Mirror, Mirror

Hey True Weirdos, we just wanted to take a minute and thank you so much for your support. True Weird Stuff has won the Best History Podcast and the Women in Podcasting Awards and we've also won a Signal Award in the Paranormal category and that's only happened because of you, our fellow strange people. Thanks. Stick around if you want after the episode for a little bonus content and conversation.

Once upon a time, many hundreds of years ago, in a faraway place, there lived a young man named Philip. Philip had been born in a castle, destined for a life of nobility and wealth. His family lineage could be traced as far back as the year 1000, and so the boy knew from an early age that much was expected of him. When Philip was just 20 years old, his father died.

Philip ascended to power, becoming the Count of Waldeck-Vildemann in the County of Waldeck, which was a principality of the Holy Roman Empire. Philip's reign lasted six decades. No count or prince of Waldeck could equal it. He played a role in changing how Christianity was thought about and practiced in Europe. His was a big life, important and consequential.

But it's unlikely that you've ever heard of him. European nobles, counts, dukes, and even princes are in plentiful supply, and really, why would most of us know anything at all about some random count from the 16th century who ruled over a teeny-tiny patch of land that's now claimed by Germany? But maybe, just maybe, you know more than you think, because Count Philip of Waldeck-Vildemann's story includes some very familiar things, like a daughter whose beauty was told off far and wide, a second wife who envied that child, an ornate mirror, copper mines worked by miners of very small stature, and even a poisoned apple.

Mirror, mirror on the wall, could the fairy tale Snow White actually be true, after all? True, weird, stuff. Count Philip had been in power for seven years, when he was called by the Emperor Charles V to the city of Worms for a special assembly called the Diet of Worms, which is an unfortunate name for the thing to have, since in print it reads like Diet of Worms, which sounds like one of those weirdo influencer bro longevity strategies.

But there was nothing funny about this assembly, which would wind up taking five months of Philip's life, because also summoned to Worms was the German priest and theologian Martin Luther. In a nutshell, Luther's views were in opposition to that of the all-powerful Catholic Church, always a dangerous position to take back then.

And Luther really kicked it into high gear by arguing that faith alone was the secret to salvation. Catholic Church was like, no, no, it's works, good deeds that unlock the kingdom of heaven. Now the Pope at that time, Pope Leo X, had issued a papal bull denouncing Luther and threatening him with excommunication. So Emperor Charles V had questions for Martin Luther and demands.

When Luther refused to recant or renounce his views on the church, the Emperor was displeased, so displeased that he issued the Edict of Worms, which condemned Martin Luther as a heretic. The Emperor was just getting started, though. Charles V also banned any citizen of the Holy Roman Empire from spreading Luther's ideas.

This went down in history as the first big, no denying it moment of the Protestant Reformation. And it turned Martin Luther into an outlaw. For Count Philip, staunch follower of Martin Luther, that was a bit of a bummer. But there were other things happening for Philip at the Edict of Worms. He met the woman he'd marry there.

Her name was Margaret of East Frisia. East Frisia was a relative newcomer to the Holy Roman Empire and had already fought off the Emperor's attempt to oust the Frisians from power and replace them with Saxon leadership. And East Frisia will go on to be a super important player in the Protestant Reformation as well. So Count Philip and Margaret of East Frisia had their faith in common, and their marriage would signal an alliance, or at least an affinity, between their two principalities.

It all sounds very dry and business-like, but who can really say that passion or friendship or even love wasn't also a part of it? Once upon a time in midwinter, when the snowflakes were falling like feathers from heaven, a queen sat sewing at her window, which had a frame of black ebony wood. As she sewed, she looked at the snow and pricked her finger with her needle.

Three drops of blood fell into the snow. The red on the white looked so beautiful that she thought to herself, If only I had a child as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as the wood in this frame. Would there be, could there be, a happily ever after for Count Philip and his Countess? Soon afterward, she had a little daughter, who was as white as snow, as red as blood, and as black as ebony wood, and therefore they called her Little Snow White.

And as soon as the child was born, the queen died. Count Philip grieved, of course, and then he remarried. His second wife was a woman said to be renowned for her beauty, Katharina von Hatzfeld. A beauty so spectacular that it was exceeded only by Katharina's vanity, or so it was said. Under Count Philip's influence, almost the entire population of Waldeck had abandoned the Church of Rome for Lutheranism.

Count Philip had even issued an order requiring clergy to preach only Protestant sermons. He also ordered that Catholic monasteries in his jurisdiction be dissolved, and their assets used to fund charitable needs more in keeping with Philip's Lutheran sensibilities. And the newly minted Countess Katharina, by all accounts, spent her days preening and accepting the admiration of her subjects.

Seeing how much pleasure his new bride took in her own appearance, the count paused from his political and religious work and ordered a special gift to be made. A large, ornate mirror, elaborately carved and gilded. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in this land is fairest of all? You, my queen, are fairest of all. Then she was satisfied, for she knew the mirror spoke the truth.

The years flew by as they do, the count and countess growing older, their children growing up, and the daughter of Count Philip's first marriage, named Margaret for her late mother. When she was seven years old, she was as beautiful as the light of day, even more beautiful than the queen herself. Countess Katharina's stepdaughter, Margaret, grew into a young woman of dazzling, ethereal, otherworldly beauty.

Her demeanor was so sweet and charming that she was beloved by all the people of Waldeck. She was not, however, beloved by Katharina. When the countess gazed upon Margaret, she saw a rival, a threat, a competitor. Today we'd say, sounds like narcissistic personality disorder, but no such words existed in the Holy Roman Empire.

The very idea of a personality disorder, of psychology itself, would have been as foreign to the people of that time as an iPhone or a satellite. One day, when the queen asked her mirror, Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in this land is fairest of all? It answered, You, my queen, are fair, it's true, but Snow White is a thousand times fairer than you.

If the countess Katharina was, in fact, a narcissist, that talk in mirror just triggered her worst nightmare. Her bottomless need for admiration, her complete inability to accept criticism, the entrenched belief in her own specialness, the glories to which she was so clearly entitled. Was she expected to now live in the shadow of an upstart child?

The queen took fright and turned yellow and green with envy. From that hour on, whenever she looked at Snow White, her heart turned over inside her body. So great was her hatred for the girl. The envy and pride grew even greater, like a weed in her heart, until she had no peace, day and night. Oh, it was all just intolerable for Katharina.

A mentally sound, emotionally healthy adult, you know, typically takes delight in hearing their child praised. If you're a parent yourself, you know that from experience. Say something nice about one of my kids, and I promise you, you gonna make my whole day. But for Katharina, it was just the opposite. Every word sung in praise of Margaret's beauty or sweetness was like a poisonous bar piercing Katharina's gut.

The older woman's hostility grew and festered, more and more bitter with each new day, until finally, it could no longer be endured. The girl would have to be sent away. Now, in the Brothers Grimm fairy tale, and in the versions of the story we all grew up with, this was the plan. The queen summoned a huntsman and said to him, Take Snow White out into the woods. I never want to see her again.

Kill her, and as proof that she is dead, bring her lungs and her liver back to me. The huntsman obeyed and took Snow White into the woods. He took out his hunting knife and was about to stab into her innocent heart when she began to cry, saying, Oh, dear huntsman, let me live. I will run into the wild woods and never come back.

What actually happened was very different. Instead of a huntsman luring the girl into the forest, arrangements were made for Margaret to travel to the home of her late mother's brother. His name was Johan Circina, and he lived in splendor at the Valkenburg Castle in Brussels, Belgium. Margaret agreed to go, so desperate was she to please her father and appease her stepmother.

So off she journeyed to Brussels, never dreaming what fate awaited her there. Now, we haven't really talked yet about the principality of Waldeck, about its wild beauty or its abundant natural resources. The region was dotted with copper mines, and most of those were owned and operated by Margaret's brother. Copper mining in the 16th century was nothing but punishing manual labor.

Everything had to be done by hand. This was before the invention of gunpowder, which meant that there was no blasting of rock to create tunnels and shafts. Those tunnels and shafts had to be dug, a process that could take laborers years of brute force. Shovels and picks, buckets filled with soil and rock. It could take years to excavate a shaft.

The tunnels were narrow and tight, dug at a width that would accommodate just one person. By the time Margaret left for Brussels, workers in Waldeck's copper mines were facing harder challenges than ever before. Any copper ore close to the surface had already long been extracted. The miners were forced to dig deeper and deeper, and with that came the problem of draining the mines and keeping the water out.

And the deeper the mines went, the more costly the whole operation became. And the work itself, exhausting and difficult, carried other risks. Safety equipment was non-existent. This was the mid-1500s. No respirators, no OSHA-approved helmets, no lights. Miners faced injury by falling rocks, collapsing shafts, and poor ventilation.

In the event of a cave-in, the miners died. The narrow tunnel where they toiled became their final resting place. Even more horribly, miners could and did drown in flooding tunnels. Can you imagine the panic? To drown in pitch darkness? In the bowels of the earth? Miners inhaled copper dust, which could cause chronic lung disease and lead to painful, premature death.

And then there were the toxic gases, which, depending on the composition of the ore being mined, could be sulfur dioxide or carbon monoxide or even arsenic fumes. The news is even worse for children. And it was children who labored in Waldeck copper mines. Exposure to copper can dramatically stunt a child's growth and can cause a permanent curvature in the spine.

Exposure to the toxic chemicals involved had a way of turning the hair of those child miners gray. As they emerged at the end of each day from those narrow gashes in the earth, they were filthy, stooped, gray-headed. You wouldn't know you were looking at a child. The people of Waldeck had a special nickname for the children who toiled in the mines.

They called them dwarves. These miniature copper miners trudged home, exhausted and spent, trudged not to the homes they'd been born to, you know, homes with waiting parents and warm meal. Waldeck little copper miners were housed in group cottages. Some of those cottages accommodated as many as 30 miners. Others were smaller and might be home to as few as seven.

Seven small child laborers. Seven. After dark, the masters of the house returned home. They were the seven dwarves who picked and dug for ore in the mountains. They lit their seven candles and as soon as it was light in their house, they saw that someone had been there for not everything was in the same order as when they had left it.

The first one said, Who has been sitting in my chair? The second one said, Who has been eating at my plate? The third one said, Who has been eating my bread? The fourth one said, Who's been eating my vegetables? The fifth one said, Who has been sticking with my fork? The sixth one said, Who has been cutting with my knife?

The seventh one said, Who has been drinking from my mug? Then the first one saw that there was a little imprint in his head and said, Who stepped on my bed? The others came running and shouted, Someone's been lying in my bed as well. But the seventh one, looking at his bed, found Snow White lying there asleep. The seven dwarves all came running up and they cried out in amazement.

They fetched their seven candles and shone the light on Snow White. Oh, good heaven! Oh, good heaven! They cried. The child is so beautiful, as the fairy tale goes. But there was one more real problem troubling the little miners, the people of Valdek called dwarves. They were hungry. They were hungry all the time. A local farmer who was exasperated and angry at the pilfering and thieving of his crops took to sprinkling poison on some of the apples hanging on trees in his orchard.

Now, of course, the beautiful Margaret was nowhere near the copper mines. She was in Brussels. After a few years spent living in her uncle's home, Margaret's father arranged for her to attend the court of Mary of Hungary, who just happened to be the sister of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Margaret was presented at court.

That is the aristocratic way of saying that Margaret was introduced to high society, with the end goal being hopefully a marriage to a suitable bachelor with at least a title and ideally some land and wealth to go with it. As destiny would have it, there was a very prominent and important guest at court when Margaret made her debut, the nephew of Mary of Hungary.

His name was Crown Prince Philip. And he was hopelessly smitten with Margaret. At first sight, so romantic. Ooh, is this becoming a Disney story? A beautiful girl with a dead mother and a wicked stepmother meets a handsome Prince Charming at the ball? Their eyes meet and it's love? No, this is not any kind of a Disney story at all.

Crown Prince Philip might have been swooning over the lovely Margaret, but his father had other ideas about exactly what sort of woman would make the ideal wife for his son. And just who was this overbearing father daring to dictate who his son might marry? Well, that would be the Holy Roman Emperor himself, Charles V. Maybe he empathized with his son.

Margaret was breathtaking and charismatic and kind to a fault. Anyone could see why the Crown Prince might lose his heart and his head to such a woman. But marriage for love wasn't in the cards for Philip. Marriage for a man in his position was about power, about forging strategic alliances with other ruling families, about consolidating wealth and territory.

Though Margaret herself was of noble blood, being a countess of Waldeck was pretty small potatoes. And then there was the question of faith. Margaret was a Lutheran. The Emperor had been crowned by none other than Pope Clement VII. And you know what that means. Charles V was big Catholic. Mixed-faith marriages can be problematic today, even when half the couple isn't riding the throne of the Holy Roman Empire.

Back then, forget it. There was just no path forward for the Crown Prince Philip and the Countess Margaret. Now, here's a wonky fun fact that might make you look like a genius if Jeopardy ever has the category trash-talking political philosophers. He once said, a bit sarcastically, this body, which was called and which still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire, was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.

Who is French philosopher Voltaire? You're welcome. Oh, uneasy lies the head that wears the crown. Shakespeare said that. The Bard left off the part, though, about how bloody are the hands that adjust that crown. Being a monarch is a nasty business. To rule over a kingdom, never mind an empire, calls for a very specific kind of ruthlessness, which is fostered and made easier by the conviction that you have been chosen by God to wield power over a people that you get to call your subjects, as in, their lives and will are subject to your deeds and choices.

A king or a queen has nothing in common with the commoner. The European monarchs even had a name for God-given power. They called it the divine right of kings. Basically, it means they answered to no earthly authority and more that they themselves were sacred beings. So imagine you are this divinely chosen sacred being slash emperor and you're watching your son, who is supposed to devote his life to expanding yours and God's realm, daring to fall in love in full view of the entire court.

Charles V had to find a way to derail the budding courtship. But how? The next morning Snow White woke up and when she saw the seven dwarfs, she was frightened. But they were friendly and they asked, What's your name? My name is Snow White. How did you find your way to our house? The dwarfs asked further. Then she told them that her stepmother had tried to kill her and that the huntsman had spared her life and that she had run the entire day finally coming to their house.

The dwarfs said, If you will keep house for us and cook, make beds, wash, sew and knit and keep everything clean and orderly, you can stay with us and you shall have everything you want. Yes, answered Snow White with all my heart. So she kept house for them. Every morning they went into the mountains looking for ore and gold and in the evening when they came back home, their meal had to be ready.

During the day the girl was alone. The good dwarfs warned her saying, Be careful about your stepmother. She will soon know that you are here. Do not let anyone in. And just then, Margaret's health took an odd turn. Seemingly overnight, no physician was able to explain her decline. She grew weaker and paler by the day.

As Margaret languished, gossip spread. Her affliction was so mysterious, especially in one so young. It's unknown if word was sent to the Count and Countess of Waldeck regarding their daughter's condition. Not that Katharina would have felt an ounce of sympathy for the girl. The Queen stepped before her mirror and said, Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in the land is fairest of all?

It answered, You, my Queen, are fair, it's true. But Snow White beyond the mountains with the seven dwarfs is still a thousand times fairer than you. How it must have galled Katharina knowing that the stepdaughter she despised was the toast of Brussels while she herself was trapped in the countryside. Margaret wore silks and velvet and was courted by the Crown Prince while she, Katharina, paced the corridors in bitter rumination.

She had thought to punish Margaret by sending her away, but instead it was she herself who fumed and raged in a gilded cage of her own making. She thought and thought again. How could she kill Snow White? For as long as she was the most beautiful woman in the entire land, her envy would give her no rest. At last, she thought of something.

Coloring her face, she disguised herself as an old peddler woman so that no one would recognize her. In this disguise, she went to the house of the seven dwarfs. Knocking on the door, she called out, Beautiful wares for sale! For sale! Snow White peered out of the window and said, Good day, dear woman. What do you have for sale?

Good wares! Beautiful wares! She answered, Bodice laces in all colors. She took one out that was braided from colorful silk. Would you like this one? I can let the honest woman in, thought Snow White. Then unbolted the door and bought the pretty bodice lace. Child, said the old woman, how you look. Come, let me lace you up properly.

The unsuspecting Snow White stood before her and let her do up the new lace. But the old woman pulled so quickly and so hard that Snow White could not breathe. Margaret, so frail now, asked for pen and paper. In a shaking hand, she wrote her own last will and testament. Not long afterward, in the evening, the seven dwarfs came home.

How terrified they were when they saw their dear Snow White lying on the ground. Not moving at all. As though she were dead. They lifted her up. Seeing that she was too tightly laced, they cut the lace in two. Then she began to breathe a little. And little by little, she came back to life. When the dwarfs heard what had happened, they said, The old peddler woman was no one else but the godless queen.

Take care and let no one in when we are not with you. There were those at court who believed that the emperor had hired a most cunning and discreet assassin. Poison was the rumor. How else to account for Margaret's sudden illness, one no doctor had been able to diagnose, much less treat. When the wicked queen returned home, she went to her mirror and asked, Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in this land is fairest of all?

You, my queen, are fair, it's true. But Snow White, beyond the mountains with the seven dwarfs, is still a thousand times fairer than you. When she heard that, all her blood ran to her heart because she knew that Snow White had come back to life. This time, she said, I shall think of something that will destroy you. I can hear you thinking, oh, wait a minute.

Snow White was a real person. The brothers Grimm, Jakob and Vilhelm were more than the authors of fairy tales. They were historians. They were fascinated by the ways in which language evolves over time. After they finished their studies at university, the brothers moved to the town of Kassel, Germany, where they worked as librarians.

Hearing the people of Kassel recounting old folk tales, the brothers got the idea to write the stories down. At first, mostly because Jakob was intrigued by the changes to the German language that stories revealed. The brothers hadn't set out to write stories for children, which explains why so many of the original Grimm's tales were laced with sexual content and a whole lot of violence.

It's proof of how little times have changed, that there was an uproar over the sex and an indifference to the violence, which is why the brothers removed the sex from later editions, but left all the violence intact. Since the stories the brothers Grimm ultimately published were based on the old tales circulating around that part of Germany, it's absolutely possible that each one is built on at least a kernel of truth.

And the story of Snow White sure does have some intriguing parallels to the story of Margaret von Waldeck. The wicked queen made a poisoned, poisoned apple. From the outside, it was beautiful, white with red cheeks, and anyone who saw it would want it. But anyone who might eat a little piece of it would die. Then, coloring her face, she disguised herself as a peasant woman and thus went across the seven mountains to the seven dwarves.

She knocked on the door. Snow White stuck her head out the window and said, I'm not allowed to let anyone in. The dwarves have forbidden me to do so. That is all right with me, answered the peasant woman. I'll easily get rid of my apples. Here, I'll give you one of them. No, said Snow White, I cannot accept anything. Are you afraid of poison? asked the old woman.

Look, I'll cut the apple in two. You eat the red half and I shall eat the white half. Now the apple had been so artfully made that only the red half was poisoned. Snow White longed for the beautiful apple, and when she saw the peasant woman was eating part of it, she could no longer resist, and she stuck her hand out and took the poisoned half.

She barely had a bite in her mouth when she fell to the ground dead. The queen looked at her with a gruesome stare, laughed loudly and said, White as snow, red as blood, black as ebony wood. This time the dwarves cannot awaken you. Margaret died of this mysterious sickness. She was 21 years old. The crown prince Philip was bereft.

The emperor, whether he hired an assassin to kill the girl or not, was relieved. She had been nothing more to him than an irritant to be swatted away. A king must, he knew, exist to remove from the petty troubles of his subjects. Margaret was just a girl. Beautiful beyond description, yes, but ultimately just a girl. And now just a body to be disposed of.

Back at home, the queen asked her mirror, Mirror, mirror on the wall, who in the land is fairest of all? It finally answered, You, my queen, are the fairest of all. Then her envious heart was at rest, as well as her envious heart can be at rest. When the dwarves came home that evening, they found Snow White lying on the ground.

She was not breathing at all. She was dead. They lifted her up and looked for something poisonous. They undid her laces. They combed her hair. They washed her with water and wine. But nothing helped. The dear child was dead and she remained dead. They laid her on a bier and all seven sat next to her and mourned for her and cried for three days.

They were going to bury her, but she still looked as fresh as a living person. And she still had her beautiful red cheeks. It's human nature to want a happy ending to our stories. To have our fiction and fairy tales give us that one thing that reality doesn't offer. Fairness. It wasn't fair the way Margaret's life played out.

To lose her mother at such a young age. To be treated with such cruelty by her father's second wife, the imperious Katharina. To be banished from her home. To find love only to have her life snuffed out before that love could truly blossom. It wasn't fair. Not any of it. And so the story passed down from generation to generation gave to Margaret what the truth had denied her.

A happy ending with her prince. Now it came to pass that a prince entered these woods and happened onto the dwarf's house. Where he sought shelter for the night. He saw the coffin on the mountain with beautiful snow white in it. And he read what was written on it with golden letters. He said to the dwarfs, Let me have the coffin.

I will give you anything you want for it. But the dwarfs answered, We will not sell it for all the gold in the world. Then he said, Then give it to me. For I cannot live without being able to see snow white. I will honor her and respect her as my most cherished one. As he thus spoke, the good dwarfs felt pity for him.

And gave him the coffin. The prince had his servants carried away on their shoulders. But then it happened that one of them stumbled on some brush. And this dislodged from snow white's throat the piece of poisoned apple that she had bitten off. Not long after, she opened her eyes. Lifted the lid from her coffin. Sat up and was alive again.

Good heavens, where am I? She cried out. The prince said joyfully, You are with me. He told her what had happened. And then said, I love you more than anything else in the world. Come with me to my father's castle. You shall become my wife. Snow white loved him. And she went with him. Their wedding was planned with great splendor and majesty.

The story had one more gift for Margaret von Waldeck. One more thing that life had denied her. Snow white's godless stepmother was also invited to the feast. After putting on her beautiful clothes, She stepped before her mirror and said, Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who in this land is fairest of all? The mirror answered, You my queen are fair, it's true.

But the young queen is a thousand times fairer than you. The wicked woman uttered a curse. And she became so frightened, So frightened that she did not know what to do. At first she did not want to go to the wedding. But she found no peace. She had to go and see the young queen. When she arrived, She recognized snow white and terrorized.

She could only stand there without moving. The people of the olden times lived short lives. Under conditions that could be harsh and were often downright brutal. Their taste and justice matched that. Yes, the wicked queen would see that all of her efforts had come to nothing. Yes, she would see that snow white now had everything that the queen herself had coveted.

But justice in those times was measured not in psychological torment, But in blood. Then they put a pair of iron shoes into burning coals. The shoes were brought forth with tongs and placed before the wicked queen. She was forced to step into the red hot shoes and dance until she fell down dead. And maybe that's as close as this story gets to a happily ever after.

Next time on True Weird Stuff. Everyone knows what Jack the Ripper did. But no one knows who Jack the Ripper was. And there are some who believe that we might have Jack all wrong. The fiend who stalked the Whitechapel district of London was a man we call a monster. But maybe that monster wasn't a man at all. What if Jack wasn't a Jack?

What if the Ripper was a Jill? That's on the next True Weird Stuff. Special thanks to our voice talents on this episode. Kary "Doc" Bowser, Heather Elizabeth, and Wendy Tonetti. Cherry, I really love what you did with this episode. I really do. This was so neat that you wove in the grim fairy tale with this. And this was a lot of fun to listen to.

It really was. Thank you. You know, this was one where I was like, ooh, I have an idea. But I don't know if it'll work. Well, we'll just do it. I mean, what's the worst case scenario? People dock our pay. LOL. Really? Darn it, you're going to give me even more of nothing. That's great. I thought it would be kind of a fun way to do it because the simple truth is, you know, like no one knows 100% with any certainty which of these old fables and legends and fairy tales are based on true stories.

There are some historians who argue absolutely this is based on Margaret of Waldeck. And there are some compelling reasons to think that. I mean, did you not love learning that the miners that worked in that part of the Roman Empire were children? So they were small and stooped with prematurely gray hair. Yeah. Even the poisoned apple in the fairy tale gets accounted for in the historical accounts of Waldeck.

So, I mean, you don't know. But here's the other thing to think about, the way that the Brothers Grimm worked. They were not in the business of telling bedtime stories. I think they would be as surprised as anybody by what's happened to some of their stories. They were interested. They were linguists. They were interested in watching archaic Germany evolve into modern German.

And all these tales that they wrote down were all in the oral tradition. I mean, you have to remember, like Margaret von Waldeck and the Crown Prince Philip, they lived in the 1500s. So by the time the Brothers Grimm came along, these stories had been told and retold and retold. And you know what happens to stories that are told and not written down.

Every time they're told, a detail might be omitted or embellished. And there's often this attempt at conveying morality and the rules of behavior in these stories. So depending on who was telling you the story, maybe Snow White was more responsible for what happened. Maybe the stepmother was more responsible. Maybe it was the emperor.

So by the time we got what the Brothers Grimm wrote down and handed it to us, it had been circulating among a population of people that were not literate. They couldn't read or write, but they certainly could tell stories. And that's why we're never going to really be able to prove, I think, which of the Grimm's fairy tales link up to actual historic people.

But you can make a pretty strong case for Margaret von Waldeck for Snow White, I thought. Well, you know, you talked about Charles V and the City of Worms. Well, I can remember studying this in world history when I was a kid, because when you see it spelled out, it looks like Diet of Worms. So I remember that we seemed to really enjoy that, connected with that.

But I am also fascinated that they took out the sex in the Brothers Grimm stuff. And I'm wondering, what did that look like when they had sex in these tales? Well, if you read the original Grimm's tales, I wish I could read them in German. They're probably even more hair-raising. But when you read the original and archaic versions, look at the way the original Snow White ends.

Snow White gets her happily ever after. It follows the Disney version pretty closely. But that part about the queen having her feet locked into red-hot iron shoes and dancing until she died, that's not in the Disney movie, right? So I don't know what the sexual component in this story might have been, although you could guess that Katharina had some sort of something going on, that Count Philip would be like, yeah, because he was way...

Count Philip was way religious, man. He was way into being a Lutheran. He was way into the Protestant Reformation. Way into undoing the grip that the Catholic Church had. So he was kind of a zealot. So maybe some of the sex in this particular story was Katharina seducing him. And I hate a story when women aren't heroic.

It kind of pissed me off what a bitch Katharina was. I would have liked her to not be. But maybe she, you know, really used every one of her wiles to ensnare him. And then he was so under her spell that he agreed to send his only daughter away. So maybe that would be a place for it. And you can certainly imagine how, like, Cinderella and the prince might have had a good time that night at the ball before she lost her glass slipper.

It's just very telling, I think. And all of this falls into a very religious tradition. This stripping of sex but leaving violence. We see this today. We see this today. Like, people are beside themselves at the thought of children being exposed to, you know, sexual or romantic content in a cartoon. But bash each other over the head with a stick, not a problem.

I mean, you know that. We're so puritanical about sex and so casual about violence, even now. And look, where do you think that comes from? Like, none of this stuff just springs into being out of nowhere. Puritans. Yeah. Puritans. It's a cultural evolution. We're a nation of immigrants. We, our ancestors came from these countries and these faith practices, and they grew up listening to these kinds of stories.

Yeah, it's super interesting. A little behind the scenes. I think we've revealed before kind of what our process is when we record an episode. We record it. Sherry does her narration, and then all of the voice parts that you hear that are different people. I voice all the voice parts in this. And it was so much fun because it was like I was sitting with my nieces when they were little, and I'm reading them a story, doing the grim fairy tale part of this.

And it was, it warmed my heart because I can remember I would sit with either, on either side of me, and I would come to visit. And they liked me because I would do, you know, I would do all the voices. And they really, that was very sweet. And so that brought back some really great memories just recording this episode.

One of the really fun parts about this one for me was the Grimm's Brother fairy tale does not align deed for deed, word for word with the story of Margaret and Crown Prince Philip, but it gets really close if you stand back and think about it. Margaret gets sent away. Snow White ends up in the forest being sheltered by the seven dwarves, right?

Margaret falls ill shortly after Crown Prince Philip begins wooing her, and Snow White takes the bite of the apple and is presumed to be dead by the Wicked Queen. So you can see how like, in the true story of Margaret and Philip, you know, you don't have whistle while you work and I brought you an apple. You don't have that.

But you have those parallels in terms of like the courtship and the treachery, the betrayal. Because the rumor was very strong that Emperor Charles V had Margaret killed because she was such a distraction for Philip and enough's enough. We have other fish to fry. Like we're just not going to deal with this. And so that was like a really widely believed thing.

And so you see like the beautiful Snow White wasting away. She's unconscious in the coffin. The beautiful Margaret wasting away and eventually dying. And so the parallels were really fun. When you kind of laid them on top of each other. But then the story, the fairy tale of Snow White, does exactly what stories are supposed to do for us.

Fiction gives us a way of controlling outcomes and changing outcomes. So in the real world, death is forever. And the kiss of true love doesn't wake you back up, right? And in the real world, Margaret died at age 21, tragically having been cast out of her home. And there was no happy ever after for her. But the story gave that back to her.

And then the story did the other thing that fiction does that real life cheats us of. In real life, there's not necessarily a whole lot of justice and there's no fairness. None. People get away with murder in real life. People do terrible things and suffer no consequences. Not always, but a lot, right? People are cruel and sadistic and dishonest.

And sometimes they're celebrated for those things. And it's not fair and it's not just. But in the world of stories and make-believe, we can engineer fairness and we can engineer justice in a way that we can't in reality. And so when you step back and you look at Margaret's, the real story of Margaret Von Baldeck and the story of Snow White, you can see how the fairy tale gave her the thing that life stole from her.

It gave her love and it gave her a future. And it right at the scales. This torment and abuse from her stepmother, the story made sure that Katharina was dealt with. Whereas in real life, none of that. None of it. Wasn't the huntsman supposed to bring her the liver and lungs? I wonder what he did with that. I guess I don't remember that part of the story.

I guess he maybe brought them from an animal or something. Oh, OK. He did. The Wicked Queen was fooled by the liver and lungs from the animal. And if not for the magic mirror, they would have gotten away. Snow White would have gotten away, got free. But the magic mirror could see the truth of the situation and told the Wicked Queen that Snow White still lived.

A yummy little detail in all of this is that Count Philip, Margaret's father, he was delighted by his second wife's beauty and thought it was adorable how vain she was of her beauty. And that's why he commissioned the gift of the mirror. Because she was beautiful and if she wanted to spend her days admiring herself, that suited him just fine.

He thought it was charming that she was so vain. He couldn't see that that vanity was driven by this bottomless need for validation and approval by this narcissism. Because that was a word that they didn't even have back then. He couldn't see that there was nothing charming about her vanity, that it was cold and manipulative and hollow.

And that kind of almost exactly matches the fairy tale version of the Wicked Stepmother, doesn't it? Yes. I must say, I don't remember. The Disney cartoon, it's been so long since I've watched it. I don't remember what happens to her at the end. But the idea that she was forced to step into red hot shoes and dance until she fell down dead, it's a little harsh.

But then again, Disney has no problem at all killing innocent animals. And mothers. Disney's like, hang on, child, is that your mother? We're going to kill her now. Set the story in motion. But they're going, whoa, whoa, whoa. The villain? Red hot shoes and dance until she fell down dead? I don't think we can do that.

Well, because that would be upsetting for children. As though watching Snow White stalked by the Huntsman, then poisoned by the old lady was like no big deal. But, you know, back then, and we see this all the time in True Weird Stuff, and you don't have to go back very far. Like, you can just go back to when the West was won in the United States to see how swift and brutal justice could be.

The trial would begin at 10 o'clock in the morning. The person would be found guilty by four o'clock in the afternoon. They'd be walked over to the gallows and hung. And then their body dug, a grave dug at the crossroads, and their body dumped into it and spat upon. That's recent history. Yeah. So you go back. They put a pair of iron shoes into the burning coals.

I got to tell you, the fact that somebody was like, hmm, I'll tell you what would be good here. Where's the metalsmith? We need some iron shoes. And then they put them into the coals, and when they're red hot, they make the wicked queen step into them. Oh, that's some justice, man. That's some savage justice right there.

Now, of course, the Grimm Brothers spelled their last name G-R-I-M-M. But doesn't it sound like a Saturday Night Live bit? Grimm Fairy Tales. Because they are. And they are. And so there are all kinds of versions of the original Grimm's. The one that you heard in this episode is one of the translations from one of the originals, and that's why it has different things in it than the Disney version that you've heard.

But I just could not believe, and who even knows? In fact, who knows what's real and true? Everything was handed down word of mouth. But I could not get over the teeny tiny child laborers who were so damaged from exposure to toxins in the mines. And their hairs were gray. And they looked like little dwarfs. And they lived in group cottages like seven dwarfs.

I mean, and then the farmer being pissed off that these hungry kids would, you know, steal things out of his fields, poisoning the apples. It's like, whoa, yeah. All the details were here for a pretty good story. We just had to rearrange some things and make it more of a fable than a news report. It's wild, isn't it? You have to have the seed that starts whatever the story idea is.

And generally, in fiction, there's something that's factual that's happened that is where that comes from. And certainly it's not too much of a stretch to realize, to believe that that's what they were at least basing the story on. It's kind of like Law and Order used to do that with their episodes. It would be like there was a true story, and they'd sort of do a version of it.

Well, we just had a recent, I think, great example of speculative fiction in the Tarantino movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. So the events of the movie are based on, you know, a real person, the actress Sharon Tate, who was pregnant with her first child, Charles Manson and the members of that Manson family cult. And then Tarantino added some fictional elements, a washed up stunt man, an actor whose best parts were behind him and set in motion a story that paralleled the true events faithfully up to a point and then did at the end what the Brothers Grimm did for Margaret Von Waldeck.

Tarantino said, I'm sorry, but it's not fair for Sharon Tate to be butchered and murdered like this. That's not fair. That's not just. And so the movie changes the ending completely and shows you speculative fiction, shows you how different things would have been if one or two of movements, choices, events would have happened at a slightly different time in a slightly different way.

You have a happy ending. It's the same. The Brothers Grimm did the same with the people, actually not the Brothers Grimm because they just wrote down the story as it was told to them over time. The people who told their children these tales shaped them to provide at least some sense of justice and fairness and happiness at the end.

So this is like the idea of speculative fiction, the idea of changing the ending to make it more just and joyful. That's an ancient thing that humans do. And it's one of the beautiful aspects of fiction that it's a place you can go and sort of try on all these different lives and characters and have the outcomes, you know, be other, have the outcomes be joyful instead of tragic.

We see that a lot in the Snow White story. I think you're seeing that with the parallels to Margaret von Waldeck. So when we read these to children, what we're doing is we're indoctrinating them with the idea that life is fair and that they will have happy endings in life. A little aside about that. Once upon a time in Hollywood, the guy that played Charles Manson in that also played Charles Manson in the Netflix series Mindhunter.

Oh, so does he specialize in Manson because there's nobody better at Manson? I imagine, you know, I mean, I don't know what else he's done, but I do know that, you know, a check's a check. You know, I mean, I guess he's not terribly worried about being typecast, but he is so good in that part that it's really astonishing.

I loved what Tarantino did with that story because the simple truth of it is Manson was a lunatic cult leader, like the absolute worst of the worst. And his followers were brainwashed and indoctrinated and activated. All of that. It's all awful, just awful for everyone involved. Right. Sharon Tate was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That was an inhumane, the magnitude of savagery in the way those people, the victims of the Manson family were killed.

I understood Tarantino's desire to give a happy ending to her. It's no different from this ending to Snow White. It's no different at all. It's somebody in this case, the filmmaker, saying that's not fair. There should have been another way that this story could have ended. He did the same thing with Inglorious Bastards, too. Oh, yeah. I mean, he got Hitler was assassinated.

Oh, oh, not just assassinated, but assassinated by a woman who had witnessed the slaughter of her family. So it was it was not just justice. It was retribution plus justice. Yeah. Tarantino. I mean, that idea of I hate the way the real story played out. Is there another way that it could have gone? Very, very much the fairy tale concept. And if you look at the way that these stories were passed down in the oral tradition, they all have a lesson to teach.

Every last one of them teaches you something, which is why they've lasted all of this time. And in all the versions that we have now that are most of them are so sanitized, so far from the original events. Right. But they still teach. And that's why we read them to our kids. Yeah. The message is the messages are timeless. Yeah. Yeah.

So I'm kind of a departure, but a fun one, right? Oh, it was a lot of fun. Oh, no, no, I really I really appreciated what you did with this. This is this was a very cool little episode. It's different than it's different than anything else that we've done with this podcast. Well, let me tell you what's coming up on the horizon for true weird stuff so that you'll understand why you got a sweet little bedtime story. Next week's episode, we're going to take a look at the only credible female suspect in the as yet still unsolved Jack the Ripper murder.

Isn't it interesting that this particular serial set of serial killings still fascinates us the way that it does? I mean, all these years later, when you think about all the serial killers and unsolved crimes that have happened, this one just seems to endure. And I'm just and of course, and I'm fascinated with it, too.

But it just won't let it go. Like we won't let it go. And I think part of it is because we can't believe that after all this time, we we don't know who this was. There have been so many theories about that, too, that it was a member of the royal family, that it was a doctor, that it was this guy who emigrated to the United States. And then there were other killings over the United States. And then, of course, the story that we're going to present. So I really can't wait for this.

So that's next week. That's pretty intense, because you don't get the nickname Jack the Ripper, because you're killing people by boring them to death. It was bad, right. And then also on the horizon, we have a wild tale of the very last duel in America. Spoiler alert, it wasn't Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton. It was long after dueling had been outlawed everywhere except this one place. And also coming up, we have a story about and this is like notorious story. Imagine having a murder trial. You have arrested and indicted four individuals for the crime of murder. And it's a death penalty case. And the victim walks into town and takes the stand.

Yeah, buddy. So I mean, we've got some kind of hardcore stuff coming up. That's a little more. I don't know what the word. Not like, you know, violent or anything like that, but definitely less of a fairy tale with handsome princesses or handsome princes and beautiful princesses and wicked stepmothers. Yeah, we got some intense stuff coming up. So I thought it might be fun, you know, to have a bedtime story.

Well, it was fun. It really was is is was so is was. So I also want to thank our Max already mentioned Wendy Tonetti, who did the original Grimm's fairy tale. I was like on vacation for this episode because somebody else did so much of the talking. And that was kind of fun. So we'll see you next week for Jill the Ripper. And at the end of it, you can be thinking for yourself what you believe, because like Max said, there have been so many suspects and we didn't even mention the author of Alice in Wonderland.

Lewis Carroll, who for a long time people were side eyeing as maybe he was Jack the Ripper. And there's some recent news involving DNA in the Jack the Ripper case. And we'll have that for you in next week's episode, too. So thank you so much for listening. And we hope that wherever you're headed now that you're headed there happily ever after.

And if you listen to us on Apple podcast, hit the plus button in the top right corner. And now it helps an independent podcast like ours to get discovered. And we really appreciate it. If you subscribe, rate and review true weird stuff, hit our Web site, true weird stuff dot com for show notes and photos and videos when we have it.

And bonus content. Everything true weird is waiting for you at true weird stuff dot com and follow true weird stuff on Instagram. True weird stuff is a Now! Media production. Our executive producer is Anthony Garcia. The show is written and hosted by me, Sheri Lynch, along with my deeply weird director, Max Sweeten. Our equally odd producer is Kary Bowser. Additional production by the mysterious Stephen Call. Our digital witch and social media cult leader is Heather Furr. Original graphics by Kevin Nash. Original artworks by Olivia Axland. True weird original music composed and performed by Jack Griffin and Zane Nash. Copyright 2025 Now! Media. All rights reserved. All wrongs remembered.

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