"Gretel in Darkness" is based on Hansel and Gretel, a German-rooted fairytale about two siblings who are abandoned in a forest and imprisoned by a witch, escaping only when the sister, Gretel, tricks the witch into climbing inside of an oven. Glück's poem is faithful to the Brothers Grimm version of the tale, a particularly popular telling. Yet, like most popular stories—especially those with their roots in the oral tradition—"Hansel and Gretel" has countless versions. Many are entirely lost to the record, never recorded in writing. Others were faithfully transcribed by folklorists. Still others were embellished into literary retellings, taking on the stylistic attributes of forms like the novel. Indeed, Glück's poem, viewed through this lens, is not so much a response to a preexisting story as it is a link in a long and ongoing chain of retellings. Here, we will examine several stories, known to scholars of folklore as examples of the tale-type 327A.
In "Molly Whuppie," a version from England, three sisters—the youngest being a girl named Molly Whuppie— are abandoned in a forest when their father is unable to feed them. They knock at the door of a house to beg for food, and are greeted by a woman who warns them that her husband, a giant, will want to hurt them. Hungry enough to take the risk, they come inside the house for some bread and milk. When the giant comes home, the woman tells him not to harm the children. The three sisters are sent to sleep, sharing a bed with the giant's three children. Molly notices that the giant has put gold chains on his own children's necks, and straw ones on her and her siblings'. She switches the chain, tricking him into killing his own children rather than the guests. Molly and her sisters run away, and she tells her story to a king who lives nearby. The king gives her a series of quests, telling her to steal various objects from the giant's home. Molly is forced to use elaborate trickery: she convinces the giant to put her in a sack, and then tricks the giant's wife into taking her place, imprisoning her in the sack and running away. In exchange, Molly and her sisters are each married to one of the king's sons.
Charles Perrault was a seventeenth-century French writer of literary fairytales, which retold stories from the oral tradition for specifically aristocratic and female audiences. His version features a poor woodcutter with seven children, the youngest and frailest among them called Little Thumb. Their father decides, over his wife's objections, to abandon them in the woods rather than let them starve. Little Thumb, overhearing the plan, gathers pebbles and uses them to leave a trail so that he and his siblings can find their way home. They return via this trail, but hunger again drives the parents to abandon the children. Little Thumb makes a train out of breadcrumbs, which are eaten by birds. The desperate children seek shelter in a house, but the inhabitants are a woman and her husband, an ogre. The woman convinces the ogre not to kill the children until the next day. That night, they sleep beside the ogre's seven children, who are wearing gold crowns. Little Thumb switches the ogre's children's crowns with his own siblings' caps, and the giant, confused, kills his own children. The angry ogre chases after the children, but falls asleep, and Little Thumb steals his enchanted shoes. He returns to the ogre's house, wearing his shoes, and tells his wife that her husband is being held hostage. He thus tricks her into giving him a great deal of money, making the family rich. However, Perrault asserts, some people dispute these details and insist that Little Thumb instead made his family wealthy after a successful career as a messenger at court. He includes a concluding moral: "It is no affliction to have many children, if they all are good looking, courteous, and strong, but if one is sickly or slow-witted, he will be scorned, ridiculed, and despised. However, it is often the little urchin who brings good fortune to the entire family."
In "Magic Flight," an African American version, a girl named Katie drops in at a witch's house. She is served apples and even asked to stay for dinner, but Katie tells the witch that she must leave to buy supper for her mother. The witch assures her this isn't necessary, using a magic wand to conjure food directly to the mother's house. Katie stays with the witch for a while happily, but in a recurring dream, an elf begins to warn her that the witch wants to eat her. The elf leaves her a comb and a handkerchief, telling her to drop them when the witch chases her. When Katie jumps from a window and tries to run away, the witch chases her. But she drops the comb, which causes a forest to grow, obstructing the witch. She then drops the handkerchief, creating a river for the witch to cross. Finally, a woodcutter sees the witch and chops off her head before bringing Katie home. Katie's mother scolds her, telling her that such harrowing things happen to children who disobey.
These three tales are connected, sharing various elements—although the European tales share more with each other than they do with the American one, likely because of the different evolutionary tracks taken by the tale on the two different continents. To an extent, the versions display attributes typical of their countries and cultures of origin. Historian Robert Darnton points out that English tales tend to be imbued with "gaiety and whimsy," compared to darker German ones. French tales, he argues, "strike a note of humor and domesticity"—though Perrault's literary versions also take on the additional sensory detail typical of literary writing rather than oral storytelling. Furthermore, Perrault uses his tales as explicitly, if sometimes ironically, didactic tools, with clear morals included. Finally, African American tales tend to be terse and playful, with a jokelike cadence. Each version of the tale, then, takes inspiration from previous ones while injecting the story with the specific sensibilities of the teller, audience, and broader cultural context.
