The fairy tales you know were rewritten. Here are the originals.

The stories

• Read the storyThe Beast asked a different question.

  The version you know is a 1756 rewrite for schoolgirls. The original is a two-hundred-page novel, and it turns on Beauty saying yes herself.

• Read the storyThe famine in Hansel and Gretel was added in 1857

  The internet says the tale is a memory of the Great Famine of 1315. The Grimms' own editions say the famine went in last, and the mother went out.

• Read the storyIn 1812, Snow White's killer was her own mother

  Lungs and liver, cooked with salt, and no stepmother anywhere. The first edition is stranger than any retelling, and the strangest part is the one nobody retells.

• Read the storySleeping Beauty's kiss is a Grimm invention, not Disney's

  The 1636 Neapolitan original has no kiss, no prince and no poison, and it ends by congratulating the lucky rather than warning the vulnerable.

• Read the storyHamelin counted its years from the children's disappearance

  The town dated its documents from the day 130 children walked out, and for almost 300 years no rat appeared in the story.

• Read the storyPeter Pan's own narrator says the boys get killed

  Barrie's 1911 novel really does say Peter "thins them out," but the line is stranger than murder, and Captain Hook was never a Lost Boy.

• Read the storyCinderella got crueler with every Grimm edition

  The 1812 first edition has a knife and two mutilated feet, but not the famous queen line and not the blinding; Wilhelm Grimm added those seven years later.

• Read the storyThe peasant Red Riding Hood saved herself

  In the oral French version the girl eats her grandmother without knowing it, and then she escapes on her own, with no hunter anywhere in the story.

• Read the storyThe sea witch cut out her tongue, not her voice

  Andersen's 1837 text is harsher than the retellings in one place and far stranger in another, because it does not end with her dying.

• Read the storyThe Greek tortoise never says "slow and steady"

  The oldest surviving text of Aesop's most famous race blames the hare's laziness, not his speed, and that changes what the fable can honestly be used to prove.

• Read the storyThe tiger's voice never fooled the children

  In the Korean tale of the Sun and the Moon the children pass the voice test and the hand test, and the tiger gets in anyway, which is exactly the problem with AI voice cloning today.

• Read the storyIn the oldest White Snake, the husband calls Fahai

  In the earliest full printed version, from 1624, Bai Niangzi hands her husband stolen government silver, threatens to kill a city, and confesses she is a python, and Xu Xuan is the one who goes looking for the monk.

• Read the storyChang'e's fortune was good. She became a toad.

  The oldest surviving Chang'e story has no loneliness and no warning in it: the divination she casts before flying to the moon comes back auspicious, and the earliest text to follow her there turns her into an amphibian.

How we check

Every claim in a video traces to one original text.

A claim about "the original version" of a tale has to come from the original version, not from a blog post that summarizes it. Each story here quotes the first edition, in its own language and in English, and links the scan so you can read it yourself. Read the method.