I always thought it was a combination of both looks and personality. Maybe I was wrong.
While it’s been a while since I’ve seen the original anything, I thought it said the queen was beautiful (and so “fair”) visually, but she had a cold heart as she got older and more vain (and so was no longer “fair” in personality).
The original German wording is “Spieglein, Spieglein an der Wand: wer ist die schönste Frau in dem ganzen Land?”. Literally translated that would be “Mirror, mirror on the wall: who is the most beautiful woman in all the land.” I would let “hottest” slide as a more contemporary translation.
Being able to rhyme wall(wand) with land sounds nice. “Beautifulist of them all” to perseve the rhyme doesn’t sound right so hottest is about the closest you’re gonna get. That or prettiest, but I prefer hottest.
And she says"who’s the fairest of them all" not the hottest.
*“Who is the fairest one of all”
🤓☝️
There’s an NPR episode of Code Switch on the subject:
https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/05/16/313154674/mirror-mirror-does-fairest-mean-most-beautiful-or-most-white
I always thought it was a combination of both looks and personality. Maybe I was wrong.
While it’s been a while since I’ve seen the original anything, I thought it said the queen was beautiful (and so “fair”) visually, but she had a cold heart as she got older and more vain (and so was no longer “fair” in personality).
The original German wording is “Spieglein, Spieglein an der Wand: wer ist die schönste Frau in dem ganzen Land?”. Literally translated that would be “Mirror, mirror on the wall: who is the most beautiful woman in all the land.” I would let “hottest” slide as a more contemporary translation.
“yo shiny shit, who’s the baddest hoe around? aw yeah”
Being able to rhyme wall(wand) with land sounds nice. “Beautifulist of them all” to perseve the rhyme doesn’t sound right so hottest is about the closest you’re gonna get. That or prettiest, but I prefer hottest.