Snow White – in the mirror

Come closer, my dear, ask me the question. On second thoughts, better not, you may not like the answer. I cannot help it, I have to speak the truth. Oh, I forgot for a moment, you cannot hear me. No one can, it’s my punishment for speaking one too many unpalatable truths. For all intents and purposes I am now an ordinary mirror, hanging on the wall in this old castle, peered into by vain, tiresome tourists, adjusting their hair, checking their eyebrows, wiping runny makeup. And that’s just the guys. Yes, makeup on guys is back in fashion, like it used to be a long time ago when good and evil were white and black, no subtlety about either of them. You’d imagine good and evil could be spotted a mile off. But people then were more innocent and trusting than they are today, and maybe more stupid too, although I’m not saying that. Ok, I am. Anyway, the evil ones had a lot of fun. And speaking of black and white, let me tell you about Snow White. Yes, Snow White was the actual name given to a little baby girl. I guess people then lacked imagination too.

Snow White was born in the days when I had a voice. I knew everything of course. My mirror world was vast, reaching the corners of the earth, which used to be flat and had corners in those days. They say it’s round now, a globe, fancy that.

Snow White’s mother to be, a frail, pale queen, was doing embroidery on an ebony frame. She sat beside an open window, in winter. No wonder she was never the healthy sort. Clumsy too, for she pricked a finger and squealed in pain as a few drops of blood fell onto snow on the windowsill. In the instant before the bright red blood seeped into the snow, she wished she’d have a daughter with skin like the snow, lips like the blood and hair like her ebony embroidery frame. People those days, not unlike today, valued good looks way over intelligence. Her wish was granted, but she did not survive the birth due to poor health, not helped by sitting beside open windows in winter. She cannot be blamed for the name. That must have been the king. He wanted a son, like all kings, and in his heart blamed the baby for the death of his wife.

You’d think he might have gone looking for a new wife who was similar to the one he’d just lost but no, he fell for my owner. She was a looker, I’ll grant her that, but apart from her looks she had nothing. Not absolutely nothing. She dabbled in the dark arts and knew a spell or two. Which is how I came into existence. She sought regular reassurance from me that she was the most beautiful woman in the land. For a while she was. Snow White was a cute baby, no question, and a sweet toddler, but ravishing beauty did not arrive until she was seven, and then I was forced to tell my owner that her beauty had been surpassed by the child, with her raven head, alabaster skin and blood-red lips. I knew the queen would not take that news on the chin, but I’m no diplomat, as you already know. To make matters worse, I used bad poetry to tell her, which infuriated her even more.

She promptly summoned her huntsman and ordered him to take Snow White to the forest, kill her and bring back her heart. One of my countless roving eyes followed them. Snow White put on a precocious performance, weeping, wailing, begging for her life. The huntsman was never going to murder her anyway, even though he had no qualms about abandoning a little girl in a forest teeming with predators. And whatever kindness he possessed certainly didn’t extend to the boar he left heartless on the forest floor.

My normally dispassionate observation of human affairs was severely tested by Snow White’s dilemma. I found myself hoping so much that Snow White wouldn’t come to grief, that I dug into my emergency magic powers to protect her. Yes, I might have been a minor character in the original story, but you are the privileged reader of the first-ever revelation of my involvement in preventing the story from ending in absolute disaster then and there. If I hadn’t covered her with a cloak that made her invisible and odourless, roving wolves looking for a snack would have made short work of her. I also nudged her towards the dwarves’ cottage, conjuring paths where paths didn’t exist.

At the door of the cottage I whipped off the cloak; there was no need for it anymore. The seven dwarves who lived in the cottage were harmless. The homes of the working poor had no locks in those days. There was no need for them; they contained nothing worth stealing. So Snow White encountered no difficulty entering the empty cottage. Here’s something you need to know about Snow White. She, like most of the nobility, had a healthy sense of entitlement. She was hungry and tired, so she went looking for food, which she found and ate, and then she searched for a bed, which she also found. When the weary dwarves returned home from another typical, heavy day in the mines, they postponed to the morning their confrontation with the little stranger fast asleep in one of their beds. In the morning they gathered round her bed, one of them, yes, Sleepy, you guessed right, more tired than the others after a restless night on the floor. After she told them her story, they agreed to her living there provided she cooked and cleaned for them. Princesses knew nothing about such duties, but Snow White was a survivor; she learnt on the job. And she twigged the dwarves were tolerant (some would say gullible) souls, so she didn’t exactly work herself to the bone. Actually the opposite. By the way, the dwarves never sang on their way to work. Only monks and minstrels sang in those days. And even if they could sing, their hatred of working the mines wouldn’t have inspired them to sing. I needed to say that. Disney’s version irritates me.

Back in the castle, I was forced to reveal to the queen, when she asked, that Snow White was alive and well. The first question on every readers lips should be, what happened to the huntsman. Another world first: unsurprisingly, the queen ordered that he, his wife, his children, the dog and the cat be tortured and then executed. The king, however, stepped in and spared them all. To avoid a domestic fracas he had them sent away to a neighbouring kingdom where he was on good terms with the reigning monarch. And fortunately for him, and also the huntsman and his family, the queen, obsessed with only one thing, never asked me about them. The king made his displeasure known to the queen about wanting to get rid of Snow White. He had no paternal feelings towards his daughter, but he suspected her beauty would attract princes from all over the region and result in a deal that would expand his dominion and, more importantly, fill his coffers. So why didn’t he order that Snow White be returned to the palace? For the sake of peace. He was getting on, retired from battles, and generally spending most of his time smelling the roses in his private garden. He thought Snow White would be safer with the dwarves.

So the queen now had to tread warily. Within the limits of her intelligence, naturally. I’ll make no judgement about her intelligence. I’ll leave that to you, dear reader. She was still determined to eliminate Snow White. But it was no longer in her power to order her assassination. She had to resort to stealth, not her strong suit. Her mediocre dark arts enabled her to successfully disguise herself as peasant women, but her first two lame attempts to kill Snow White opens a window to her brain power. Imagine trying to kill someone with a lace bodice pulled tight enough to constrict breathing, then a comb infused with a slow-acting poison . Each time the Dwarves arrived home in time to find and remove the offending article before it did lasting damage. Snow White’s intelligence is also called to question for not having regarded a strange peasant woman with suspicion. But Snow White was an inveterate consumer busting to spend her allowance on things she didn’t need. So she was fair game for door-to-door peddlers. Despite the dwarves’ exhortations and warnings about entertaining strangers, Snow White’s obsessive consumerism held sway and made her reckless. After both attempts, the queen asked me the question and I was forced to tell her that Snow White was still number one.

The third time, the queen exercised a few more brain cells. She poisoned half an apple and persuaded Snow White to eat the poisoned half while she munched on the other half.

The dwarves found Snow White passed out, and this time they couldn’t find the cause. Attempts to revive her failed. They pronounced her dead. Smitten by her beauty they placed her in a glass coffin so that they could gaze on her beauty for years and years. They obviously knew nothing about decomposition, so I had to dig deep again to keep Snow White’s body nourished until I figured out what to do next. I knew she wasn’t stone, cold dead. But when the queen asked me who was fairest in the land I told her she was, because Snow White was out of action for the time being. And she didn’t ask me if Snow White was dead. In any case, death in those days was a looser notion than it is nowadays. If someone was unconscious and could not be returned to consciousness in a reasonable amount of time, it was perfectly legitimate to regard them as dead and ready for burial.

The years flew. Snow White’s body, although unconscious, continued to grow. They had to transfer her to a bigger coffin. It was I who kept her that way, managing her body functions, waste disposal, not very pleasant, but it had to be done. Can you imagine what it would be like if…nah, let’s not go there. The effort took a heavy toll on me, my powers waned.

A prince wandering through the forest happened to find the dwarves’ cottage. He took one look at Snow White and fell in love with her. He bribed and cajoled and begged and threatened, and finally the dwarves agreed to part with her. Eyebrows were raised about what the prince wanted from what was, for all intents and purposes, a corpse. There were no laws against such things. Even if there were laws of any sort, royalty as a rule was above them.

Thanks to the prince’s clumsy servants who stumbled while shouldering the coffin, the poisonous apple stuck in Snow White’s throat became dislodged and popped out. Snow White woke up, perfectly healthy, unblemished, unaffected by her years-long slumber. Thank me for that. She took one look at the prince and fell in love with him. She had a bit of mental catching up to do. Not that the prince was a brain box either. Remember, he was obsessed with a corpse. How smart is that? They were meant for each other. News of their impending marriage spread all over the land.

Of course I blabbed to the queen (she asked, I had to answer) that once again she was no longer fairest in the land. This time I avoided telling her it was Snow White and merely said it was the bride to be. She didn’t ask her name anyway. She wasn’t happy, but having received an invitation to the wedding, she thought she’d have a look, indulge herself in a spot of feasting and then decide what to do.

When the queen discovered that the bride was Snow White, or rather when she saw the way Snow White looked at her, she became fearful. Like all those of royal blood, Snow White had a dark side. In any case, what’s the point of a story about good and evil if the evildoer doesn’t get their comeuppance? Even if the lines are sometimes blurred, because the good ones are also capable of perpetrating serious evil. The lovely Snow White did just that. She made the queen wear burning hot shoes and dance in them until she dropped dead.

And don’t for a moment believe that Snow White and the prince lived happily ever after. She lost her looks as middle-age and a horrible diet took their toll, while he became a typical philandering, marauding monarch.

As for my fate, the queen’s chief lady-in-waiting, like the queen an amateur sorceress, a more skilful one I might add, grabbed me. She asked me the question, I answered it and she cast a spell that shut me up for good.