fairy tale project

    In the Grimm version of “Hansel and Gretel”, these two children named Hansel and Gretel get disowned by their mother and father because there is not enough food to go around.  Alone in the wilderness, the kids come across a house made of candy, where they are captured by a witch.  The witch wanted to eat the boy, so she enslaved the girl to help her fatten him.  Right before they were going to cook Hansel, Gretel tricked the witch into climbing into the cauldron, where she shut it and cooked her to death.

    In the alternate version of “Hansel and Gretel” that I found, the stories have the same beginning, but end differently.  The witch had successfully eaten Hansel and was bragging as to how he tasted so good.  The witch shaved Gretel’s head and enslaved her for many years to come.  After observing the witch’s powers for years, Gretel thought that she had what it took to use some magic of her own, in order to escape and go back to her father.  One night, when the witch was asleep, Gretel strangled the cat, then after taking a potion, transformed herself into one.  She dipped her paws in a poison, then went up to the sleeping witch and killed her by clawing her neck.  

    There are a few similarities between the endings of these stories.  It seems that the father is the more favored parent because in the Grimm’s fairy tale, the mother was trying to get rid of the children while the father wanted them to stay.  In the end, when they returned home, the kids were glad to see him and didn’t care about the fact that the mother was dead.  In the alternate version, Gretel said how she wanted to go back home to see her father.  However, it said nothing about her mother.  The two stories also both had a witch that wanted to fatten, then eat, Hansel.  Also in both stories, Gretel survives and even though it is done in different ways, she is successful in killing the witch, while Hansel did nothing.

The story of Hansel and Gretel is a long loved classic and has a happy ending, but most people don’t know about what happened after the “happily ever after”, and little do people know that the witch had friends.  

One sparkling young afternoon, about a few months after the incident with the witch, the two children were having lunch with their loving father.  Things have been very peaceful the last few months, now that the mother is dead.  There is more food to go around and since Gretel had the experience with killing the witch, she is quite the hunter.  Life was better than it had ever been for the small family.  What could go wrong?

Some of the old witch’s friends were going over to her candy house to visit.  These friends were also witches.  They had met at a witch school back in the day and remained very close friends.  They travelled up to the house and knocked on the door.  Nobody answered, so they broke down the door and looked everywhere for the witch.  They opened up the cauldron and found her carcass.  The witches screamed and wondered who could have done such a thing.  Being stealthy with their senses, the witches went outside and noticed a path that they could follow from two young children.  They followed this path and ended up to Hansel and Gretel’s house.  The witches went and knocked on the door and Gretel answered.

“Hello young girl, we were just wondering...”  The witch paused mid sentence and recognized Gretel’s smell.  The same smell that was near the cauldron with her dead friend.  The smell that led them to this very house.  The witch quickly reached for Gretel, but she pushed away and slammed the door in the witch’s face.

“After her!” the witch yelled to her friends.  They all got on their brooms and backed up so that they could get enough speed to smash through the walls of the house.  Little did they know that that was what Gretel wanted to happen.  She had many slingshots set up that were all connected to the same string.  The end of that linked string laid within Gretel’s hand.  All of the slingshots were pointed directly at the witches as they broke through the wall.  Gretel pulled the string and the slingshots released some of the little pebbles from their front walkway.  All of the pebbles hit each of the witches, so they lost their concentration and flew off of the brooms.  One of the witches flew into the fireplace and was burned to death.  The other three witches fell on the floor.  

One of the witches fell by the table and Hansel sprang from behind it and slit her throat with a kitchen knife.  Another witch fell into a wall, with her head poking through it into the room next door.  The children’s father was in the other room with a hatchet and cut the witch’s head off.  Now that her head was separate from her body, there was nothing in the wall, so the rest of her body was able to just fall to the floor.  As for the last witch, she noticed that she was alone and was aware of the power that these three humans possessed.  She retreated and the humans cheered.  

“Do not expect this to be over.  There are tons of witches in this world and they are all allies with each other.  They will come back.  We cannot run because they are able to follow our scent.  We have more of an advantage here.” Gretel said.

“I agree.  If there is anything I have learned about that race is that they have no feelings for humans at all.  With their anger, they will not hesitate to kill us.” Hansel explained.

“Well then we must be ready!” the father added.

Meanwhile, the one surviving witch returned back to her city that was heavily populated with one race: witches.  She called for a city meeting and explained her memory.

“I barely escaped with my life!  These are not ordinary humans!  They are superhumans!  And there was this little girl.. who.. who seemed like she knew exactly how a witch thinks.  As if she had spent a long time with a witch, learning her every move.  These humans could be a threat to our whole race!  But also, we must give revenge, for the death of our four friends!  They had just killed three of them only an hour ago!”  The rest of the city’s witches cheered and grabbed their brooms and wands.  War was about to start.

Gretel and her family were covering the holes that the witches made when they smashed through in their house, with sturdy wooden boards.

“I imagine that they will attack as soon as possible and I imagine that they will come in great numbers.  We gave her quite the scare.”  Gretel left the house and ran to that nearby river where they had met that nice little duck who helped them float across when they were on their way home from the witch’s candy house.  Gretel found the creature and communicated with her.  She told her to get all of the other forest critters and have them go to her house.  She said that war was about to begin and that the witches were going to leave the whole world in ashes.  That was probably an overstatement, but she needed as many soldiers that could come because her and her family’s life was in danger.  The duck came back to Gretel and explained how she didn’t know any other forest creatures other than her little ducklings.  However, she did want to help in some way, so she told Gretel how there was this interesting powder that she discover inside a hollow tree.  She said how this powder exploded when fire came in contact with it.  Gretel thanked the duck and then went back home to get help from her family so that they could get as much of this powder as possible.  

The night was young and Hansel, Gretel, and their father were sitting by the window, looking up in the sky for the army of witches.

“Here they come!” Hansel yelled.  There were about a hundred witches that were flying rapidly on their brooms toward the house.  

“Alright, let’s go!” Gretel yelled to her family.  The three opened up the hidden hatch that was under the carpet and climbed inside.  Gretel poked her hand out and put the carpet over the hatch as she shut it.  The hatch led to the basement, which was now filled with nothing but the power.  Luckily, the children’s father had built monkey bars on the ceiling so that they could somewhat avoid the powder, for it was piled up high.  The three climbed into the escape tunnel that they built on one of the walls and followed it until they got to the end.  This tunnel went about a quarter mile away from the house and had an opening at the end of it so that the family could get out of the tunnel and look at their house from across the field.  They observed, as they saw all of the witches smash through the roof and search through their house.  

“Alright, do it now!” Gretel told Hansel.  Hansel took two stones and swiped them past each other so that the friction created a spark.  The spark went down and hit the string that they had laid throughout the whole tunnel, all the way to the basement filled with the powder.  The string lit on fire, and the fire slowly traveled down the length of the spring.  

The witches checked every room in the house, behind every door, every crevice.  Then right before the witches were about to leave, one of them decided to check under the carpet.  

“Look ladies!  A hatch.  I think we’ve found our dinner!”  The witches laughed, knowing that their manhunt was over.  She opened up the hatch and hopped in.  “What is all of this powder?!” she yelled.  “It is everywhere and it goes past my neck!  Hurry up, pull me out!”  Two witches grabbed on to the powder-covered witch and started to pull her up.  “What’s that?” the witch said as she was slowly being elevated.  

“What?” the two witches said at the same time.  They dropped the witch they were trying to pull up and poked their heads into the hatch and tried to look at what she was talking about.

“That moving light!” the witch screamed.  The light was the fire that was traveling down the string.  The basement was now illuminated as the fiery string was travelling out of the tunnel and down towards the powder.”

“Do you think they are in that tunnel?”  BOOM!  

The family’s faces lit up as the witch-filled house exploded.  Large bright flames sprinted up into the air.  Colors of orange and red filled the sky.  The family all hugged each other and laughed, knowing that all one-hundred of the black hearted witches were joining their mother in hell.  All of a sudden, they felt a great force within the ground coming towards them, so they jumped away from the opening of the tunnel and flames came bursting out!  

The safe trio walked over to their burning house to see if they could see any remains of the witches.  It seemed as though they were all dead and from the looks of the sky as they were flying in, it seemed like it was every witch who lived in the city.  

“You know what guys?” Gretel said.  “I think this is a sign of things to come.  Witches do nothing but hurt all that is good in this world and it would be a better place if there were none of them in all the lands.  Nobody in history has ever killed one-hundred witches at once, like we just did!”

“What are you saying Gretel?” the father said nervously.

“We survived that situation with the witch, a few months ago, for a reason.  A reason  that god is trying to tell us.  We must bring peace to this world and by doing that, we must destroy all witches that are in existence.”

“You will have to do that without me then.” the father said.

“Hansel, what do you say?” Gretel asked excitedly.

“I say, let’s burn some more witches!”

           “Great!  From now on, we shall be known as ‘Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters’.”