In the brothers Grimm telling, the heroine is called Aschenputtel, and her wishes come true not from the wave of a fairy godmother’s wand but from a hazel tree growing on her mother’s grave, which she waters with her flowing tears. The story of Cinderella that appears in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s collection of German folktales, first published in 1812, might shock those familiar with today’s version of a scullery maid turned princess. In Egypt, her slippers are red leather, while in the West Indies, breadfruit, not a pumpkin, is the transformative object. Details in the telling change depending on the storyteller’s cultural origins. The story of Cinderella, for example, appeared in ancient China and in ancient Egypt. A synthesis of the spoken and the scripted, a fusion of different accounts of the same story. Folktales are as old as human civilisation itself.
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