Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things (33 page)

The Grimm brothers, one hundred twenty years after Perrault, provided
yet another version—the only one that spares Granny. The wolf, logy after dining on Granny and Red, falls asleep. His thunderous snores attract the attention of a hunter, who enters the house, guesses what has transpired, and rips open the wolf’s stomach with a pair of scissors. Out jumps Red, exclaiming, “How dark it was inside the wolf!” Then an exhausted, dissheveled, and silent grandmother steps out. And the wolf is chased away.

Folklorists believe that before Perrault immortalized “Little Red Riding Hood” by committing it to paper in his skillful style, the story existed as oral tradition, perhaps as early as the Middle Ages.

“Cinderella”: 9th Century, China

The Cinderella story is believed to be the best-known fairy tale in the world. It is a tale that may have existed for at least a thousand years in various written and oral forms—most of which involved the brutal mutilation of women’s feet in vain attempts to claim the mystery slipper.

The tale as recounted to children today—in which a poor cinder girl is able to attend a grand ball through the benevolence of a fairy godmother—is due entirely to Charles Perrault. Were it not for his skilled retelling, the Western world might instead know only the trials of “Rashin Coatie,” the lovely, impoverished daughter in a popular Scottish version.

According to that tale, the girl’s three ugly stepsisters force her to wear garments of rushes (hence her name). Instead of a fairy godmother to grant wishes, Rashin Coatie has a magic calf, which her wicked stepmother vindictively slaughters and cooks. The grief-stricken Rashin Coatie, desiring to attend a ball, wishes for a new dress upon the dead calf’s bones. Attired in the “grandest” gown, she wins the heart of a prince, and hurrying home, loses a beautiful satin slipper.

Since the prince will marry whoever fits into the slipper, the stepmother cuts off the toes of her eldest daughter; the foot is still too large, so she hacks off the heel. The prince accepts the ugly (secretly mutilated) daughter, only to be told later by a bird that the foot inside the shoe is not intact—and that Rashin Coatie is the beauty he is after. The prince marries her, and “they lived happily all their days.”

In many old European versions of the story, the ugliest daughter’s foot is mangled to fit into a slipper of satin, cloth, leather, or fur. And a bird of some sort always alerts the prince to the deception. In the French tale that Perrault heard as a child, the shoe is believed to have been of variegated fur (
vair
in French) rather than of glass (
verre
). It was Perrault’s genius to perceive the merits of a glass slipper—one that could not be stretched and could be seen through. His awareness of the salient aspect of glass is apparent in his choice of title: “Cinderella: or, The Little Glass Slipper.”

In Europe, the earliest Cinderella-type tale is attributed to Giambattista Basile. It appeared in his
Pentamerone
, under the title “The Hearth Cat.” A widely traveled poet, soldier, courtier, and administrator from Naples,
Basile composed fifty stories, all supposedly related to him by Neapolitan women. His Cinderella, named Zezolla, is a victim of child abuse.

The Basile story opens with the unhappy Zezolla plotting to murder her wicked stepmother; she eventually breaks the woman’s neck. Unfortunately, her father marries an even more vindictive woman, with six vicious daughters who consign Zezolla to toil all day at the hearth.

Desiring to attend a gala
festa
, she wishes upon a magic date tree and instantly finds herself in regal attire, astride a white horse, with twelve pages in attendance. The king is bewitched by her loveliness. But at midnight, he is left holding an empty slipper—which fits no one in the land except, of course, Zezolla.

Although this earlier Italian version is strikingly similar to Charles Perrault’s, historians believe that Perrault was unfamiliar with Giambattista Basile’s published fairy tales, and was acquainted only with the oral French version of the story.

Who, though, told the
first
Cinderella story?

The earliest-dated version of such a story appears in a Chinese book written between
A.D
. 850 and 860. In the Oriental tale, Yeh-hsien is mistreated by an ill-tempered stepmother, who dresses her in tattered clothes and forces her to draw water from dangerously deep wells.

The Chinese Cinderella keeps a ten-foot-long magic fish in a pool by her home. Disguised in her daughter’s tattered rags, the stepmother tricks, catches, and kills the fish. Cinderella, desiring clothes to attend a festival, wishes upon the fish’s bones and is suddenly outfitted in magnificent feathers and gold.

There is no prince or king at the Chinese festival. But on hurriedly leaving the affair, Cinderella does lose a golden slipper, which was “light as down and made no noise even when treading on stone.” Eventually, the shoe falls into the hands of the wealthiest merchant in the province. A considerable search leads him to Cinderella, who fits into the slipper and becomes as beautiful “as a heavenly being.” They marry while an avalanche of heavy stones buries the wicked stepmother and her ugly daughter.

This ninth-century Chinese story was recorded by Taun Ch’eng-shih, one of history’s earliest folktale collectors. He wrote that he had first learned the story from a servant who had been with his family for years. No more is known about the story’s origin; it bears many obvious similarities with later Western versions. Today seven hundred different Cinderella tales have been collected.

“Puss in Boots”: 1553, Italy

“Le Chat Botte
,” as told by Charles Perrault in 1697, is the most renowned tale in all folklore of an animal as man’s helper. But Puss, in earlier and later versions of the story, is a role model for the true con artist. To acquire riches for his destitute master, the quick-witted cat, decked out in a splendid pair of boots, lies, cheats, bullies, and steals. As the story ends, every one of his conniving stratagems has succeeded brilliantly, and the reader leaves Puss, dashingly attired, mingling in high court circles. Crime pays, suggests the story.

The earliest Cinderella-like tale tells of the mistreated Yeh-hsien who goes from rags to riches by way of a magic fish, a lost slipper, and marriage to a wealthy merchant
.

Once again, the story first appeared in Basile’s
Pentamerone
. A Neapolitan beggar dies, leaving his son a cat. The son complains bitterly about the meager inheritance, until the cat promises, “I can make you rich, if I put my mind to it.”

As in Perrault’s tale, the Italian cat,
Il Gatto
, lies and schemes his way to wealth. He even cons the king into offering the princess in marriage to his master; and he coaxes until the king provides a dowry large enough so the master may purchase a sprawling estate. But while Perrault’s tale ends there, Basile’s does not.

The master had sworn to the cat that as recompense, upon the animal’s death, its body would be preserved in a magnificent gold coffin. As a test,
Il Gatto
plays dead. He then suffers the humiliation of hearing his master joke about the feline’s ludicrous attire and immoral behavior, and he uncovers the man’s true plan: to hurl the corpse by the paws out the window.
Il Gatto
, livid, leaps up and storms out of the house, never to be seen again.
The animal fares better in Perrault’s closing line: “The Cat became a great Lord, and never ran more after mice, but for his diversion.”

The resemblance between the Italian tale and Perrault’s is striking on many counts; except that
Il Gatto
was bootless and the master’s estate was purchased with dowry money. Nonetheless, folklorists feel confident that Perrault was unfamiliar with Basile’s book.

There was, however, an even earlier Italian version of the story, which may or may not have influenced both Perrault and Basile.

In Venice in 1553, Gianfrancesco Straparola, a storyteller from Caravaggio, near Milan, published a tale of a remarkable cat in
The Delightful Nights
. He claimed that the story, as well as all others in the two-volume work, was written down “from the lips of ten young girls.” It is quite similar to Perrault’s version, differing in only minor details. And Straparola’s book, unlike Basile’s, was published in France during Perrault’s lifetime.

Over the centuries, in various countries, the tale has appeared in children’s books somewhat softened, to make the roguish cat more of a Robin Hood–like prankster, stealing from the rich to give to the poor.

“Hansel and Gretel”: 1812, Germany

This story, in which two children outwit a witch who is about to destroy them, comes down to us from the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, who began recording folktales told to them by villagers and farmers near the town of Kassel, Germany, about 1807.

The brothers collected 156 stories in all, many of them similar to tales preserved by Charles Perrault, such as “Cinderella” and “Puss in Boots.” “Hansel and Gretel” was told to the brothers by a young girl, Doretchen Wild, who years later became Wilhelm Grimm’s wife.

The fairy story gained wider popularity after German composer Engelbert Humperdinck made it the basis of a children’s opera, first produced in Munich in 1893. However, the opera—as well as subsequent versions of the story—omits the most traumatizing aspect of the traditional tale: the parents’ deliberate abandonment of their children to the wild beasts of the forest.

“Hansel and Gretel” was not only known through German oral tradition. A version circulating in France as early as the late seventeenth century had a house made not of gingerbread but of gold and jewels, in which a young girl is held captive by a giant whom she eventually shoves into his own fire. But it was the brothers Grimm who immortalized the tale for future generations.

In Germany, the story lost popularity following the atrocities of Hitler. Shortly after the war, when a major exhibition of children’s books was presented in Munich, many people objected to the story’s celebration of incinerating an opponent in an oven.

“Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs”: 1812, Germany

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s stay in the Germany town of Kassel, in order to collect oral-tradition fairy tales, resulted in more than one marriage. Whereas Wilhelm married the girl who told him “Hansel and Gretel,” his sister, Lotte, married into the Hassenpflug family, who had told the Grimms “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

The brothers Grimm were the first to artfully combine the elements of blossoming youth, fading beauty, and female rivalry into an enduring fairy tale. But theirs was not the first published version of such a story. The
Pentamerone
contains a tale of a beautiful seven-year-old girl named Lisa who falls unconscious when a comb sticks in her hair. Placed in a glass coffin (as is Snow White), Lisa continues to mature (as does Snow White, who is also seven years old when she is abandoned), growing more and more lovely. A female relative, envious of Lisa’s beauty, vows to destroy her (as the jealous queen swears to accomplish Snow White’s death). The woman opens the coffin, and while dragging Lisa out by the hair, dislodges the comb, restoring the beauty to life.

Basile’s story appears to be the earliest recorded Snow White—like fairy tale. It is uncertain whether the Grimms, writing their version of “Snowdrop” (as they named the girl) two hundred years later, were familiar with the Italian legend.

It was the Grimm version that Walt Disney brought to the screen in 1938 in the first feature-length cartoon.

Many early translators of the Grimm story omitted a gory fact: The queen not only orders Snow White killed but also, as proof of the death, demands that her heart be brought to the palace. Disney reinstated this original detail, but he chose to leave out a more gruesome one. In the German story, the queen, believing the heart returned by the huntsman is Snow White’s (it’s from a boar), salts and actually eats the organ. And the original fairy tale ends with the defeated queen being forced to don slippers made of iron, which are heated red hot in a fire. In an agonized frenzy, she dances herself to death.

“The Princess on the Pea”: 1835, Copenhagen

Charles Perrault and the brothers Grimm wrote what are known as “classic” fairy tales. By comparison, the nineteenth-century author Hans Christian Andersen recounted what folklorists call “art” fairy tales. They were cultivated in the period of German Romanticism, and though rooted in folk legend, they are more personal in style, containing elements of autobiography and social satire.

Andersen, born in 1805 on the Danish island of Funen, was the son of a sickly shoemaker and an illiterate washerwoman. His own life was something
of a fairy tale, for he rose from street urchin to darling of European society. He published
Tales Told for Children
in Copenhagen in 1835, but belittled his fairy tales as “those trifles,” being prouder of his concurrently published first novel,
Improvisatoren
, which quickly settled into oblivion.