“If you build the candy cottage, the kiddies will come.”
(Frebur Hobson)
I pulled my mother's girlhood copy of the Brothers Grimm off the shelf the other day, and found a version of Hansel and Gretel like one that I've never seen before.
Move over, Disney.
Here's how I remembered it: wicked stepmother, weak father, kids abandoned in the woods.
Candy cottage, wicked witch, caged Hansel.
Gretel plays dumb, pushes witch into stoked oven. H & G, liberated, find their way back home. Stepmother—Elmira Gulch to the witch's WOW, maybe—has meanwhile died.
Happily ever after with weak but loving dad.
The original, though, is much longer and far more interesting.
They use her magic against her, you see.
To start off with, it's not a wicked stepmother who wants to abandon the children in the woods to starve to death, but their mother. That's way scarier.
(One wonders, though. It's scary when mom stops doing everything for you and pushes you toward independence, but isn't it really far worse if she never does?)
The witch's house is made, not of candy, but of bread, and thatched with cake, with barley sugar windowpanes.
In this version, the children manage to escape the witch's clutches and flee into the woods, but first they steal her wand and the pipe that hangs on her wall.
