User:Tepples/The Ungrateful Dwarf

"The Ungrateful Dwarf" is a short story by Caroline Stahl. It reappears as "Snow and Rose", chapter 161 in Grimms' Fairy Tales, and in Andrew Lang's The Blue Fairy Book (no relation).

A single mom and two daughters let a talking black bear crash at their place over the winter. Later, the girls rescue a little man several times at the cost of damaging his beard or clothes; he is ungrateful each time. Bear finds man, who had stolen his jewels and trapped him in a fursuit, and kills him, which opens the fursuit and reveals a human prince. Daughters marry into prince's family, H.E.A.

Plot holes
Snow is described as more of a quiet, stay-at-home type, with Rose being an outdoor type. Yet Snow and Rose are always seen together, even in the first act that bloviates about how functional the family is and how Mary Sue-ish the girls are.

When the bear stays with the family in most tellings, the bear is in the house at night and leaves during the day. Yet real black bears hibernate during winter. Is this a plot hole, or is it foreshadowing that the bear isn't quite what he appears, even beyond the ability to speak that appears to be common among fairy tale animals?

The bear killing the dwarf on the evening after the final rescue appears to be somewhat deus ex machina.

Jewish parallels
The dwarf in the story is ungrateful when rescued because rescues involve cutting his beard. Orthodox Jewish men feel the same way (Leviticus 19:27). And let's not go too deeply into stereotypes that Jews are thieves and robbers.

Several aspects of British fantasy author J. R. R. Tolkien's dwarves likewise parallel the Jewish diaspora: beards, no longer having a homeland, and even a Semitoid language called Khuzdul. Khuzdul parallels Hebrew by being reserved for sacred purposes, having triconsonantal roots and a "construct state", and having no accepted relationship to other language families of Middle-earth, just as the Afro-Asiatic family to which Hebrew belongs is unrelated to Indo-European (apart from the Nostratic hypothesis and false cognate crackpots).

Parallels between dwarves and Jews are probably not the only thing Tolkien nicked from the Grimms. But Laron syndrome, a real-life form of dwarfism, also originated in Sephardi Jews. So if Wookiees live on Endor, you must acquit.