Some fairy tales, loved by children at all times, can shock modern adults. In such samples of folklore, you can find a lot of eerie details.
Reading old folk tales, it is easy to see that in ancient times, parents did not try to protect children from images of death. This was partly due to the way of life: a child who every year saw how a cow or a pig was slaughtered, the concept of death was not as shocking as a modern city dweller.
And yet, some fairy-tale motifs seem especially scary and mysterious. One of these motives is the poisoned apple.
A fabulous plot about a poisoned apple
The antiquity of the plot, in which the poisoned apple is present, is evidenced by its presence among different peoples. There are at least two such fairy tales: the Russian fairy tale, processed by A. S. Pushkin and known as The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Heroes, and the German fairy tale included in the Brothers Grimm collection entitled Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
The plot boils down to the following: the evil stepmother, wanting to get rid of her stepdaughter, who surpasses her beauty, orders the girl to be taken into the forest and killed. The one who is ordered to do this pity and lets the unfortunate woman go. The girl finds a house in the forest where seven brothers live (heroes in a Russian fairy tale, gnomes in a German one), and remains with them.
The stepmother, having learned that her stepdaughter is alive, comes to the forest house disguised as a poor wanderer and treats the girl with a poisoned apple. The stepdaughter dies, the inconsolable brothers bury her, but they do not bury her in the ground, but leave her on a mountain or in a cave in a crystal coffin.
The burial place of the girl is found by a prince in love with her and brings her back to life. In later interpretations, the hero does this with a kiss, but in the original it is more prosaic: in A. S. Pushkin, the prince breaks the coffin, and in the brothers Grimm one of the prince's servants, carrying the coffin with Snow White's body to his castle, stumbles, and from the push a slice of poisoned apple flies out of the girl's throat.
Historical roots of the plot
Behind this "romantic" plot there is a custom that might seem immoral to a modern person.
The rite of passage is at the heart of many fairy tales. Having passed initiation, the ancient youths did not immediately move on to an ordinary male life. There was an intermediate stage, which some researchers consider as part of the rite of passage - life in a men's house. It was a kind of "commune" uniting young people who had already left their parental families, but had not yet acquired their own.
Such a male community was closed in nature. Special rituals were performed there, entry into the men's house on pain of death was prohibited for women, as well as for children and youths who had not passed the rite of passage.
And yet someone had to do the housework in the men's house. And not only by the household, because the usual male instincts among the inhabitants of the house were quite developed. Often a girl lived in a men's house who did not run there from her evil stepmother at all - her own mother could well take her daughter there herself.
To the inhabitants of the house, she was by no means only an "affectionate sister", but the morality of that era did not condemn such behavior. The girl was engaged in the household. The men treated her with great respect.
But this could not continue indefinitely - the time came for the girl to start a family. She could not just leave the men's home - after all, she knew the secrets of the male community, which the woman had to take with her to the grave …
It is possible that somewhere and once such girls were really killed, but ethnographers did not meet such customs. The question was resolved more humanely - through ritual death, followed by "resurrection", after which the girl was free. It is about this custom that the tales of Snow White and the "dead princess" are told.
