MarytaleThe version almost everyone knows comes from a film. In it a fairy godmother appears, waves a wand, turns a pumpkin into a coach and mice into horses, and everything must be back by midnight. Almost none of that is in the story the Brothers Grimm wrote down in 1812.
This is not a complaint about the film. It is only that the older version is a different and stranger story, and once you have read it you cannot un-read it.
What helps her is a tree, not a fairy
In the Grimm text Cinderella's mother dies at the beginning and tells her: stay good, and I will be near you. Cinderella plants a branch on her grave and waters it with her tears, and it grows into a hazel tree. A white bird comes to sit in that tree, and whatever Cinderella asks the bird for, the bird throws down to her.
So the dress does not come from a wand. It comes from her mother's grave, by way of a tree she planted herself and looked after for years. That changes what the story is about: it is not luck arriving, it is something she has kept alive paying her back.
There is no midnight either. She simply leaves before she can be followed, three nights running, and on the third night the prince has the palace steps painted with pitch.
The stepsisters cut their feet
This is the part people remember being shocked by. When the prince brings the slipper round, the eldest stepsister's foot will not go in, so her mother hands her a knife and tells her to cut off her big toe — a queen does not need to walk. She does it, and rides away with the prince, until two pigeons in the hazel tree call out that there is blood in the shoe.
The second sister cuts a piece off her heel and gets exactly as far.
It is not gore for the sake of it. The whole story turns on things that cannot be faked, and a foot is one of them: you can borrow a dress and you cannot borrow a foot.
Perrault, Grimm, and which one you grew up with
There are two famous written versions. Charles Perrault published his in France in 1697, and that is the one with the fairy godmother, the pumpkin and the midnight rule — the film follows Perrault. The Brothers Grimm published theirs in Germany in 1812, from tellers who had it by word of mouth, and that is the one with the tree and the pigeons.
Neither is the original, because there is no original: versions of this story have been found from Egypt, from China in the ninth century, and all over Europe. Perrault and Grimm are simply the two that got written down and stayed.
Our Cinderella follows the Grimm plot, and the tree is in it. If your child asks where the fairy godmother is, the honest answer is that she was added later, in France, and that the older version gives Cinderella more of the credit.
What the two versions actually differ on
**The helper.** Perrault: a fairy godmother who appears from nowhere. Grimm: a hazel tree grown from a branch Cinderella planted on her mother's grave, and a white bird in it.
**The deadline.** Perrault: everything ends at midnight. Grimm: no clock at all — she leaves early so as not to be followed, three nights in a row.
**The shoe.** Perrault: glass, and it fits only her. Grimm: gold, and the stepsisters get blood in it.
**The ending for the stepsisters.** Perrault: Cinderella forgives them and marries them off to lords. Grimm: pigeons blind them at the wedding.
**The transport.** The pumpkin coach and the mice are Perrault's, and they are the reason most people picture the story as French.
Is Cinderella a French or a German story?
Neither, and the question is older than both. A version was written down in China in the ninth century — a girl called Ye Xian, helped by the bones of a fish she had kept, who loses a gold shoe. Greek and Egyptian relatives are older still, and folklorists have catalogued hundreds of variants across Europe and Asia.
What Perrault and the Grimms did was print two of them, a century apart, in languages that were widely read. That is the whole reason those two are the ones everybody knows.
Where the versions agree is more interesting than where they differ: there is always something kept alive at cost — a tree, a fish, a promise to a dead mother — and it always pays her back. The fairy godmother is the one version where the help simply arrives.
Does the harder version frighten children?
Less than adults expect. The cutting of the feet reads as fair to a child in a way it does not to a parent: the sisters lie, and the lie is found out by the thing that cannot lie. Children are strict about that sort of justice.
What does need care is the mother. The story begins with a death, and it is in the first two sentences. That is worth being ready for, and worth not hurrying past — the whole plot grows out of it, literally.