Fur Shoes and Glass Slippers

FUR SHOES ANDGLASS SLIPPERS

BY EMMA SAVANT

We all know the story of Cinderella. She’s the one who gets a gown and glass slippers from her fairy godmother.

No, wait. The shoes are made of fur and she’s gifted them by a tree. Or maybe the gown’s from her dead mother who is also a tree?

She goes to a ball. She goes to three balls. Her stepsisters cut off parts of their feet… or maybe they just don’t get to marry a prince, which is totally on the same consequence level.

And hey, what about the talking mice?Turns out Cinderella isn’t actually the

whole story. It’s just one of many, many stories, all classified under the Aarne– Thompson–Uther (ATU) folktale type 510A.

Yes, fairy tales have their very own classification systems, and they are awesome. There are two major indices used by people who study fairy tales and folklore: the Aarne–Thompson Tale Type Index (first published in 1910 and cataloged by AT or AaTh numbers) and the Aarne–Thompson–Uther classification system (developed in 2004 and cataloged by ATU numbers).

Both classification systems group fairy tales and folk tales into a tree that con-

tains an astounding number of categories, sub-categories, and specific stories that recur over and over in the body of folklore.

For example, if you were to drill down from a primary category, you may find a sequence that narrows down from “Tales of Magic” to “Supernatural or Enchanted Wife (Husband) or Other Relative” to “Brother or Sister” to type 451: “The Nurse looking for her Brothers.” Examples of type 451 include, among others, the English tale “The Six Swans” and the Norwegian tale “The Twelve Wild Ducks.”

These fairy tales and folk tales have evolved over time. Most arose from an oral tradition, which means they were passed down from person to person long before they were ever written down. As you may know from playing a game of Telephone, stories change in the retelling--which is part of why there can be so many variations on a single story! Some fairy tales started off as true accounts of things that actually happened, some were simply invented to entertain, and still others stories were intentionally developed as morality tales that came with a lesson, like “Don’t wander into the woods alone” or “Obey your parents or bad things will happen to you.”

And by bad, they meant bad. After all, most fairy tales in the oral tradition were much, much darker than the Disney interpretations we’re familiar with today. These stories weren’t intended for children--they were intended for everybody, and could be just as frightening and explicit as any of our R-rated films today. Themes of incest, cannibalism, murder,

and abuse are rampant in the earliest fairy tales, and many of the tellers didn’t shy away from sexual situations or bodily functions. (Research the earliest versions of Little Red Riding Hood at your own risk.)

Perhaps most interestingly, the majority of our most well-known fairy tales went down many evolutionary paths, which explains why Cinderella might wear glass slippers in one story and fur shoes in another, or why Beauty (of Beauty and the Beast) might have a ton of siblings or none at all, depending on the tale. The ATU classifies the core stories regardless of their superficial details: Consequently, Cinderella, no matter her wardrobe choices or magical benefactors, is always a Persecuted Heroine (type 510A).

These fairy tales are easier to study and classify than they were a few hundred years ago, thanks to anthropologists and authors who began compiling existing tales and writing new ones in the 16th and 17th centuries. Collectively, these individuals accumulated an incredible number of folk tales. Brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm compiled over 200 stories, Andrew Lang collected enough fairy tales to fill 25 books, and Joseph Jacobs published multiple collections of fairy tales gathered from English, Celtic, and Indian sources--and these are just a sample.

Other authors contributed to this large body of work by writing original fairy tales, many intended especially for children. Hans Christian Andersen, the Danish author, wrote a remarkable 3,381

fairy tales, many of which feature strong Christian themes and morals. Other writers include Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, who coined the term contes de fées (“fairy tales”), and Charles Perrault, who based many of his works on existing tales and whose version of Cendrillon (or Cinderella) is among the most widely known today.

Together, these collections capture a valuable cross-section of the stories humans have been telling one another for as long as we’ve had the capacity to understand narrative. Collections assembled in different centuries and decades show the evolution of stories as they were passed from storyteller to storyteller over generations, while the ATU helps us see how stories have changed and stayed the same.

These days, fairy tales are still evolving, and we’re still basing our new stories on the old ones. The genre of fairy tale retellings is robust, with new books and movies

being released every year. These retellings are set in diverse environments, from the magical world of Ella Enchanted by Gail Carson Levine to the scifi universe of The Lunar Chronicles by Marissa Meyer. Some retellings are obvious nods to the stories that inspired them, while others are more removed, borrowing only a few elements or the core of the plot from the earlier stories. No matter the setting, though, most of these retellings include key fairy tale elements that fit into the ATU classification system.

If you’d like to learn more about the ATU, check out the Multilingual Folk Tale Database. There, you can find not only a list of the ATU classifications, but also examples of stories that fall within each type. To find other fairy tale retellings, check out this Goodreads list.

Emma Savant lives with her husband and cat in a small town in Oregon, where she spends way too much time watching Star Trek and eating nachos. She loves fairy tales and once took an archery class in the hopes of becoming more Narnian.

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