It Aint What You Shoe It’s The Way That You Shoe It

A vast amount of what I did for the first month of the first lockdown was extensively and minutely deconstructing Cinderella variations. It started as a process to identify what exactly a Cinderella story is, what elements are present in all of the different versions. I say “all of the versions”, There are more than 700, some scholars claim over a thousand. I’m collaborating with another storyteller and together we are examining in detail a sample of 21 stories, carefully selected through rigorous, scientific criteria such as “We’ve got to have this one: there’s a talking horse in it!”.

Inspired by questions like “Do all Cinderella’s have a Fairy Godmother?” (Nope. Not by a long way), or “How many have wicked step mothers?” (significantly less than half), we have uncovered some shocking statistics. Our perception of the story has been altered to a point that will be hard to explain in the time available for a theatre show. One of the surprising revelations being that the apparently desirable royal male is far from the bland, two dimensional, characterless but handsome, Identikit prince that we initially thought.

I wrote In January about the problem with princes failing to recognise the heroine and going away with a step sister who has cut her toes off, but that is just the tip of the deeply disturbing princeberg. In the popular imagination, a glass slipper being taken around to all the women in the country until the ash covered kitchen wench puts her foot in it and is re-united with her paramour, sits at the centre of the Cinderella myth. Statistically though, only one out of the full seven hundred styles a slipper of glass, and a mere half of the tales in our sample feature footwear of any sort. So bear in mind that, Out of the 21 ‘princes’ we have looked at (some are kings, some are just rich blokes), the following litany of dodgy shoe related behaviours take place within only twelve tales and our experience so far is that even worse are likely to come to light if you look any further.

Four of the princes, having become enamoured of their respective sink skivies, are unable to find out who they are or where they come from. In two of these cases the posh plonker hasn’t even attempted to engage the object of his “affection” in conversation or considered asking her directly. The other two have asked but, despite getting no answer, have failed to get the hint. These four delightful examples of regal breeding take it in to their heads that they have a right to know and that the best way to find out is to obtain one of her shoes. This they set about doing by taking tar (or in one case, honey) and spreading it all over the exit of a public building. Nobody questions this and no charges are brought.

One prince obtains the hapless girl’s shoe by sending a servant to pursue her coach until, in her hurry to get away, she sheds a slipper. Another takes matters in to his own hands and, grabbing her foot as she tries to ride away from the church, hangs on until he hauls her multicoloured mule from it’s mount.

Four more royal males begin a search for our leading lady without ever having met her: they simply find her little, lost slipper and become obsessed with marrying the woman whose foot would be small enough to fit. The two, so called, lovers do not exchange so much as a word before the testing of the tiny treads brings about their, usually instantaneous, wedding. That’s a full 20% of cinderella stories being basically a shoe fetishists fantasy.

Most of the twelve slipper searchers simply announce that they are going to marry the woman who can get the slipper on. No further proposal is made. In fact out of the entire cohort of monarchical muppets, only two actually ask the female protagonist if she wants to marry him and only one gets a positive answer, but all of them end up married regardless.

This reveals a dizzying level of assumption and entitlement on the part of the sovereign slipper snatchers and a terrifying lack of choice or control for the women involved. If you have ever told one of the seven hundred or more Cinderella stories to a child, it might be worth having a think about what they are being trained to accept, or even aspire to, when their impressionable young ears hear it.

You have to kiss a lot of frogs…

Well, actually, no. You don’t. There really is no point at all in going round randomly kissing amphibians in the hope that they will become lovestruck royalty, and even less in killing them. All else aside, they have to be able to talk or the chances of them being a magical creature are slim, and even then just because our cat appeared to call me a “wingnut” the other day doesn’t make her magical. We want whole clear sentences from them, ideally ones offering assistance with a tricky situation or high speed transportation.

It’s not just frogs either, all sorts of animals can come along and start chatting away; the White Cat from the story of the same name is a sophisticated conversationalist with her own castle; the fox of The Golden Apple (well it is midsummer, they were bound to come up) from Norway is witty and erudite. One thing most of them will never do is tell you that they may be royalty, gorgeous or highly eligible and the answer to your prayers in some other way. Often it is a condition of the curse which gave them animal form that the actions they ask of you be unbiased by their previous political clout or social and financial status.

Don’t worry, statistically they are fairly unlikely to ask for a snog or even a peck on the cheek in a traditional folk tale. It is far more common for these loquacious animals to help you along with your quest and save your skin on numerous occasions, often when you are only at risk because you ignored their initial good advice. They will repeatedly prove a loyal bosom buddy to you, before politely and kindly requesting that you cut off their head. Not what one normally expects from a good friend.

So if you’ve been given a list of impossible tasks to do and the local wildlife has come over all verbose:

1) DON’T assume it’s all down to the ale or that you’re going mad and ignore them hoping they’ll go away

2) DO exactly what they say, and I mean exactly, follow those instructions carefully, you will only make more work for yourself in the long run if you don’t.

3) DON’T get smart and think you know better than they do or tweak the details because it was only a pond dweller who advised you. They’re animals that can talk so they probably do know what they’re talking about, have they not proved that on your quest?

4) DO for just a moment put aside any emotional attachment you might have to keeping them with you, if they have asked you to ritualistically decapitate them it is probably the only way to release them from their cursed state into their human form so they can make all your dreams come true (not just the weird ones involving talking animals)

5) DON’T however, get ahead of yourself and start slaughtering garrulous critters unless they specifically request you to do so (over-enthusiastic slaying has already rendered them endangered, we see very few of them around these days)

6) DO be aware that not all chatty beasts are marriageable material: some turn out to be your dead parents come back to look after you or they might just be honest to goodness, straight up, every day, perfectly normal talking animals. But that’s a story for another Folk Tales Corner.

…here’s to living happily ever after, until the next adventure.

There are nine and sixty ways…

I’ve been rebuilding my bookshelves and sorting the massive collection of storybooks back into categories.  It’s amazing how many of them feature the same stories, only slightly different.   Some vary only in the voice in which they are told; some may be a name change here or there; sometimes the same story is in rhyme; in others the motivation for action is entirely different although the main plot features settle into their familiar pattern once things get going. Sometimes you come across entire stories welded on to the end of one you know… or maybe that was it’s original form and parts have been left out in later tellings.  I remember my surprise on discovering that the famous dragon slaying episode in St. George’s tale is near the beginning of a much larger adventure. For me these discoveries are part of the exciting detective work that leads to the heart of the story!

Take Cinderella (no please take her, she’s been overshadowing her folktale sisters for far too long),  you will find variations of this tale all over the world.  They go by the various names of Tattercoats; Cap o’ Rushes; Mossycoat; Nipitfit and Clipitfit; with never a glass slipper or a pumpkin coach in sight.

Many of them are more empowered than Cinderella and don’t rely on a fairy godmother to do the work for them (though Tattercoats does get a hand from her only friend the crippled goatherd). The sisters rarely play more than a cameo role, neither ugly nor evil, they simply contribute to a misunderstanding between our heroine and (this may surprise you) her father, the king, leading to her banishment from court and a stint in lowly service.  However the main plot reveals itself as the same over and again with the poor-maid-turned-anonymous-beauty winning the heart of the Prince at three successive balls.

Now for some of us reading a variation we may find ourselves missing the familiar elements, but if we can accept the differences they often show the story in a new light revealing valuable, previously obscured aspects of the tale. Without the special effects of transformed mice or the demonised step-mother, the climax of the story shifts from Cinderella’s ‘escape’ into marriage, to Cap  O’ Rushes’ clever reconciliation with her father, making it less of a black and white Good-Versus-Evil tale and more a triumph of wit and perseverance over foolishness and pride.

One of the skills of a storyteller is to search out these variants of a story, and in exploring their individualities, get to know the essence of each tale.  These different tales may have evolved through chinese whispers one to another, or sprung up simultaneously and spontaneously from the pool of human archetypes; either way the exploring storyteller may choose to weave them into a fresh, informed, new telling of the tale, their very own contribution to the evolutionary Folk process.

As Kipling says –

“There are nine and sixty ways
of constructing tribal lays
and Every Single One of Them
IS RIGHT!”

…. here’s to living happily ever after, until the next adventure.

The Travelling Talesman
http://www.thetravellingtalesman.co.uk