The Blood And Blindness In The Original Cinderella

Every child knows the story. A pumpkin becomes a carriage. Mice become horses. A fairy godmother waves a wand, a glass slipper is lost on a marble stair, and the good girl is rewarded while the wicked stepsisters are simply left behind to sulk. It is a story about kindness and patience, softened and re-softened across two centuries until it is safe enough for the nursery. But the version the Brothers Grimm first set down in print in 1812 — “Aschenputtel,” in the first edition of their “Kinder- und Hausmärchen,” their “Children’s and Household Tales” — is not that story. It is older, stranger, and it ends in blood and blindness. There is no fairy godmother in the Grimms’ tale. There is a grave. When Cinderella’s mother dies, the girl plants a hazel branch on the burial mound and waters it with her tears until it grows into a tree. She goes there to weep, and a white bird settles in its branches, and whatever she wishes for, the bird throws down to her. There is no wand and no magic hour — there is a dead mother, a tree fed on grief, and the birds that answer from it. When the great festival is announced and Cinderella is forbidden to go, it is to this tree she runs, and it is the birds who clothe her. The festival in the Grimms’ telling lasts three nights, and three nights running Cinderella dances in the silver and gold the birds have thrown down to her, and each night she slips away before the prince can learn who she is. On the third night he is ready for her. He has had the palace staircase smeared with pitch, so that as she flees, her left slipper — the golden one — sticks fast to a step and is torn from her foot. This is the detail we have sanded away entirely: the shoe is not dropped by accident on a romantic stair as she glances back. It is caught in a trap the prince has laid to catch a woman who keeps escaping him. That is the slipper he then carries from house to house — and it is that slipper the stepsisters will cut themselves apart to fill.

The Horror

The famous test of the slipper is where the Grimms’ version turns to something the Disney studio would never touch. The slipper is not glass. It is gold, and it is small, and the prince has sworn to marry the woman whose foot it fits. The first stepsister takes the shoe into a room to try it, and it will not go on — her big toe is too large. Her mother hands her a knife. “Cut off the toe,” she says; “when you are queen you will no longer have to go on foot.” The girl cuts off her big toe, forces her bleeding foot into the golden shoe, and rides out with the prince as his bride. But as they pass the hazel tree on the grave, two doves are perched in it, and they call out: “Rucke di guck, rucke di guck, blood is in the shoe. The shoe is too small, the true bride is still at home.” The prince looks down, sees the blood welling over the gold, and turns his horse back. The second sister tries. Her heel is too broad. Her mother hands her the same knife. She cuts away a piece of her heel, crushes her foot into the shoe, and smiles through the pain — and again the doves see the blood, and again they cry out, and again the prince turns back. Only Cinderella’s foot slides in clean. This is a fairy tale in which two women mutilate themselves on their mother’s instruction, in cold blood, for the promise of a crown — and it is the birds on a dead woman’s grave who keep giving them away. The Grimms were not finished with the sisters. At Cinderella’s wedding, the two stepsisters come to the church hoping to share in her good fortune and be forgiven. As the wedding party enters, the two white doves fly down and peck out one eye from each sister. As the party leaves, the doves return and take the other eye from each. And so, the tale ends, “for their wickedness and falseness they were punished with blindness for the rest of their days.” No forgiveness. No mercy. The good girl walks into her happiness, and the wicked ones stand blinded on the church steps. The Grimm brothers were not inventing cruelty for its own sake. They were collecting — writing down the older, oral, adult versions of tales that had circulated for generations before anyone thought them children’s fare. Blood in the shoe and the pecking of eyes are not embellishments; they are the moral machinery of the original, in which vanity and cruelty are met with maiming and darkness. It was later editions, and later hands, that sanded the tales smooth. Between the first edition of 1812 and the seventh and final one of 1857, Wilhelm Grimm rewrote and gentled the collection again and again for a growing family readership, tempering its violence and stripping out its most adult material — but the blood in the shoe and the doves at the eyes he let stand. The 1812 and 1819 texts keep the knife and the blinding intact.

The Modern Relic

The book itself survives, and it is treated as a treasure of civilisation. The Grimms’ “Kinder- und Hausmärchen” is one of the most published books in the German language, and the brothers’ own hand-annotated working copies — the “Kasseler Handexemplare,” the Kassel personal copies, marked up in their own hands — are inscribed in UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register, the same register that protects the Magna Carta and the Gutenberg Bible. You can go and stand with the Grimms and their world at the GRIMMWELT museum in Kassel, Germany, where their manuscripts and marginalia are held and displayed. The GRIMMWELT, opened in 2015 on the Weinberg terraces above the city, arranges the brothers’ world alphabetically, letter by letter, and sets their scholarship beside the tales — for Jacob and Wilhelm were first of all philologists and lexicographers, men who spent decades compiling a monumental German dictionary, and only secondarily the collectors of nursery stories the world remembers them as. The two brothers themselves lie buried in Berlin, in the Alter St.-Matthäus-Kirchhof cemetery. The tale you were read at bedtime, cleaned of its knives, still descends in a direct printed line from those annotated pages. We tell children the version with the pumpkin because it is kinder. But somewhere on a shelf in Kassel, in a book the world has chosen to preserve forever, the doves are still perched in the hazel tree, still watching the golden shoe fill with blood, still waiting on the church steps.

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