Fairy Tale Coloring Pages

What the tales said before they were tidied up

Almost every fairy tale most people know arrived through a nineteenth-century edit, and the edits went one way: softer. The versions drawn here go back to what the story was doing before it was made suitable, which is usually stranger and almost always more interesting to sit with for an hour.

The Frog King - there is no kiss

In the Grimms' text the princess does not kiss the frog. She is disgusted by him, she is made to keep her promise by her father, and when the frog asks to sleep on her pillow she throws him at the wall as hard as she can. That is the moment he transforms. Whatever the story is about, it is not about tenderness rewarded - it is about a promise extracted and a refusal that finally gets heard.

The Little Mermaid - the price was always the point

Andersen's mermaid trades her voice for legs, and every step on them feels like walking on knives. She does not get the prince. The story was written by a man in love with someone who was marrying somebody else, and it reads exactly like that. The drawing here keeps the knives.

The Snow Queen - a story about a splinter

The whole plot turns on a shard of a broken mirror lodged in a boy's eye, which makes everything good look ugly to him. His friend walks across a continent to get him back. It is the least romantic and most accurate picture of watching someone you love turn cold that any of these tales contains.

Medusa - who was punished for what happened to her

The version most people know starts with a monster. The older telling starts with a woman who was assaulted in Athena's temple, and who was then transformed by Athena as the punishment - for the desecration of the temple, not for the crime against her. Every version after that is the story of a hero who kills her. She is drawn here as the person she was first.

Why the endings matter for a coloring page

A picture you sit with for an hour is not the same as a picture you glance at. If the story underneath it is the sanded-down one, the hour goes nowhere. If it is the original, you find yourself thinking about it, and the coloring becomes the thing you do with your hands while that happens. That is the entire design of these books.

Coloring notes

• Give the central figure the strongest contrast on the page and let everything else stay quieter. Fairy-tale scenes are busy, and without a hierarchy they read as wallpaper.
• Cloth is the easiest place to show skill: one deep fold colour, one mid, and untouched paper on the ridges.
• Water and glass take the colours around them. Do not invent a colour for them.
• If a scene has fire in it, colour the fire last and let it be the only fully saturated thing.

Who the Grimms actually collected from

The picture of two brothers walking German villages taking down peasant tales is mostly invention. A great many of their sources were educated women of their own circle, several of them of French Huguenot descent, who knew the printed French collections perfectly well. Which means the "authentically German" tales were already cross-bred with Perrault before the first edition appeared in 1812. The brothers also kept editing - the tales got longer, more pious and less violent with each of the seven editions Wilhelm oversaw.

Perrault wrote for a court, the Grimms for a nation

Perrault's versions, published in Paris in 1697, end with a rhymed moral and are aimed at adults at Versailles who would catch the joke. His Little Red Riding Hood simply gets eaten

• there is no woodsman, and the moral is about young women and charming strangers, stated outright. The Grimms, a century later, were assembling evidence of a German folk soul, and the rescue gets added. Same story, two entirely different jobs.

The tales that were never for children

Bluebeard is about a serial killer and a locked room. The Juniper Tree involves a stepmother, a decapitation and a stew. Donkeyskin is about a father who wants to marry his daughter. None of these were softened much because none of them was aimed at a nursery - they were told among adults, at work, at night, in company. The nineteenth century did not discover children's stories so much as decide, retroactively, that these had been them.

What survives the edits

Strip away every version and a small number of shapes remain: a promise that must be kept, a rule that must be broken for the story to start, a helper who asks for something apparently trivial, and a return home that is not the same home. Those are what these drawings are built around, which is why a page can be recognisable even if you have never heard the particular tale.