Finding Snow White’s gravestone

A museum has discovered the gravestone of a German aristocrat who is claimed to have been the figure behind the fairytale.

Scene from Disney’s 1937 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.

The mirror on the wall could not talk. The dwarfs were probably just grubby children. And while the stepmother was undoubtedly a bit of a battleaxe, it seems unlikely that she would have spiked an apple with narcotics.

Those quibbles aside, though, the story is a pretty good fit.

A museum in Bavaria has discovered the gravestone of an 18th-century German aristocrat who is claimed to have been the historical figure behind the fairytale of Snow White.

Maria Sophia von Erthal, the sister of the powerful archbishop of Mainz, grew up in a castle in Lohr am Main, a medieval town in a densely forested region of central Germany known as the Spessart.

The family chronicle describes her as a “girl of unusual loveliness” who did her best for the poor and the needy.

When von Erthal was still in her teens, however, her mother died and her father married a “markedly domineering” widow from the Swabian Venningen dynasty, who tried to ostracise her stepdaughter and advance the cause of her own children.

The stepmother’s machinations seem to have done the trick. Von Erthal never found a husband and eventually moved into the house of an English spinster in the Bavarian city of Bamberg, almost 100km from her childhood home.

She went blind and died aged 71 in 1796. Her burial plaque was lost after the church where she had been laid to rest was demolished in 1804. It has now resurfaced in a house in Bamberg and been donated to the city’s Dio­cesan museum.

Holger Kempkens, the museum’s director, says it regards the Snow White connection as “a bit of a gimmick”. Yet for the people of Lohr, which styles itself as the “town of Snow White”, it is a serious matter.

They argue that the Brothers Grimm, who lived only 80km away and published the fairytale in 1812, merely dressed up her story with a few frills of Germanic folklore.

The dwarfs of the fairytale, for example, are said to have been based on the silver and copper mines at nearby Bieber, where children or diminutive men were sent to work the narrow passages.

“When they went to work, they wore smocks and hoods, the prototype of the classic dwarf costume,” says Barbara Grimm, director of Lohr’s Spessart museum and no relation of the fairytale-collectors.

Lohr also had a sophisticated glassmaking industry, which may account for the glass coffin and the wicked stepmother’s mirror. Some historians argue that the town’s mirrors were so flawless that they were felt to “speak” to whoever gazed into their depths.

“Only the fair prince remains unidentified,” Grimm adds.

There are, however, four rival Snow Whites. One school of thought holds that she was a daughter of Loherangrin, a semi-mythical knight immortalised by Wagner’s opera.

In the state of Hesse, where the Grimm brothers grew up, some maintain the true template for Snow White was Margaretha von Waldeck, a 16th-century noble’s daughter whose hand was sought by some of the most powerful men in Europe, but who died at the age of 21 after her father remarried. The family chronicle says she was poisoned.

The village of Alfeld in Lower Saxony has a Snow White walking trail around the ruins of a medieval fortress where it claims the wicked stepmother lived.

Langenbach, near Marburg, where the Grimm brothers went to study, also lays claim to the myth, pointing to a mining area known as the “dwarf ground”.

THE TIMES