FOOTNOTES
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The Cinderella story we know today was published in 1697 by the French author Charles Perrault in his book Tales of My Mother Goose. Perrault based the story on an oral fairy tale that, interestingly, seems to have originated in ninth-century China. Perrault made many changes to the crude peasant original to sanitize it for a bourgeois audience. For example, in some early versions Cinderella’s stepsisters cut off their heels and toes in order to fit into the glass slipper.
But Perrault didn’t invent the glass slipper, and it probably didn’t arise from vair/verre confusion either. As the French folklorist Paul Delarue pointed out in a 1951 essay, “one can also find [glass shoes in Cinderella stories] in other countries where there is no homonym which permits the confusion.” For example, glass shoes appear in an old Scottish version of the Cinderella tale as well as in several stories in Irish folk literature.
–John Cholod, via the Internet
