Could Snow White have been real? We often imagine that fictional stories contain within them at least a grain of truth; perhaps the setting shares a likeness to the author’s home town, or the hero is someone strikingly possessed of qualities like the writer. Fairy tales? Not so much. After all, who ever heard of an actual big, bad wolf disguising himself as a little girl’s grandma and hiding in her bed? No, fairy tales are called tales precisely because they bear no likeness to any reality.

Turns out, that assumption is mistaken, at least in the case of the fairy tale, Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs. There is a real life baroness behind the story’s heroine, Maria Sophia von Erthal, who lived in a castle near the town of Lohr am Main, in northern Bavaria in the mid-18^th century, and died in 1796.

Experts believe that von Erthal served as the inspiration for Snow White, the classic tale of a virtuous maiden who lives with seven dwarfs, all of whom work in a mine. The baroness’s gravestone was recently donated by a family to the Diocesan Museum, in Bamberg, in southern Germany. Its director, Holger Kempken, likes to think the story of the baroness as the basis for the fairy tale girl is, at least in part, true. He recently told BBC News, “The story of Sophia’s life was well known at the start of the 19^th century,” he began. “The Brothers Grimm made literature out of the stories they heard from local people.

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