Blackness in the Grimms' Fairy Tales

I examine four tales in the Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmärchen in which human characters are described as physiologically black. Against the background of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of race, ethnicity, and skin color, the centuries-old pre-Christian and Christian mythologies of color that influence these portrayals of blackness in the Grimms' fairy tales likely took on new layers of meaning for readers and storytellers. This is particularly the case in "The Three Black Princesses," in which black color symbolism appears in an exotic setting that can be read in the context of early nineteenth-century imaginings of the colonial Other.