Array The Brothers Grimm - Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm - A New English Version

The prince looked down and saw that they were right. Blood was dripping from the slipper. He turned the horse around and went back.

The mother said to the second sister: ‘If it doesn’t fit, cut off your big toe. It won’t hurt much — just a twinge — and you’ll marry the prince.’

The second sister did as her mother had said, and the prince set her on his horse and began to ride away. But the doves called again from the hazel tree:

The prince took her back and said to the father, ‘I’m sure I followed the mystery princess to this house. Haven’t you got another daughter?’

‘Well, there’s only Cinderella,’ said her father, ‘but surely it can’t be her.’

‘It can’t possibly be her!’ said the stepmother. ‘We can’t let her out, your royal highness. She’s much too dirty to be seen.’

‘If you have another daughter, I insist on seeing her,’ said the prince. ‘Bring her out at once.’

So they had to fetch Cinderella from the kitchen. She wouldn’t come till she’d washed, and of course they had to rinse out the golden slipper, so the prince had to wait. But finally Cinderella came in and curtseyed, and his heart beat hard in his chest at the sight of her; and she sat down, and he fitted the slipper on her foot, and it slipped on and fitted her perfectly, just like that.

‘This is my bride!’ he said, and took her in his arms.

The stepmother and sisters turned ghastly pale, and nearly bit their own fingers off with rage and mortification.

The prince set Cinderella on his horse and rode away, and the doves in the hazel tree called:

Then they flew down and landed on Cinderella’s shoulders, one on each side, and there they stayed.

At the wedding the two stepsisters were keen to toady to the royal couple, hoping to share in Cinderella’s good luck. When the prince and his bride walked into the church, the older sister walked on their right and the younger sister on their left, and the doves flew down and pecked out one eye from each of them. After the ceremony, when they came out of the church, the older one was on the left and the younger on the right, and the doves flew down and pecked out their other eyes.

So for their wickedness and falsity, they were punished with blindness to the end of their days.

Tale type:ATU 510A, ‘Cinderella’

Source:an anonymous storyteller from the Elizabeth Hospital in Marburg, with additional material by Dorothea Viehmann

Similar stories:Giambattista Basile: ‘The Cat Cinderella’ ( The Great Fairy Tale Tradition , ed. Jack Zipes); Katharine M. Briggs: ‘Ashpitel’, ‘The Little Cinder-Girl’, ‘Mossycoat’, ‘Rashin Coatie’ ( Folk Tales of Britain ); Italo Calvino: ‘Gràttula-Bedàttulla’ ( Italian Folktales ); Charles Perrault: ‘Cinderella’ ( Perrault’s Complete Fairy Tales ); Neil Philip: The Cinderella Story (containing twenty-four different versions of the story, with an excellent commentary)

The story of Cinderella must be one of the most closely studied stories in the entire corpus of folk tale. Entire books have been written about it and its variants. It is the most popular pantomime of all. But more importantly, it always seems to work.

Much of its popularity must be due to Charles Perrault, whose inventiveness and charm delighted readers from the moment his Histoires ou contes du temps passé ( Stories or Fairy Tales from Past Times , more famously known by its subtitle, Tales of Mother Goose ) was published in 1697. The one thing that everyone knows about Perrault is that he mistook vair , fur, for verre , glass, but I don’t believe it. Perrault was quite inventive enough to have thought of a glass slipper, which is absurd, impossible, magical, and infinitely more memorable than fur. It was Perrault, too, who turned the helping principle in the story (which is always a surrogate mother, whether a hazel tree growing from the real mother’s grave, or a goat, or a cow, or a dove) into a godmother, whose function is immediately easy to understand.

One popular misapprehension is that the story is simply a rags-to-riches tale. There are rags and there are riches, but according to Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment , the most important theme is sibling rivalry, compounded by the girl’s arriving at sexual maturity, symbolized by the marriage. This is why the function embodied by the fairy godmother is so important: she represents the mother by doing what a good mother should do, and helping the girl appear as beautiful on the outside as she is on the inside.

For this version I borrowed the idea that her dresses are of different colours from the British ‘Mossycoat’, which to my mind is the best Cinderella of all.

In the first version the Grimms published, in 1812, there is no punishment for the stepsisters. The story ends with the doves calling out that this bride is the right one. The punishment of blinding was added in their version of 1819, and kept in all later versions. Blinding is all very well in a story, but it would be hard to take on the stage. This is not King Lear . No ugly sisters are blinded in pantomime, and neither are they in opera: Massenet’s Cendrillon (1899) and Rossini’s La Cenerentola (1817) both end with happiness all round. In Perrault, where sweetness reigns, the sisters are actually married off to lords of the court.

She has many names. The Grimms call her Aschenputtel, but she is firmly Cinderella in English. In our centrally heated homes today, when few children have ever seen a cinder or know what one is, Cinderella just sounds like a pretty name, but I thought it needed a little context.

Once there was a prince who took it into his head to travel about the world, taking no one with him but a faithful servant. One day they came to a great forest, and when evening came they could find no place to shelter. They didn’t know where they could spend the night.

But then the prince saw a little house, and walking towards the house there was a girl, and as they came closer they saw that she was young and beautiful.

He caught up with her and said, ‘Tell me, miss, can my servant and I find shelter for the night in that little house?’

‘Yes,’ she said sadly, ‘you can, but I don’t think it’s a good idea. I wouldn’t go in if I were you.’

‘Why ever not?’ asked the prince.

The girl sighed. ‘My stepmother lives there,’ she said, ‘and she practises the evil arts. What’s more, she doesn’t like strangers. But if you must go in, don’t eat or drink anything she offers you.’

The prince realized that this was the house of a witch. But it was dark and they couldn’t go any further, and besides, he was afraid of nothing, so he knocked and went in.

The old woman was sitting in an armchair by the fire, and when she looked at the prince, her eyes glowed like the coals.

‘Good evening, young sirs,’ she said in her friendliest voice. ‘Sit down and rest yourselves.’

She blew on the fire and stirred something in a little pot. Because of the girl’s warning, the prince and his servant didn’t eat or drink anything; they wrapped themselves up and slept soundly till morning.