d take their place among the
folk and for that reason I have given a couple of specimens of them,
but of course my main attention has been directed to attempting to
reconstruct the original form of the true folk-tale from the
innumerable variants now current among the folk.

I. CINDER-MAID

_Source._--Miss Roalfe Cox's volume on Cinderella, published by the
Folk-Lore Society (London: David Nutt, 1893), contains 130 abstracts
and tabulations of the pure Cinderella "formula," found in Finland,
the Riviera, Scotland, Italy, Armenia, Iceland, Norway and Sweden,
France, Greece, Germany, Spain, Calcutta, Ireland, Servia, Poland,
Russia, Denmark, Albania, Cyprus, Galicia Lithuania, Catalonia,
Portugal, Sicily, Hungary, Martinique, Holland, Bohemia, Bulgaria,
and the Tyrol. Besides these there are 31 intermediate stories
approximating to the Cinderella type, from Russia, Asia Minor, Italy,
Lorraine, The Deccan, Poland, Hungary, Catalonia, Corsica, Finland,
Switzerland, and in Basque, Spain. The earliest form in which the pure
type occurs is in Basile's _Pentamerone_, 1634, and of the
indeterminate type in Bonaventure des Periers _Nouvelles Recreations_,
1557, though the latter seems more cognate to the Catskin formula.

In many of the variants there is an introductory series of incidents
in which the heroine, after the loss of her mother, is set tasks by
the envious step-mother and sisters, which she is aided to perform by
means of an animal helper, mainly sheep or cow, which, in some of the
versions, is clearly identified with her mother either in a
transformed or a natural state. In these versions the magic dresses,
for example, are taken out of the ear of the cow or sheep! These
incidents however seem to me to be incongruous with the rest of the
story, which involves a monogamous society with fairly fixed social
grades and with the wearing of shoes at least among the upper strata
of society. They belong rather to the type of story represented by the
Grimm's "One eye, Two eyes, Three eyes"; and I have therefore reserved
them for my retelling of this formula. In a similar way, in some of
the Celtic versions, a long series of incidents is inserted, clearly
taken from the Sea Maiden story (see _Celtic Fairy Tales_, xvii.).

The central incident of the Cinder-Maid formula is clearly the Shoe
Marriage Test, up to which everything leads and upon which the
mutilation incidents at the end depends. The mutilation again implies