "the mother" and once as "the stepmother".
The sequence where the duck helps them across the river is also a later addition. In some later versions, the mother died from unknown causes, left the family, or remained with the husband at the end of the story. In the 1810 pre-publication manuscript, the children were called "Little Brother" and "Little Sister", then named Hänsel and Gretel in the first edition (1812). Wilhelm Grimm also adulterated the text with Alsatian dialects, "re-appropriated" from August Stöber's Alsatian version (1842) to give the tale a more "folksy" tone.
Goldberg notes that although "there is no doubt that the Grimms' Hänsel und Gretel was pieced together, it was, however, pieced together from traditional elements," and its previous narrators themselves had been "piecing this little tale together with other traditional motifs for centuries." For instance, the duck helping the children cross the river may be the remnant of an old traditional motif in the folktale complex that the Grimms reintroduced in later editions.
Plot Hansel and Gretel are the young children of a poor woodcutter. When a famine settles over the land, the woodcutter's second wife tells him to take the children into the woods and leave them there to fend for themselves. The woodcutter opposes the plan, but his wife repeats her demands until he reluctantly agrees. They are unaware that in the children's bedroom, Hansel and Gretel have overheard them. After the parents have gone to bed, Hansel sneaks out of the house and gathers as many shiny white pebbles as he can, then returns to his room, reassuring Gretel that God will not forsake them.
The next day, the children's stepmother gives them small pieces of bread before she and their father take them into the woods. As the family walks deeper, Hansel leaves a trail of white pebbles. After their parents abandon them, the children stay in the woods until night falls and the moonlight reveals the white pebbles shining in the dark. The children then safely follow the trail back home, much to their stepmother's rage. Once again, provisions become scarce, and the stepmother angrily orders her husband to take the children further into the woods and leave them there. Hansel attempts to gather more pebbles, but finds his stepmother has locked the door.
The following morning, the children's stepmother gives them smaller pieces of bread before she and their father take them back into the woods. As the family treks, Hansel leaves a trail of bread crumbs for him and Gretel to follow back home. However, after they are once again abandoned, the children find that the birds have eaten the crumbs, and they are lost in the woods. After three days of wandering, the children follow a dove to a clearing in the woods, and discover a cottage with bread walls, a cake roof, and sugar windows. Hungry and tired, the children begin to eat the house, when the door opens and the elderly woman who lives there emerges and takes the children inside, giving them delicious food to eat and soft beds to sleep in. What the children do not know is that their kind hostess is an evil witch who had built the bread house to lure them inside so she can cook and eat them.
The next morning, the witch locks Hansel in a stable and enslaves Gretel. The witch feeds Hansel regularly to fatten him up, but serves Gretel nothing but crab shells. The witch then tries to touch Hansel's finger to see how fat he has become, but he cleverly offers a thin bone he found in the cage. As the witch's eyes are too weak to notice the deception, she is fooled into thinking Hansel is still too thin for her to eat. After four weeks of this, the witch grows impatient and decides to eat Hansel anyway.
She prepares the oven for Hansel, and then decides she is hungry enough to eat Gretel, too. She coaxes Gretel to the open oven and asks her to lean over in front of it to see if the fire is hot enough. Gretel, sensing the witch's intent, pretends she does not understand what the witch means. Frustrated, the witch demonstrates, and Gretel instantly shoves her into the hot oven, slams and bolts the door shut, leaving the witch to burn to death. Gretel frees Hansel from the stable, and the pair discovers boxes full of pearls and precious stones. Putting the jewels into their pockets, the children set off for home. A white duck (or swan in some versions) ferries them across an expanse of water, and at home they find only their father; his wife had died from an unknown cause. The children's father had spent all his days missing them and is delighted to see them safe and sound.
With the witch's wealth, the children and their father live happily afterwards.
Variants
Folklorists Iona and Peter Opie indicate that "Hansel and Gretel" belongs to a group of European tales especially popular in the Baltic regions, about children outwitting ogres into whose hands they have involuntarily fallen.
ATU 327A tales "Hansel and Gretel" is the prototype for the fairy tales of the type Aarne–Thompson–Uther (ATU) 327A. In particular, Gretel's pretence of not understanding how to test the oven ("Show Me How") is characteristic of 327A, although it also appears traditionally in other sub-types of ATU 327. As argued by Stith Thompson, the simplicity of the tale may explain its spread into several traditions all over the world.
A closely similar version is "Finette Cendron", published by Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy in 1697, which depicts an impoverished king and queen deliberately losing their three daughters three times in the wilderness. The cleverest of the girls, Finette, initially manages to bring them home following a line of thread she unwound as they travelled. On the second journey, she leaves a trail of ashes, and on the third, a trail of peas, but these are eaten by pigeons. The little girls then go to the mansion of a hag, who lives with her husband, the ogre. Finette heats the oven and asks the ogre to test it with his tongue, so that he falls in and is incinerated. Thereafter, Finette cuts off the hag's head. The sisters remain in the ogre's house, and the rest of the tale relates the story of Cinderella.
In the Russian Vasilisa the Beautiful, the stepmother likewise sends her hated stepdaughter into the forest to borrow a light from her sister, who turns out to be Baba Yaga, a cannibalistic witch. Besides highlighting the endangerment of children (as well as their own cleverness), the tales have in common a preoccupation with eating and with hurting children: the mother or stepmother wants to avoid hunger, and the witch lures children to eat her house of candy so that she can then eat them.
In a variant from Flanders, The Sugar-Candy House, siblings Jan and Jannette get lost in the woods and sight a hut made of confectionery in the distance. When they approach, a giant wolf named Garon jumps out of the window and chases them to a riverbank. Sister and brother ask a pair of ducks to help them cross the river and escape the wolf. Garon threatens the ducks to carry him over, to no avail; he then tries to cross by swimming. He sinks and surfaces three times, but disappears in the water on the fourth try. The story seems to contain the "child/wind" rhyming scheme of the German tale.Bosschère, Jean de. Folk tales of Flanders. New York: Dodd, Mead. 1918. pp. 91-94.
In a Swedish fairy tale, Stugan, hwars tak bestod af bara ostar ("The Cottage Whose Roof Was Made Entirely of Cheese") the brother is the hero who deceives the witch and locks her up in the oven. It was translated in to French as La Cabane au Toit de Fromage ("The Hut with the Roof made of Cheese").Guerber, Hélène Adeline. Contes et légendes. 1ere partie. New York, Cincinnati [etc.] American Book Company. 1895. pp. 64-67.
In the first Puerto Rican variant of "The Orphaned Children", the brother pushes the witch into the oven.
Pandekagehuset ("Pancake House") is a Danish variant.
A Jamaican variant, "The Children and the Witch," was collected in Mandeville.
A variant was collected in America by the folklorist James Taylor Adams.
Other folk tales of ATU 327A type include the French "The Lost Children", published by Antoinette Bon in 1887, or the Moravian "Old Gruel", edited by Maria Kosch in 1899.
The Children and the Ogre (ATU 327) Structural comparisons can also be made with other tales of ATU 327 type ("The Children and the Ogre"), which is not a simple fairy tale type but rather a "folktale complex with interconnected subdivisions" depicting a child (or children) falling under the power of an ogre, then escaping by their clever tricks.
In ATU 327B ("The Brothers and the Ogre"), a group of siblings comes to the house of an ogre, who intends to kill them in their beds, but the youngest of the children exchanges the visitors with the ogre's offspring, and the villain kills his own children by mistake. The ogre chases them, but the siblings eventually manage to come back home safely. Stith Thompson points out the remarkable similarity of the tales types ATU 327A and ATU 327B and concludes that "it is quite impossible to disentangle the two tales".