<P> The fairy tale may have originated in the medieval period of the Great Famine (1315--1321), which caused desperate people to abandon young children to fend for themselves, or even resort to cannibalism . </P> <P> Folklorists Iona and Peter Opie indicate in The Classic Fairy Tales (1974) that "Hansel and Gretel" belongs to a group of European tales especially popular in the Baltic regions, about children outwitting ogres into whose hands they have involuntarily fallen . The tale bears resemblances to the first half of Charles Perrault's "Hop - o' - My - Thumb" (1697) and Madame d'Aulnoy's "Finette Cendron" (1721). In both tales, the Opies note, abandoned children find their way home by following a trail . In "Clever Cinders", the Opies observe that the heroine incinerates a giant by shoving him into an oven in a manner similar to Gretel's dispatch of the witch and they point out that a ruse involving a twig in a Swedish tale resembles Hansel's trick of the dry bone . Linguist and folklorist Edward Vajda has proposed that these stories represent the remnant of a coming - of - age rite - of - passage tale extant in Proto - Indo - European society . A house made of confectionery is found in a 14th - century manuscript about the Land of Cockayne . </P> <P> The fact that the mother or stepmother dies when the children have killed the witch has suggested to many commentators that the mother or stepmother and the witch are metaphorically the same woman . A Russian folk tale exists in which the evil stepmother (also the wife of a poor woodcutter) asks her hated stepdaughter to go into the forest to borrow a light from her sister, who turns out to be Baba Yaga, who is also a cannibalistic witch . Besides highlighting the endangerment of children (as well as their own cleverness), the tales have in common a preoccupation with food and with hurting children: the mother or stepmother wants to avoid hunger, while the witch lures children to eat her house of candy so that she can then eat them . Another tale of this type is the French fairy tale The Lost Children . The Brothers Grimm also identified the French Finette Cendron and Hop o' My Thumb as parallel stories . </P> <P> Hansel and Gretel's trail of breadcrumbs inspired the name of the navigation element "breadcrumbs" that allows users to keep track of their locations within programs or documents . The opera Hänsel und Gretel by Engelbert Humperdinck is one of the most renowned operas, and is considered one of the most important German operas . </P>

What is the witch's name in hansel and gretel