Page:Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress.djvu/69

 Rh Catskin and the Norse tale of Katie Woodencloak. It has affinities for certain Italian variants, but the only point of contact with Cendrillon is the shoe of glass. In the second the deus ex machinâ is no fairy godmother, but a pet lamb who is killed by the stepmother, and who appears after death to dress, and bestow fairy gifts upon, the heroine. The prince falls in love with the heroine not at a ball but at church, and one of her stepsisters mutilates her own foot that she may get the slipper on; but she is betrayed, and its true owner discovered, by the help of a raven. In short, except the stepmother—a very common character in European fairy tales—and the glass slipper, this version differs as widely from Perrault's as two variants of the same story can differ. The Irish tale diverges more remarkably still. The shoe—in this instance of blue glass—is worn not by a lady but by a hero, who, like Perseus, kills a dragon and rescues a king's daughter. He then rides off in the ill-mannered way he heroes of fairy tales sometimes affect, and is afterwards identified by means of the shoe, which the princess had caught from his foot in the vain effort to detain him. Thus neither structure nor incident of any of these stories confirms the suspicion of French influence raised by the glass slipper common to them all. On the other hand, glass would seem to peasants in out-of-the-way places a material almost as precious as, and probably stranger and therefore more magical, more fairy-like than, gold, while it fully satisfied the requirements of splendour and hardness.

The glass slipper is a feature of the tale of Cinderella quite as striking as the powerful words "Open, Sesame!" are of the tale of Ali Baba. And a little enquiry has thus made it apparent that even a striking feature occurring in two or more versions of the same story cannot be made evidence of the derivation of one -ersion from the other, or any of the others—or even of both, or all, from a common source including the special feature—unless some other portions of the story coincide, and unless the special feature cannot be explained as a natural outgrowth of the story. But it may be comparatively easy to dispose of a single feature, or a single incident; but not so easy to waive aside a series of incidents following in the same or a slightly varied order in two versions of the same story. It is difficult to deal with hypothetical cases. Every