Which French author wrote the fairy tales ‘Little Red Riding Hood’ ‘Sleeping Beauty’ and ‘Puss in Boots’?
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Fairy_tale.txt Little_Red_Riding_Hood.txt Sleeping_Beauty.txt Puss_in_Boots.txt
Fairy tale Little Red Riding Hood Sleeping Beauty Puss in Boots
A fairy tale (pronounced /ˈfeəriˌteɪl/) is a type of short story that typically features folkloric fantasy characters, such as dwarves, elves, fairies, giants, gnomes, goblins, mermaids, trolls, or witches, and usually magic or enchantments. Fairy tales may be distinguished from other folk narratives such as legends (which generally involve belief in the veracity of the events described)  and explicitly moral tales, including beast fables. The term is mainly used for stories with origins in European tradition and, at least in recent centuries, mostly relates to children's literature.

In less technical contexts, the term is also used to describe something blessed with unusual happiness, as in "fairy tale ending" (a happy ending)  or "fairy tale romance" (though not all fairy tales end happily). Colloquially, a "fairy tale" or "fairy story" can also mean any far-fetched story or tall tale; it is used especially of any story that not only is not true, but could not possibly be true. Legends are perceived as real; fairy tales may merge into legends, where the narrative is perceived both by teller and hearers as being grounded in historical truth. However, unlike legends and epics, they usually do not contain more than superficial references to religion and actual places, people, and events; they take place once upon a time rather than in actual times. 

Fairy tales are found in oral and in literary form; the name "fairy tale" was first ascribed to them by Madame d'Aulnoy in the late 17th century. Many of today's fairy tales have evolved from centuries-old stories that have appeared, with variations, in multiple cultures around the world.  The history of the fairy tale is particularly difficult to trace because only the literary forms can survive. Still, according to researchers at universities in Durham and Lisbon, such stories may date back thousands of years, some to the Bronze Age more than 6,000 years ago.   Fairy tales, and works derived from fairy tales, are still written today.

Folklorists have classified fairy tales in various ways. The Aarne-Thompson classification system and the morphological analysis of Vladimir Propp are among the most notable. Other folklorists have interpreted the tales' significance, but no school has been definitively established for the meaning of the tales.

Terminology

Some folklorists prefer to use the German term Märchen or "wonder tale" to refer to the genre over fairy tale, a practice given weight by the definition of Thompson in his 1977 [1946] edition of The Folktale: "a tale of some length involving a succession of motifs or episodes. It moves in an unreal world without definite locality or definite creatures and is filled with the marvelous. In this never-never land, humble heroes kill adversaries, succeed to kingdoms and marry princesses."  The characters and motifs of fairy tales are simple and archetypal: princesses and goose-girls; youngest sons and gallant princes; ogres, giants, dragons, and trolls; wicked stepmothers and false heroes; fairy godmothers and other magical helpers, often talking horses, or foxes, or birds; glass mountains; and prohibitions and breaking of prohibitions. 

A fairy tale with a tragic rather than a happy end is called an anti-fairy tale.

Definition

Although the fairy tale is a distinct genre within the larger category of folktale, the definition that marks a work as a fairy tale is a source of considerable dispute.  One universally agreed-upon matter is that fairy tales do not require fairies. (The term itself comes from the translation of Madame D'Aulnoy's conte de fées, first used in her collection in 1697.) Common parlance conflates fairy tales with beast fables and other folktales, and scholars differ on the degree to which the presence of fairies and/or similarly mythical beings (e.g., elves, goblins, trolls, giants, huge monsters) should be taken as a differentiator. Vladimir Propp, in his Morphology of the Folktale, criticized the common distinction between "fairy tales" and "animal tales" on the grounds that many tales contained both fantastic elements and animals.  Nevertheless, to select works for his analysis, Propp used all Russian folktales classified as a folk lore Aarne-Thompson 300-749 – in a cataloguing system that made such a distinction – to gain a clear set of tales.  His own analysis identified fairy tales by their plot elements, but that in itself has been criticized, as the analysis does not lend itself easily to tales that do not involve a quest, and furthermore, the same plot elements are found in non-fairy tale works. 

As Stith Thompson points out, talking animals and the presence of magic seem to be more common to the fairy tale than fairies themselves.  However, the mere presence of animals that talk does not make a tale a fairy tale, especially when the animal is clearly a mask on a human face, as in fables.Tolkien, p. 15.

In his essay "On Fairy-Stories", J. R. R. Tolkien agreed with the exclusion of "fairies" from the definition, defining fairy tales as stories about the adventures of men in Faërie, the land of fairies, fairytale princes and princesses, dwarves, elves, and not only other magical species but many other marvels.  However, the same essay excludes tales that are often considered fairy tales, citing as an example The Monkey's Heart, which Andrew Lang included in The Lilac Fairy Book.

Steven Swann Jones identified the presence of magic as the feature by which fairy tales can be distinguished from other sorts of folktales.  Davidson and Chaudri identify "transformation" as the key feature of the genre.A companion to the fairy tale. By Hilda Ellis Davidson, Anna Chaudhri. Boydell & Brewer 2006. p. 39. From a psychological point of view, Jean Chiriac argued for the necessity of the fantastic in these narratives. 

In terms of aesthetic values, Italo Calvino cited the fairy tale as a prime example of "quickness" in literature, because of the economy and concision of the tales. 

History of the genre

Originally, stories that would contemporarily be considered fairy tales were not marked out as a separate genre. The German term "Märchen" stems from the old German word "Mär", which means story or tale. The word "Märchen" is the diminutive of the word "Mär", therefore it means a "little story". Together with the common beginning "once upon a time" it means a fairy tale or a märchen was originally a little story from a long time ago, when the world was still magic. (Indeed, one less regular German opening is "In the old times when wishing was still effective".)

The English term "fairy tale" stems from the fact that the French contes often included fairies.

Roots of the genre come from different oral stories passed down in European cultures. The genre was first marked out by writers of the Renaissance, such as Giovanni Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Basile, and stabilized through the works of later collectors such as Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm.  In this evolution, the name was coined when the précieuses took up writing literary stories; Madame d'Aulnoy invented the term conte de fée, or fairy tale, in the late 17th century. 

Before the definition of the genre of fantasy, many works that would now be classified as fantasy were termed "fairy tales", including Tolkien's The Hobbit, George Orwell's Animal Farm, and L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.  Indeed, Tolkien's "On Fairy-Stories" includes discussions of world-building and is considered a vital part of fantasy criticism. Although fantasy, particularly the subgenre of fairytale fantasy, draws heavily on fairy tale motifs,  the genres are now regarded as distinct.

Folk and literary

The fairy tale, told orally, is a sub-class of the folktale. Many writers have written in the form of the fairy tale. These are the literary fairy tales, or Kunstmärchen. The oldest forms, from Panchatantra to the Pentamerone, show considerable reworking from the oral form.  The Brothers Grimm were among the first to try to preserve the features of oral tales. Yet the stories printed under the Grimm name have been considerably reworked to fit the written form. 

Literary fairy tales and oral fairy tales freely exchanged plots, motifs, and elements with one another and with the tales of foreign lands.  The literary fairy tale came into fashion during the 17th century, developed by aristocratic women as a parlor game. This in turn helped to maintain the oral tradition. According to Jack Zipes, "The subject matter of the conversations consisted of literature, mores, taste, and etiquette, whereby the speakers all endeavored to portray ideal situations in the most effective oratorical style that would gradually have a major effect on literary forms."    Many 18th-century folklorists attempted to recover the "pure" folktale, uncontaminated by literary versions. Yet while oral fairy tales likely existed for thousands of years before the literary forms, there is no pure folktale, and each literary fairy tale draws on folk traditions, if only in parody.  This makes it impossible to trace forms of transmission of a fairy tale. Oral story-tellers have been known to read literary fairy tales to increase their own stock of stories and treatments. 

History

The oral tradition of the fairy tale came long before the written page. Tales were told or enacted dramatically, rather than written down, and handed down from generation to generation. Because of this, the history of their development is necessarily obscure and blurred.  Fairy tales appear, now and again, in written literature throughout literate cultures, as in The Golden Ass, which includes Cupid and Psyche (Roman, 100–200 AD),  or the Panchatantra (India 3rd century BCE), but it is unknown to what extent these reflect the actual folk tales even of their own time. The stylistic evidence indicates that these, and many later collections, reworked folk tales into literary forms. What they do show is that the fairy tale has ancient roots, older than the Arabian Nights collection of magical tales (compiled circa 1500 AD), such as Vikram and the Vampire, and Bel and the Dragon. Besides such collections and individual tales, in China, Taoist philosophers such as Liezi and Zhuangzi recounted fairy tales in their philosophical works.Moss Roberts, "Introduction", p. xviii, Chinese Fairy Tales & Fantasies. ISBN 0-394-73994-9. In the broader definition of the genre, the first famous Western fairy tales are those of Aesop (6th century BC) in ancient Greece.

Jack Zipes writes in When Dreams Came True, "There are fairy tale elements in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, and ... in many of William Shakespeare plays."  King Lear can be considered a literary variant of fairy tales such as Water and Salt and Cap O' Rushes.  The tale itself resurfaced in Western literature in the 16th and 17th centuries, with The Facetious Nights of Straparola by Giovanni Francesco Straparola (Italy, 1550 and 1553), which contains many fairy tales in its inset tales, and the Neapolitan tales of Giambattista Basile (Naples, 1634–6), which are all fairy tales.  Carlo Gozzi made use of many fairy tale motifs among his Commedia dell'Arte scenarios,  including among them one based on The Love For Three Oranges (1761).  Simultaneously, Pu Songling, in China, included many fairy tales in his collection, Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (published posthumously, 1766). The fairy tale itself became popular among the précieuses of upper-class France (1690–1710), and among the tales told in that time were the ones of La Fontaine and the Contes of Charles Perrault (1697), who fixed the forms of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella.  Although Straparola's, Basile's and Perrault's collections contain the oldest known forms of various fairy tales, on the stylistic evidence, all the writers rewrote the tales for literary effect. 

The Salon Era

In the mid-17th century, a vogue for magical tales emerged among the intellectuals who frequented the salons of Paris. These salons were regular gatherings hosted by prominent aristocratic women, where women and men could gather together to discuss the issues of the day.

In the 1630s, aristocratic women began to gather in their own living rooms, salons, in order to discuss the topics of their choice: arts and letters, politics, and social matters of immediate concern to the women of their class: marriage, love, financial and physical independence, and access to education. This was a time when women were barred from receiving a formal education. Some of the most gifted women writers of the period came out of these early salons (such as Madeleine de Scudéry and Madame de Lafayette), which encouraged women's independence and pushed against the gender barriers that defined their lives. The salonnières argued particularly for love and intellectual compatibility between the sexes, opposing the system of arranged marriages.

Sometime in the middle of the 17th century, a passion for the conversational parlour game based on the plots of old folk tales swept through the salons. Each salonnière was called upon to retell an old tale or rework an old theme, spinning clever new stories that not only showcased verbal agility and imagination, but also slyly commented on the conditions of aristocratic life. Great emphasis was placed on a mode of delivery that seemed natural and spontaneous. The decorative language of the fairy tales served an important function: disguising the rebellious subtext of the stories and sliding them past the court censors. Critiques of court life (and even of the king) were embedded in extravagant tales and in dark, sharply dystopian ones. Not surprisingly, the tales by women often featured young (but clever) aristocratic girls whose lives were controlled by the arbitrary whims of fathers, kings, and elderly wicked fairies, as well as tales in which groups of wise fairies (i.e., intelligent, independent women) stepped in and put all to rights.

The salon tales as they were originally written and published have been preserved in a monumental work called Le Cabinet des Fées, an enormous collection of stories from the 17th and 18th centuries.

Later works

The first collectors to attempt to preserve not only the plot and characters of the tale, but also the style in which they were told, were the Brothers Grimm, collecting German fairy tales; ironically, this meant although their first edition (1812 & 1815) remains a treasure for folklorists, they rewrote the tales in later editions to make them more acceptable, which ensured their sales and the later popularity of their work. 

Such literary forms did not merely draw from the folktale, but also influenced folktales in turn. The Brothers Grimm rejected several tales for their collection, though told orally to them by Germans, because the tales derived from Perrault, and they concluded they were thereby French and not German tales; an oral version of Bluebeard was thus rejected, and the tale of Little Briar Rose, clearly related to Perrault's The Sleeping Beauty, was included only because Jacob Grimm convinced his brother that the figure of Brynhildr, from much earlier Norse mythology, proved that the sleeping princess was authentically Germanic folklore. 

This consideration of whether to keep Sleeping Beauty reflected a belief common among folklorists of the 19th century: that the folk tradition preserved fairy tales in forms from pre-history except when "contaminated" by such literary forms, leading people to tell inauthentic tales.  The rural, illiterate, and uneducated peasants, if suitably isolated, were the folk and would tell pure folk tales.  Sometimes they regarded fairy tales as a form of fossil, the remnants of a once-perfect tale.  However, further research has concluded that fairy tales never had a fixed form, and regardless of literary influence, the tellers constantly altered them for their own purposes. 

The work of the Brothers Grimm influenced other collectors, both inspiring them to collect tales and leading them to similarly believe, in a spirit of romantic nationalism, that the fairy tales of a country were particularly representative of it, to the neglect of cross-cultural influence. Among those influenced were the Russian Alexander Afanasyev (first published in 1866), the Norwegians Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe (first published in 1845), the Romanian Petre Ispirescu (first published in 1874), the English Joseph Jacobs (first published in 1890), and Jeremiah Curtin, an American who collected Irish tales (first published in 1890). Ethnographers collected fairy tales throughout the world, finding similar tales in Africa, the Americas, and Australia; Andrew Lang was able to draw on not only the written tales of Europe and Asia, but those collected by ethnographers, to fill his "coloured" fairy books series.  They also encouraged other collectors of fairy tales, as when Yei Theodora Ozaki created a collection, Japanese Fairy Tales (1908), after encouragement from Lang.  Simultaneously, writers such as Hans Christian Andersen and George MacDonald continued the tradition of literary fairy tales. Andersen's work sometimes drew on old folktales, but more often deployed fairytale motifs and plots in new tales.  MacDonald incorporated fairytale motifs both in new literary fairy tales, such as The Light Princess, and in works of the genre that would become fantasy, as in The Princess and the Goblin or Lilith. 

Cross-cultural transmission

Two theories of origins have attempted to explain the common elements in fairy tales found spread over continents. One is that a single point of origin generated any given tale, which then spread over the centuries; the other is that such fairy tales stem from common human experience and therefore can appear separately in many different origins. 

Fairy tales with very similar plots, characters, and motifs are found spread across many different cultures. Many researchers hold this to be caused by the spread of such tales, as people repeat tales they have heard in foreign lands, although the oral nature makes it impossible to trace the route except by inference.  Folklorists have attempted to determine the origin by internal evidence, which can not always be clear; Joseph Jacobs, comparing the Scottish tale The Ridere of Riddles with the version collected by the Brothers Grimm, The Riddle, noted that in The Ridere of Riddles one hero ends up polygamously married, which might point to an ancient custom, but in The Riddle, the simpler riddle might argue greater antiquity. 

Folklorists of the "Finnish" (or historical-geographical) school attempted to place fairy tales to their origin, with inconclusive results.  Sometimes influence, especially within a limited area and time, is clearer, as when considering the influence of Perrault's tales on those collected by the Brothers Grimm. Little Briar-Rose appears to stem from Perrault's The Sleeping Beauty, as the Grimms' tale appears to be the only independent German variant.  Similarly, the close agreement between the opening of the Grimms' version of Little Red Riding Hood and Perrault's tale points to an influence, although the Grimms' version adds a different ending (perhaps derived from The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids). 

Fairy tales tend to take on the color of their location, through the choice of motifs, the style in which they are told, and the depiction of character and local color. 

The Brothers Grimm believed that European fairy tales derived from the cultural history shared by all Indo-European peoples and were therefore ancient, far older than written records. This view is supported by research by the anthropologist Jamie Tehrani and the folklorist Sara Graca Da Silva using phylogenetic analysis, a technique developed by evolutionary biologists to trace the relatedness of living and fossil species. Among the tales analysed were Jack and the Beanstalk, traced to the time of splitting of Eastern and Western Indo-European, over 5000 years ago. Both Beauty and the Beast and Rumpelstiltskin appear to have been created some 4000 years ago. The story of The Smith and the Devil (Deal with the Devil) appears to date from the Bronze Age, some 6000 years ago. 

Association with children

Originally, adults were the audience of a fairy tale just as often as children.  Literary fairy tales appeared in works intended for adults, but in the 19th and 20th centuries the fairy tale became associated with children's literature.

The précieuses, including Madame d'Aulnoy, intended their works for adults, but regarded their source as the tales that servants, or other women of lower class, would tell to children.  Indeed, a novel of that time, depicting a countess's suitor offering to tell such a tale, has the countess exclaim that she loves fairy tales as if she were still a child.  Among the late précieuses, Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont redacted a version of Beauty and the Beast for children, and it is her tale that is best known today.  The Brothers Grimm titled their collection Children's and Household Tales and rewrote their tales after complaints that they were not suitable for children. 

In the modern era, fairy tales were altered so that they could be read to children. The Brothers Grimm concentrated mostly on sexual references;  Rapunzel, in the first edition, revealed the prince's visits by asking why her clothing had grown tight, thus letting the witch deduce that she was pregnant, but in subsequent editions carelessly revealed that it was easier to pull up the prince than the witch.  On the other hand, in many respects, violenceparticularly when punishing villainswas increased.  Other, later, revisions cut out violence; J.R.R.Tolkien noted that The Juniper Tree often had its cannibalistic stew cut out in a version intended for children.  The moralizing strain in the Victorian era altered the classical tales to teach lessons, as when George Cruikshank rewrote Cinderella in 1854 to contain temperance themes. His acquaintance Charles Dickens protested, "In an utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected."  

Psychoanalysts such as Bruno Bettelheim, who regarded the cruelty of older fairy tales as indicative of psychological conflicts, strongly criticized this expurgation, because it weakened their usefulness to both children and adults as ways of symbolically resolving issues. 

The adaptation of fairy tales for children continues. Walt Disney's influential Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was largely (although certainly not solely) intended for the children's market.  The anime Magical Princess Minky Momo draws on the fairy tale Momotarō.  Jack Zipes has spent many years working to make the older traditional stories accessible to modern readers and their children. 

Contemporary tales

Literary

In contemporary literature, many authors have used the form of fairy tales for various reasons, such as examining the human condition from the simple framework a fairytale provides.  Some authors seek to recreate a sense of the fantastic in a contemporary discourse.  Some writers use fairy tale forms for modern issues;  this can include using the psychological dramas implicit in the story, as when Robin McKinley retold Donkeyskin as the novel Deerskin, with emphasis on the abusive treatment the father of the tale dealt to his daughter. Sometimes, especially in children's literature, fairy tales are retold with a twist simply for comic effect, such as The Stinky Cheese Man by Jon Scieszka and The ASBO Fairy Tales by Chris Pilbeam. A common comic motif is a world where all the fairy tales take place, and the characters are aware of their role in the story,  such as in the film series Shrek.

Other authors may have specific motives, such as multicultural or feminist reevaluations of predominantly Eurocentric masculine-dominated fairy tales, implying critique of older narratives.  The figure of the damsel in distress has been particularly attacked by many feminist critics. Examples of narrative reversal rejecting this figure include The Paperbag Princess by Robert Munsch, a picture book aimed at children in which a princess rescues a prince, and Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, which retells a number of fairy tales from a female point of view. 

There are also many contemporary erotic retellings of fairy tales, which explicitly draw upon the original spirit of the tales, and are specifically for adults. Modern retellings focus on exploring the tale through use of the erotic, explicit sexuality, dark and/or comic themes, female empowerment, fetish and BDSM, multicultural, heterosexual and LGBT characters. Cleis Press, independent publisher of books in the areas of sexuality, erotica, feminism, gay and lesbian studies, gender studies, fiction, and human rights, has released several fairy tale themed erotic anthologies, including Fairy Tale Lust, Lustfully Ever After, and A Princess Bound.

It may be hard to lay down the rule between fairy tales and fantasies that use fairy tale motifs, or even whole plots, but the distinction is commonly made, even within the works of a single author: George MacDonald's Lilith and Phantastes are regarded as fantasies, while his "The Light Princess", "The Golden Key", and "The Wise Woman" are commonly called fairy tales. The most notable distinction is that fairytale fantasies, like other fantasies, make use of novelistic writing conventions of prose, characterization, or setting. 

Film

Fairy tales have been enacted dramatically; records exist of this in commedia dell'arte,  and later in pantomime.  The advent of cinema has meant that such stories could be presented in a more plausible manner, with the use of special effects and animation. The Walt Disney Company has had a significant impact on the evolution of the fairy tale film. Some of the earliest short silent films from the Disney studio were based on fairy tales, and some fairy tales were adapted into shorts in the musical comedy series "Silly Symphonies", such as Three Little Pigs. Walt Disney's first feature-length film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, released in 1937, was a ground-breaking film for fairy tales and, indeed, fantasy in general. Disney and his creative successors have returned to traditional and literary fairy tales numerous times with films such as Cinderella (1950), Sleeping Beauty (1959) and Beauty and the Beast (1991). Disney's influence helped establish the fairy tale genre as a genre for children, and has been accused by some of bowdlerizing the gritty naturalism – and sometimes unhappy endings – of many folk fairy tales. However, others note that the softening of fairy tales occurred long before Disney. 

Many filmed fairy tales have been made primarily for children, from Disney's later works to Aleksandr Rou's retelling of Vasilissa the Beautiful, the first Soviet film to use Russian folk tales in a big-budget feature.  Others have used the conventions of fairy tales to create new stories with sentiments more relevant to contemporary life, as in Labyrinth,  My Neighbor Totoro, Happily N'Ever After, and the films of Michel Ocelot. 

Other works have retold familiar fairy tales in a darker, more horrific or psychological variant aimed primarily at adults. Notable examples are Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast  and The Company of Wolves, based on Angela Carter's retelling of Little Red Riding Hood.  Likewise, Princess Mononoke,  Pan's Labyrinth,  Suspiria, and Spike  create new stories in this genre from fairy tale and folklore motifs.

In comics and animated TV series, The Sandman, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Princess Tutu, Fables and MÄR all make use of standard fairy tale elements to various extents but are more accurately categorised as fairytale fantasy due to the definite locations and characters which a longer narrative requires.

A more modern cinematic fairy tale would be Luchino Visconti's Le Notti Bianche, starring Marcello Mastroianni before he became a superstar. It involves many of the romantic conventions of fairy tales, yet it takes place in post-World War II Italy, and it ends 

Motifs

Any comparison of fairy tales quickly discovers that many fairy tales have features in common with each other. Two of the most influential classifications are those of Antti Aarne, as revised by Stith Thompson into the Aarne-Thompson classification system, and Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folk Tale.

Aarne-Thompson

This system groups fairy and folk tales according to their overall plot. Common, identifying features are picked out to decide which tales are grouped together. Much therefore depends on what features are regarded as decisive.

For instance, tales like Cinderella – in which a persecuted heroine, with the help of the fairy godmother or similar magical helper, attends an event (or three) in which she wins the love of a prince and is identified as his true brideare classified as type 510, the persecuted heroine. Some such tales are The Wonderful Birch; Aschenputtel; Katie Woodencloak; The Story of Tam and Cam; Ye Xian; Cap O' Rushes; Catskin; Fair, Brown and Trembling; Finette Cendron; Allerleirauh.

Further analysis of the tales shows that in Cinderella, The Wonderful Birch, The Story of Tam and Cam, Ye Xian, and Aschenputtel, the heroine is persecuted by her stepmother and refused permission to go to the ball or other event, and in Fair, Brown and Trembling and Finette Cendron by her sisters and other female figures, and these are grouped as 510A; while in Cap O' Rushes, Catskin, and Allerleirauh, the heroine is driven from home by her father's persecutions, and must take work in a kitchen elsewhere, and these are grouped as 510B. But in Katie Woodencloak, she is driven from home by her stepmother's persecutions and must take service in a kitchen elsewhere, and in Tattercoats, she is refused permission to go to the ball by her grandfather. Given these features common with both types of 510, Katie Woodencloak is classified as 510A because the villain is the stepmother, and Tattercoats as 510B because the grandfather fills the father's role.

This system has its weaknesses in the difficulty of having no way to classify subportions of a tale as motifs. Rapunzel is type 310 (The Maiden in the Tower), but it opens with a child being demanded in return for stolen food, as does Puddocky; but Puddocky is not a Maiden in the Tower tale, while The Canary Prince, which opens with a jealous stepmother, is.

It also lends itself to emphasis on the common elements, to the extent that the folklorist describes The Black Bull of Norroway as the same story as Beauty and the Beast. This can be useful as a shorthand but can also erase the coloring and details of a story. 

Morphology

Vladimir Propp specifically studied a collection of Russian fairy tales, but his analysis has been found useful for the tales of other countries.  Having criticized Aarne-Thompson type analysis for ignoring what motifs did in stories, and because the motifs used were not clearly distinct,  he analyzed the tales for the function each character and action fulfilled and concluded that a tale was composed of thirty-one elements ('functions') and seven characters or 'spheres of action' ('the princess and her father' are a single sphere). While the elements were not all required for all tales, when they appeared they did so in an invariant order – except that each individual element might be negated twice, so that it would appear three times, as when, in Brother and Sister, the brother resists drinking from enchanted streams twice, so that it is the third that enchants him.  Propp's 31 functions also fall within six 'stages' (preparation, complication, transference, struggle, return, recognition), and a stage can also be repeated, which can affect the perceived order of elements.

One such element is the donor who gives the hero magical assistance, often after testing him.  In The Golden Bird, the talking fox tests the hero by warning him against entering an inn and, after he succeeds, helps him find the object of his quest; in The Boy Who Drew Cats, the priest advised the hero to stay in small places at night, which protects him from an evil spirit; in Cinderella, the fairy godmother gives Cinderella the dresses she needs to attend the ball, as their mothers' spirits do in Bawang Putih Bawang Merah and The Wonderful Birch; in The Fox Sister, a Buddhist monk gives the brothers magical bottles to protect against the fox spirit. The roles can be more complicated.  In The Red Ettin, the role is split into the motherwho offers the hero the whole of a journey cake with her curse or half with her blessingand when he takes the half, a fairy who gives him advice; in Mr Simigdáli, the sun, the moon, and the stars all give the heroine a magical gift. Characters who are not always the donor can act like the donor.  In Kallo and the Goblins, the villain goblins also give the heroine gifts, because they are tricked; in Schippeitaro, the evil cats betray their secret to the hero, giving him the means to defeat them. Other fairy tales, such as The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was, do not feature the donor.

Analogies have been drawn between this and the analysis of myths into the Hero's journey. 

Interpretations

Many fairy tales have been interpreted for their (purported) significance. One mythological interpretation saw many fairy tales, including Hansel and Gretel, Sleeping Beauty, and The Frog King, as solar myths; this mode of interpretation subsequently became rather less popular.  Freudian, Jungian, and other psychological analyses have also explicated many tales, but no mode of interpretation has established itself definitively. 

Specific analyses have often been criticized for lending great importance to motifs that are not, in fact, integral to the tale; this has often stemmed from treating one instance of a fairy tale as the definitive text, where the tale has been told and retold in many variations.  In variants of Bluebeard, the wife's curiosity is betrayed by a blood-stained key, by an egg's breaking, or by the singing of a rose she wore, without affecting the tale, but interpretations of specific variants have claimed that the precise object is integral to the tale. 

Other folklorists have interpreted tales as historical documents. Many German folklorists, believing the tales to have preserved details from ancient times, have used the Grimms' tales to explain ancient customs.  
One approach sees the topography of European Märchen as echoing the period immediately following the  last Ice Age. 
Other folklorists have explained the figure of the wicked stepmother in a historical/sociological context: many women did die in childbirth, their husbands remarried, and the new stepmothers competed with the children of the first marriage for resources. 

In a 2012 lecture, Jack Zipes reads fairy tales as examples of what he calls "childism". He suggests that there are terrible aspects to the tales, which (among other things) have conditioned children to accept mistreatment and even abuse. 

Compilations

Authors and works:
* Mixed Up Fairy Tales
* Alan Garner's Book of British Fairy Tales (United Kingdom, 1984) by Alan Garner
* Fairy Tales (USA, 1965) by E. E. Cummings
* Fairy Tales, Now First Collected: To which are prefixed two dissertations: 1. On Pygmies. 2. On Fairies (England, 1831) by Joseph Ritson
* Giovanni Francesco Straparola (Italy, 16th century)
* Grimms' Fairy Tales (Germany, 1812–1857)
* Hans Christian Andersen (Denmark, 1805–1875)
* Italian Folktales (Italy, 1956) by Italo Calvino
* Joseph Jacobs (1854–1916)
* Legende sau basmele românilor (Romania, 1874) by Petre Ispirescu
* Madame d'Aulnoy (France, 1650–1705)
* Norwegian Folktales (Norway, 1845–1870) by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe
* Narodnye russkie skazki (Russia, 1855–1863) by Alexander Afanasyev
* Pentamerone (Italy, 1634–1636) by Giambattista Basile
* Charles Perrault (France, 1628–1703)
* Panchatantra (India, 3rd century BCE)
* Popular Tales of the West Highlands (Scotland, 1862) by John Francis Campbell
* Ruth Manning-Sanders (Wales, 1886–1988)
* Franz Xaver von Schönwerth (Germany, 1810-1886)
* Kunio Yanagita (Japan, 1875–1962)
* World Tales (United Kingdom, 1979) by Idries Shah "Little Red Riding  Hood", or "Little Red Ridinghood", also known as "Little Red Cap" or simply "Red Riding Hood", is a European fairy tale about a young girl and a Big Bad Wolf.  The story, first published by   Charles Perrault,  has been changed considerably in various retellings and subjected to numerous modern adaptations and readings, such as the versions by Brothers Grimm and Italo Calvino. The story is number 333 in the Aarne-Thompson classification system for folktales.  Variations of the story have developed, incorporating various cultural beliefs and regional dialects into the story.  An example of this is "Kawoni's Journey Across the Mountain: A Cherokee Little Red Riding Hood", which introduces Cherokee myths and language into the traditional story.  Another such example is "Petite Rouge Riding Hood", which approaches the story from a Cajun perspective.

Tale

The story revolves around a girl called Little Red Riding Hood. In the Grimms' and Perrault's versions of the tale, she is named after the red hooded cape/cloak that she wears. The girl walks through the woods to deliver food to her sickly grandmother (wine and cake depending on the translation). In the Grimms' version, her mother had ordered her to stay strictly on the path.

A Big Bad Wolf wants to eat the girl and the food in the basket. He secretly stalks her behind trees, bushes, shrubs, and patches of little and tall grass. He approaches Little Red Riding Hood, and she naïvely tells him where she is going. He suggests that the girl pick some flowers, which she does. In the meantime, he goes to the grandmother's house and gains entry by pretending to be the girl. He swallows the grandmother whole (in some stories, he locks her in the closet) and waits for the girl, disguised as the grandma.

When the girl arrives, she notices that her grandmother looks very strange. Little Red then says, "What a deep voice you have!" ("The better to greet you with", responds the wolf), "Goodness, what big eyes you have!" ("The better to see you with", responds the wolf), "And what big hands you have!" ("The better to hug/grab you with", responds the wolf), and lastly, "What a big mouth you have" ("The better to eat you with!", responds the wolf), at which point the wolf jumps out of bed and eats her up too. Then he falls asleep. In Charles Perrault's version of the story (the first version to be published), the tale ends here. However, in later versions the story continues generally as follows:

A woodcutter in the French version, but a hunter in the Brothers Grimm and traditional German versions, comes to the rescue and with his axe cuts open the sleeping wolf. Little Red Riding Hood and her grandmother emerge unharmed. They then fill the wolf's body with heavy stones. The wolf awakens and tries to flee, but the stones cause him to collapse and die. (Sanitized versions of the story have the grandmother shut in the closet instead of eaten, and some have Little Red Riding Hood saved by the lumberjack as the wolf advances on her rather than after she is eaten where the woodcutter kills the wolf with his axe.) 

The tale makes the clearest contrast between the safe world of the village and the dangers of the forest, conventional antitheses that are essentially medieval, though no written versions are as old as that. It also warns about the dangers of not obeying one's mother (at least in the Grimms' version).

Relationship to other tales

A very similar story also belongs to the North African tradition, namely in Kabylia, where a number of versions are attested.  The theme of the little girl who visits her (grand-)dad in his cabin and is recognized by the sound of her bracelets constitutes the refrain of a well-known song by the modern singer Idir, A Vava Inouva:

The theme of the ravening wolf and of the creature released unharmed from its belly is also reflected in the Russian tale Peter and the Wolf and another Grimm tale The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids, but its general theme of restoration is at least as old as the biblical story, Jonah and the Whale. The theme also appears in the story of the life of Saint Margaret, wherein the saint emerges unharmed from the belly of a dragon, and in the epic "The Red Path" by Jim C. Hines.

There is even a connection to Greek mythology: Cronus, the leader of the Titans, knew he was destined to be overcome by his own sons and, as a result, he devoured his children Demeter, Hestia, Hera, Hades, and Poseidon as soon as they were born. They were eventually set free, unharmed, by Zeus, when he gave Cronus an emetic (or, in some versions, cut his stomach open).

The dialogue between the Big Bad Wolf and Little Red Riding Hood has its analogies to the Norse Þrymskviða from the Elder Edda; the giant Þrymr had stolen Mjölner, Thor's hammer, and demanded Freyja as his bride for its return. Instead, the gods dressed Thor as a bride and sent him. When the giants note Thor's unladylike eyes, eating, and drinking, Loki explains them as Freyja's not having slept, or eaten, or drunk, out of longing for the wedding. 

Tale's history

Earliest versions

The origins of the Little Red Riding Hood story can be traced to versions from various European countries and more than likely preceding the 17th century, of which several exist, some significantly different from the currently known, Grimms-inspired version. It was told by French peasants in the 10th century and recorded by the cathedral schoolmaster Egbert of Liege.  In Italy, the Little Red Riding Hood was told by peasants in the fourteenth century, where a number of versions exist, including La finta nonna (The False Grandmother), written among others by Italo Calvino in the Italian Folktales collection.  It has also been called "The Story of Grandmother". It is also possible that this early tale has roots in very similar Oriental tales (e.g. "Grandaunt Tiger"). 

These early variations of the tale differ from the currently known version in several ways. The antagonist is not always a wolf, but sometimes an ogre or a 'bzou' (werewolf), making these tales relevant to the werewolf-trials (similar to witch trials) of the time (e.g. the trial of Peter Stumpp).  The wolf usually leaves the grandmother's blood and meat for the girl to eat, who then unwittingly cannibalizes her own grandmother. Furthermore, the wolf was also known to ask her to remove her clothing and toss it into the fire.  In some versions, the wolf eats the girl after she gets into bed with him, and the story ends there.  In others, she sees through his disguise and tries to escape, complaining to her "grandmother" that she needs to defecate and would not wish to do so in the bed. The wolf reluctantly lets her go, tied to a piece of string so she does not get away. However, the girl slips the string over something else and runs off. In these stories she escapes with no help from any male or older female figure, instead using her own cunning. Sometimes, though more rarely, the red hood is even non-existent.

In other tellings of the story, the wolf chases after Little Red Ridinghood. She escapes with the help of some laundresses, who spread a sheet taut over a river so she may escape. When the wolf follows Red over the bridge of cloth, the sheet is released and the wolf drowns in the river. 

In 2013, it was revealed from scientific research that the tale originated in the 1st century in the Middle East and not, as previously assumed, in China. The scientists analysed the storylines and characters from 58 versions of the tale from different areas. By means of a computer model they then determined how the different versions of Little Red Riding Hood are related.Jamshid J. Tehrani (2013). “The Phylogeny of Little Red Riding Hood”. PLoS ONE 8(11): e78871. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0078871

Charles Perrault

The earliest known printed version  was known as Le Petit Chaperon Rouge and may have had its origins in 17th-century French folklore. It was included in the collection Tales and Stories of the Past with Morals. Tales of Mother Goose (Histoires et contes du temps passé, avec des moralités. Contes de ma mère l'Oye), in 1697, by Charles Perrault. As the title implies, this version  is both more sinister and more overtly moralized than the later ones. The redness of the hood, which has been given symbolic significance in many interpretations of the tale, was a detail introduced by Perrault. 

The story had as its subject an "attractive, well-bred young lady", a village girl of the country being deceived into giving a wolf she encountered the information he needed to find her grandmother's house successfully and eat the old woman while at the same time avoiding being noticed by woodcutters working in the nearby forest. Then he proceeded to lay a trap for the Red Riding Hood. Little Red Riding Hood ends up being asked to climb into the bed before being eaten by the wolf, where the story ends. The wolf emerges the victor of the encounter and there is no happy ending.

Charles Perrault explained the 'moral' at the end of the tale: so that no doubt is left to his intended meaning:

This, the presumed original, version of the tale was written for late seventeenth-century French court of King Louis XIV. This audience, whom the King entertained with extravagant parties, presumably would take from the story the intended meaning.

Grimm Brothers

In the 19th century two separate German versions were retold to Jacob Grimm and his younger brother Wilhelm Grimm, known as the Brothers Grimm, the first by Jeanette Hassenpflug (1791–1860) and the second by Marie Hassenpflug (1788–1856). The brothers turned the first version to the main body of the story and the second into a sequel of it. The story as Rotkäppchen was included in the first edition of their collection Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children's and Household Tales (1812)). 

The earlier parts of the tale agree so closely with Perrault's variant that it is almost certainly the source of the tale.  However, they modified the ending; this version had the little girl and her grandmother saved by a huntsman who was after the wolf's skin; this ending is identical to that in the tale The Wolf and the Seven Young Kids, which appears to be the source.  The second part featured the girl and her grandmother trapping and killing another wolf, this time anticipating his moves based on their experience with the previous one. The girl did not leave the path when the wolf spoke to her, her grandmother locked the door to keep it out, and when the wolf lurked, the grandmother had Little Red Riding Hood put a trough under the chimney and fill it with water that sausages had been cooked in; the smell lured the wolf down, and it drowned. 

The Brothers further revised the story in later editions and it reached the above-mentioned final and better-known version in the 1857 edition of their work.  It is notably tamer than the older stories which contained darker themes.

After the Grimms

Numerous authors have rewritten or adapted this tale.

Andrew Lang included a variant called "The True History of Little Goldenhood"  in The Red Fairy Book (1890). He derived it from the works of Charles Marelles,  in Contes of Charles Marelles. This version explicitly states that the story had been mistold earlier. The girl is saved, but not by the huntsman; when the wolf tries to eat her, its mouth is burned by the golden hood she wears, which is enchanted.

James N. Barker wrote a variation of Little Red Riding Hood in 1827 as an approximately 1000-word story. It was later reprinted in 1858 in a book of collected stories edited by William E Burton, called the Cyclopedia of Wit and Humor. The reprint also features a wood engraving of a clothed wolf on bended knee holding Little Red Riding Hood's hand.

In the 20th century, the popularity of the tale appeared to snowball, with many new versions being written and produced, especially in the wake of Freudian analysis, deconstruction and feminist critical theory. (See "Modern uses and adaptations" below.) This trend has also led to a number of academic texts being written that focus on Little Red Riding Hood, including works by Alan Dundes and Jack Zipes.

Interpretations

Besides the overt warning about talking to strangers, there are many interpretations of the classic fairy tale, many of them sexual.  Some are listed below.

Natural cycles

Folklorists and cultural anthropologists, such as P. Saintyves and Edward Burnett Tylor, saw "Little Red Riding Hood" in terms of solar myths and other naturally occurring cycles. Her red hood could represent the bright sun which is ultimately swallowed by the terrible night (the wolf), and the variations in which she is cut out of the wolf's belly represent the dawn.  In this interpretation, there is a connection between the wolf of this tale and Sköll, the wolf in Norse mythology that will swallow the personified Sun at Ragnarök, or Fenrir.  Alternatively, the tale could be about the season of spring or the month of May, escaping the winter. 

Rite

The tale has been interpreted as a puberty rite, stemming from a prehistoric origin (sometimes an origin stemming from a previous matriarchal era).  The girl, leaving home, enters a liminal state and by going through the acts of the tale, is transformed into an adult woman by the act of coming out of the wolf's belly. 

Rebirth

Bruno Bettelheim, in The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (1976), recast the Little Red Riding Hood motif in terms of classic Freudian analysis, that shows how fairy tales educate, support, and liberate children's emotions. The motif of the huntsman cutting open the wolf he interpreted as a "rebirth"; the girl who foolishly listened to the wolf has been reborn as a new person. 

Norse myth

The poem "Þrymskviða" from the Poetic Edda mirrors some elements of Red Riding Hood. Loki's explanations for the strange behavior of "Freyja" (actually Thor disguised as Freya) mirror the wolf's explanations for his strange appearance. The red hood has often been given great importance in many interpretations, with a significance from the dawn to blood. 

Modern uses and adaptations

Erotic, romantic, or rape connotations

A sexual analysis of the tale may also include negative connotations in terms of rape or abduction. In Against Our Will, Susan Brownmiller describes the fairy tale as a description of rape.   However, many revisionist retellings choose to focus on empowerment, and depict Little Red Riding Hood or the grandmother successfully defending herself against the wolf. 

Such tellings bear some similarity to the "animal bridegroom" tales, such as Beauty and the Beast or The Frog Prince, but where the heroines of those tales transform the hero into a prince, these tellings of Little Red Riding Hood reveal to the heroine that she has a wild nature like the hero's.   These interpretations refuse to characterize Little Red Riding Hood as a victim; these are tales of female empowerment.

Animations, films, and TV shows

*In Tex Avery's short animated cartoon, Red Hot Riding Hood (1943), the story is recast in an adult-oriented urban setting, with the suave, sharp-dressed Wolf howling after the nightclub singer Red. Avery used the same cast and themes in a subsequent series of cartoons. 
*Neil Jordan's film version of The Company of Wolves (1984) is about the journey of a young girl into womanhood, which can be interpreted as her menstruating for the first time (at the start of the tale, she is in bed with a stomach ache, according to her sister), but also of sexual awakening (in it, she wears red lipstick in bed). The wolf in this version of the tale is in fact a werewolf, which comes to the newly menstruating Red Riding Hood in the forest, in the form of a charming hunter. He turns into a wolf and eats her grandmother, and is about to devour Red Riding Hood as well, but she is equally seductive and ends up lying with the wolf man.  
*In Michelle Augello-Page's story "Wolf Moon",  Little Red is an adult who has been irrevocably changed by the events in her childhood, and it is the hunter who saves her "once upon a time, and again" in this tale of sexual awakening, bdsm, relationships, female rites and rebirth.

Lipstick

*Allusions to the tale can be more or less overtly sexual, as when the color of a lipstick is advertised as "Riding Hood Red". 

Literature

* Charles Perrault's "Le Petit Chaperon rouge" ("Little Red Riding Hood") is centered on an erotic metaphor. 
*Little Red Riding Hood appears in Angela Carter's short story "The Company of Wolves", published in The Bloody Chamber (1979), her collection of "dark, feminist fables" filled with "bestial and ferocious" heroines.   In her revision of the classic, Carter examines female lust, which according to author Catherine Orenstein is "healthy, but also challenging and sometimes disturbing, unbridled and feral lust that delivers up contradictions."    As Orenstein points out, Carter does this by unravelling the original tale's "underlying sexual currents" and by impregnating the new Little Red Riding Hood (Rosalee played by Sarah Patterson) with "animal instincts" that lead to her transformation.

Music

*A.P. Randolph's "How Could Red Riding Hood (Have Been So Very Good)?" (1925) was the first song known to be banned from radio because of its sexual suggestiveness.
*Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs's hit song, "Lil' Red Riding Hood" (1966), takes the Wolf's point of view, implying that he wants love rather than blood.

Other adaptations

Animations and films

* Soyuzmultfilm (1937) is a classic Soviet, black-and-white, animated film by the sisters Brumberg, "grandmothers of the Russian animation". Its plot differs slightly from the original fairy tale. It was issued on videotapes in various collections in the 1980s, via the SECAM system, and in the 1990s, via the PAL system, in collections of animated films of a videostudio "Soyuz" (since 1994).
* In the USSR-based animated film Petya and Little Red Riding Hood (1958), directed by Boris Stepantsev and Evgeny Raykovsky, the main character (a boy named Petya Ivanov) see the Grey Wolf deceived a trusting girl and risks his life to rescue her and her grandmother. Now, the animated movie is considered a cult film, many phrases have become part of popular culture, and in 1959 and 1960, the film received awards at festivals in Kiev, Ukraine and Ansi, Estonia. In Russia, it is repeatedly republished on DVD in collections of animated films.
*Hoodwinked! (2005) is a retelling of "Little Red Riding Hood" as a police investigation
* The film Red Riding Hood (2011) is loosely based upon this tale. 
* The wolf appears in the Shrek franchise of films. He is wearing the grandmother's clothing as in the fairytale, though the films imply he merely prefers wearing the gown and is not dangerous.  
*Red Riding Hood briefly appears in the film Shrek 2 (2004), wherein she is frightened by Shrek and Fiona and runs off.
* Ruby Rose, the main protagonist of Rooster Teeth's animated web series RWBY, alludes to Little Red Riding Hood.

Games

*In the Shrek 2 (2004) video game, she is playable and appears as a friend of Shrek's. She joins him, Fiona, and Donkey on their journey to Far Far Away, despite not knowing Shrek or his friends in the film.

Literature

* Anne Sexton wrote an adaptation as a poem called "Red Riding Hood" in her collection Transformations (1971), a book in which she re-envisions 16 of the Grimm's Fairy tales. 

Music

* "Little Red Riding Hood" is a raw hardstyle song by Da Tweekaz 
* Sunny's concept photo for Girls' Generation's third studio album The Boys was inspired by "Little Red Riding Hood".

Musicals
 
* Little Red Riding Hood is one of the central characters in the Broadway musical Into the Woods (1987) by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine. In the song, "I Know Things Now", she speaks of how the wolf made her feel "excited, well, excited and scared", in a reference to the sexual undertones of their relationship. Red Riding Hood's cape is also one of the musical's four quest items that are emblematic of fairy tales. 

Television

* The pilot episode of NBC's TV series Grimm reveals that the Red Riding Hood stories were inspired by fabled blutbaden attacks, werewolf-like beings who have a deeply ingrained bloodlust and a weakness for victims wearing red.
* Red Riding Hood is a character in ABC's Once Upon a Time (2011) TV series. In this version of the tale, Red (portrayed by Meghan Ory) is a werewolf, and her cape is the only thing that can prevent her from turning during a full moon. Her Storybrooke persona is Ruby. "Sleeping Beauty" ( "The Beauty Sleeping in the Wood") by Charles Perrault  or "Little Briar Rose" () by the Brothers Grimm is a classic fairy tale written by Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm, which involves a beautiful princess, a sleeping enchantment, and a handsome prince. The version collected by the Brothers Grimm was an orally transmitted version of the originally literary tale published by Charles Perrault in Histoires ou contes du temps passé in 1697.  This in turn was based on Sun, Moon, and Talia by Italian poet Giambattista Basile (published posthumously in 1634), which was in turn based on one or more folk tales. The earliest known version of the story is Perceforest, composed between 1330 and 1344 and first printed in 1528.
 
Perrault's narrative

Perrault’s narrative is written in 2 parts. Some folklorists believe that the two parts were originally separate tales, as they were in the Grimms', and were joined together by Basile and once more by Perrault. 

Part one

At the christening of a king and queen's long-wished-for child, seven good fairies are invited to be godmothers to the infant princess. The fairies attend the banquet at the palace. Each fairy is presented with a golden plate and drinking cups adorned with jewels. Soon after, an old fairy enters the palace and is seated with a plate of fine china and a crystal drinking glass. This old fairy is overlooked because she has been within a tower for many years and everyone had believed her to be deceased. Six of the other seven fairies then offer their gifts of beauty, wit, grace, dance, song, and goodness to the infant princess. The evil fairy is very angry about having been forgotten, and as her gift, enchants the infant princess so that she will one day prick her finger on a spindle of a spinning wheel and die. The seventh fairy, who hasn't yet given her gift, attempts to reverse the evil fairy's curse. However, she can only do so partially. Instead of dying, the Princess will fall into a deep sleep for 100 years and be awakened by a kiss from a king's son.

The King orders that every spindle and spinning wheel in the kingdom to be destroyed, to try to save his daughter from the terrible curse. Fifteen or sixteen years pass and one day, when the king and queen are away, the Princess wanders through the palace rooms and comes upon an old woman, spinning with her spindle. The princess, who has never seen anyone spin before, asks the old woman if she can try the spinning wheel. The curse is fulfilled as the princess pricks her finger on the spindle and instantly falls into a deep sleep. The old woman cries for help and attempts are made to revive the princess. The king attributes this to fate and has the Princess carried to the finest room in the palace and placed upon a bed of gold and silver embroidered fabric. The king and queen kiss their daughter goodbye and depart, proclaiming the entrance to be forbidden. The good fairy who altered the evil prophecy is summoned. Having great powers of foresight, the fairy sees that the Princess will awaken to distress when she finds herself alone, so the fairy puts everyone in the castle to sleep. The fairy also summons a forest of trees, brambles and thorns that spring up around the castle, shielding it from the outside world and preventing anyone from disturbing the Princess.

A hundred years pass and a prince from another family spies the hidden castle during a hunting expedition. His attendants tell him differing stories regarding the castle until an old man recounts his father's words: within the castle lies a beautiful princess who is doomed to sleep for a hundred years until a king's son comes and awakens her. The prince then braves the tall trees, brambles and thorns which part at his approach, and enters the castle. He passes the sleeping castle folk and comes across the chamber where the Princess lies asleep on the bed. Struck by the radiant beauty before him, he falls on his knees before her. The enchantment comes to an end by a kiss and the princess awakens and converses with the prince for a long time. Meanwhile, the rest of the castle awakens and go about their business. The prince and princess are later married by the chaplain in the castle chapel.

Part two

After wedding the Princess in secret, the Prince continues to visit her and she bears him two children, Aurore (Dawn) and Jour (Day), unbeknown to his mother, who is of an ogre lineage. When the time comes for the Prince to ascend the throne, he brings his wife, children, and the talabutte ("Count of the Mount").

The Ogress Queen Mother sends the young Queen and the children to a house secluded in the woods and directs her cook to prepare the boy with  Sauce Robert for dinner. The kind-hearted cook substitutes a lamb for the boy, which satisfies the Queen Mother. She then demands the girl but the cook this time substitutes a young goat, which also satisfies the Queen Mother. When the Ogress demands that he serve up the young Queen, the latter offers to slit her throat so that she may join the children that she imagines are dead. While the Queen Mother is satisfied with a hind prepared with Sauce Robert in place of the young Queen, there is a tearful secret reunion of the Queen and her children. However, the Queen Mother soon discovers the cook’s trick and she prepares a tub in the courtyard filled with vipers and other noxious creatures. The King returns in the nick of time and the Ogress, her true nature having been  exposed, throws herself into the tub and is fully consumed. The King, young Queen, and children then live happily ever after.

Basile's narrative

In Giambattista Basile's version of Sleeping Beauty, the Sleeping Beauty is named Talia. By asking wise men and astrologers to predict her future after her birth, her father who is a great lord learns that Talia will be in danger from a splinter of flax. The splinter later causes what appears to be Talia's death; however, it is later learned that it is a long, deep sleep. Unlike the version of Sleeping Beauty known today, Basile's version consists of a more gruesome plot. After the Sleeping Beauty named Talia falls into deep sleep, she is seated on a velvet throne and her father, to forget his misery of what he thinks is her death, closes the doors and abandons the house forever. One day, while a king is walking by, one of his falcons flies into the house. The king knocks, hoping to be let in by someone, but no one answers and he decides to climb in with a ladder. He finds Talia alive but unconscious, and after crying aloud that he is unable to wake her, he carries her to a bed and rapes her. Afterwards, he leaves her in the bed and goes back to his kingdom. Though Talia is unconscious, she gives birth to twins — one of whom keeps sucking her fingers. Talia awakens because the twin has sucked out the flax that was stuck deep in Talia's finger. When she wakes up, she discovers that she is a mother and has no idea what happened to her. One day, the king decides he wants to go see Talia again. He goes back to the palace to find her awake and a mother to his twins. He informs her of who he is, what has happened, and they end up bonding. After a few days, the king has to leave to go back to his realm, but promises Talia that he will return to take her to his kingdom.

When he arrives back in his kingdom, his wife hears him saying "Talia, Sun, and Moon" in his sleep. She bribes and threatens the king's secretary to tell her what is going on. After the queen learns the truth, she pretends she is the king and writes to Talia asking her to send the twins because he wants to see them. Talia sends her twins to the "king" and the queen tells the cook to kill the twins and make dishes out of them. She wants to feed the king his children; instead, the cook takes the twins to his wife and hides them. He then cooks two lambs and serves them as if they were the twins. Every time the king mentions how good the food is, the queen replies, "Eat, eat, you are eating of your own." Later, the queen invites Talia to the kingdom and is going to burn her alive, but the king appears and finds out what’s going on with his children and Talia. He then orders that his wife be burned along with those who betrayed him. Since the cook actually did not obey the queen, the king thanks the cook for saving his children by giving him rewards. The story ends with the king marrying Talia and living happily ever after. 

Sources

There are earlier elements that contributed to the tale. In the medieval courtly romance Perceforest (published in 1528),  a princess named Zellandine falls in love with a man named Troylus. Her father sends him to perform tasks to prove himself worthy of her, and while he is gone, Zellandine falls into an enchanted sleep. Troylus finds her and impregnates her by rape in her sleep; when their child is born, he draws from her finger the flax that caused her sleep. She realizes from the ring he left her that the father was Troylus, who later returns to marry her. 

Earlier influences come from the story of the sleeping Brynhild in the Volsunga saga and the tribulations of saintly female martyrs in early Christian hagiography conventions. It was, in fact, the existence of Brynhild that persuaded the Brothers Grimm to include the story in later editions of their work rather than eliminate it, as they did to other works they deemed to be purely French, stemming from Perrault's work.

The second half, in which the princess and her children are almost put to death, but instead hidden, may have been influenced by Genevieve of Brabant. 

Variants

The princess's name has varied from one adaptation to the other. In Sun, Moon, and Talia, she is named Talia ("Sun" and "Moon" being her twin children). She has no name in Perrault's story but her daughter is called  "Aurore". The Brothers Grimm named her "Briar Rose" in their 1812 collection.  Tchaikovsky's ballet and Disney's version named her Princess Aurora.  John Stejean named her "Rosebud" in TeleStory Presents.

The Brothers Grimm included a variant  Little Briar Rose in their collection (1812). Their version ends when the prince arrives to wake Sleeping Beauty, unlike the stories of Basile and Perrault.  Some translations of the Grimms' tale give the princess the name Rosamond. The brothers considered rejecting the story on the grounds that it was derived from Perrault's version, but the presence of the Brynhild tale convinced them to include it as an authentically German tale. Still, it is the only known German variant of the tale, and Perrault's influence is almost certain. 

The Brothers Grimm also included, in the first edition of their tales, a fragmentary fairy tale, The Evil Mother-in-Law. This story begins with the heroine a married mother of two children, as in the second part of Perrault's tale, and her mother-in-law attempting to eat her and the children. Unlike Perrault's version, the heroine suggested an animal be substituted in the dish, and ends with the heroine's worry that she cannot keep her children from crying and getting the mother-in-law’s attention. Like many German tales showing French influence, it appeared in no subsequent edition. 

Italo Calvino included a variant in Italian Folktales. The cause of her sleep is an ill-advised wish by her mother. As in Pentamerone, the prince rapes her in her sleep and her children are born. He retains the element that the woman who tries to kill the children is the king's mother, not his wife, but adds that she does not want to eat them herself, but instead serves them to the king. His version came from Calabria, but he noted that all Italian versions closely followed Basile's.  

Besides Sun, Moon, and Talia, Basile included another variant of this Aarne-Thompson type, The Young Slave. The Grimms also included a second, more distantly related one, The Glass Coffin. 

Joseph Jacobs noted that the figure of the Sleeping Beauty was in common between this tale and the Gypsy tale The King of England and his Three Sons, in his More English Fairy Tales. 

The hostility of the king's mother to his new bride is repeated in the fairy tale The Six Swans,  and also features The Twelve Wild Ducks, where she is modified to be the king's stepmother. However, these tales omit the attempted cannibalism.

Myth themes

Some folklorists have analyzed Sleeping Beauty as indicating the replacement of the lunar year (with its thirteen months, symbolically depicted by the thirteen fairies) by the solar year (which has twelve, symbolically the invited fairies). The basic elements of the story can also be interpreted as a nature allegory: the princess represents nature, the wicked fairy godmother is winter, who puts the Court to sleep with pricks of frost until the prince (spring) cuts away the brambles with his sword (a sunbeam) to allow the Sun to awaken sleeping princess (nature).

Adaptations

* Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote two poems based on Sleeping Beauty, "Sleeping Beauty" in 1830, and an expanded, rewritten version, "The Day-Dream," in 1842. 
* In 1949, the story was made into a Finnish film, Prinsessa Ruusunen, directed by Edvin Laine and score by Erkki Melartin's incidental music from 1912.
* In 1955, the story was made into a German film, Dornröschen, directed by Fritz Genschow.
* In 1959, Charles Perrault's version and Brothers Grimm's version were adapted into a Walt Disney animated film. The film was notoriously expensive to produce and, at the time, not very successful. However, it has come to be regarded as the quintessential adaptation and a film classic in its own right. It is also notable for expanding the character of Maleficent, the wicked fairy godmother, significantly and features music from the ballet.
* In 1987, Charles Perrault's version was adapted into a musical film direct-to-TV, directed by David Irving.
* In 2009, Mattel Entertainment was supposed to adapt the story into a Barbie film, titled Barbie as the Sleeping Beauty, due to the success of two previous films based on Tchaikovsky's ballets. But everything was shelved because of the trademark controversy, in which the Walt Disney Company acquired the rights for the adaptation of the film.  When the trademark was granted back on January 17, 2012, the film production was completely abandoned. 
* Sleeping Beauty has been popular for many fairytale fantasy retellings. These include Alex Flinn's "A Kiss In Time", Robin McKinley's Spindle's End, Orson Scott Card's Enchantment, Neil Gaiman's The Sleeper and the Spindle, Jane Yolen's Briar Rose, Sophie Masson's Clementine, and Anne Rice's (as A. N. Roquelaure) erotic series Sleeping Beauty Quartet.
* Mercedes Lackey's Elemental Masters novel, The Gates of Sleep, set in Edwardian England, includes many elements from "Sleeping Beauty." A notable difference from the original is that in Lackey's version, the Sleeping Beauty's analogue does not sleep passively waiting for the Prince to wake her, but rather while her body lies unconscious, her spirit is very much awake, waging a magical battle to the death with the witch's analogue.
* Jim C. Hines in Princess Series portrays the prince as raping Sleeping Beauty- AKA Talia- while she slept. After Talia wakes up after giving birth, she uses her gift of grace to become a highly skilled martial artist. She develops a strong dislike of fairies and unrequited feelings of love for her friend and ally, Snow White.
* In the ABC TV show Once Upon a Time, the Sleeping Beauty (named Princess Aurora after the Disney version) is portrayed by Sarah Bolger, and Prince Phillip is played by Julian Morris. Maleficent who is played by Kristin Bauer van Straten appears in a different context, but it is mentioned that she is the one who cursed Princess Aurora and that she once cursed Queen Briar Rose, Princess Aurora's mother, in the same manner. It is later revealed that Queen Briar Rose, Princess Aurora's mother, is the original Sleeping Beauty of the original fairy tale.
* The story is mentioned in passing in a companion to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, "The New Traveller's Almanac." In this world, the family of the Princess (Rosamund) are inbred and are cursed by cataleptic fits. Rosamund's castle is one of many that stand in the Ardennes forests on the Belgian border, three of the others belonging to Bluebeard, the Beast, and the Marquis de Carabas.
* In his 1854 satirical fantasy "The Rose and the Ring," William Makepeace Thackeray used an element from the "Sleeping Beauty" with a reversed meaning: The Fairy Blackstick comes uninvited to the Christening of the Princess Rosalba and wishes the child "a bit of bad luck." But in Thackeray's version, the Fairy meant well and the Princess's bad luck ultimately made her a better and happier person than she would have been.
* In Sheri S. Tepper's novel, Beauty, which won the Locus Award in 1992, the protagonist is the Sleeping Beauty, who is also the mother and grandmother of other classic fairy-tale heroines, and who travels through time and attempts to prevent human overpopulation from destroying the earth.
* In the Sailor Moon manga, the evil witch Nehelennia casts a curse on the objects of celebration, Silver Millennium and Sailor Moon, a story based on the curse in Sleeping Beauty. In the Sailor Moon anime, "Awaken, Sleeping Beauty! Mamoru's Distress," Sailor Moon is fighting two of the Ayakashi sisters from the Black moon when she is put into a deep sleep from which only Mamoru's kiss can wake her. The episode had started with Usagi reading the fairy tale to Chibiusa as a bedtime story.
* Archie Campbell satirized the story with "Beeping Sleauty" in several Hee Haw episodes.
* The fairy tale is used as a framing device in an episode of Dollhouse, where a young orphan objects to the story.  Echo encourages the girl to re-read the story, but to imagine herself in the role of the Prince.
* In 2014, a Walt Disney live-action remake film called Maleficent starring Angelina Jolie as Maleficent and Elle Fanning as Princess Aurora, the Sleeping Beauty, proposed a backstory for the Disney-created villain of the 1959 animated film.
* The computer game series Dark Parables, game one, "Curse of Briar Rose", puts a twist to the original story: Briar didn't wake up when kissed, but the prince died from the curse. The kiss only got rid of the briars, and the good fairies sacrificed themselves to hold them back for another hundred years. The one thing missing to wake Briar is a potion. Now the briars have returned and are spreading across the world, and the player's mission is to find Briar and wake her up, thus ending the curse for good. In the bonus game of the collector's edition, one finds out that Briar has a sister named Ivy Green, who will appear in the next game of the series.
* Anne Sexton wrote an adaptation as a poem called "Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)" in her collection Transformations (1971), a book in which she re-envisions sixteen of the Grimm's Fairy tales. 
* In 2016, The Curse of Sleeping Beauty directed by Pearry Reginald Teo puts a dark spin on the classic fairy tale.

In music

Michele Carafa composed La Belle au Bois Dormant in 1825.

Before Tchaikovsky's version, several ballet productions were based on the "Sleeping Beauty" theme, among one from Eugène Scribe: in the winter of 1828–1829, the French playwright furnished a four-act mimed scenario as a basis for Aumer's choreography of a four-act ballet-pantomime La Belle au Bois Dormant.

Scribe wisely omitted the violence of the second part of Perrault's tale for the ballet, which was set by Hérold and first staged at the Académie Royale in Paris on 27 April 1829. Though Hérold popularized his piece with a piano, Rondo brilliant was based on themes from the music, however he was not successful in getting the ballet staged again.

The fourth movement of Robert Schumann's Märchenbilder depicts scenes from this story.

When Ivan Vsevolozhsky, the Director of the Imperial Theatres in Saint Petersburg, wrote to Tchaikovsky on May 25, 1888 suggesting a ballet based on Perrault's tale, he also cut the violent second half, climaxed the action with the Awakening Kiss, and followed with a conventional festive last act, a series of bravura variations.

In 2008, the American musical trio GrooveLily released Sleeping Beauty Wakes, a concept modern-day album, loosely based on the fairy tale. The songs are part of a homonymous musical with book by Rachel Sheinkin.

Abby Dobson released Sleeping Beauty: You Are the One You Have Been Waiting On - Volumood One, her debut album, loosely based on the fairy tale.

In art

Image:Dornröschen.jpg|"Sleeping Beauty", by Alexander Zick (1845–1907)
Image:Walter Crane12.jpg|"He stands—he stoops to gaze—he kneels—he wakes her with a kiss", woodcut by Walter Crane
Image:Prince Florimund finds the Sleeping Beauty - Project Gutenberg etext 19993.jpg|Prince Florimund finds the "Sleeping Beauty"
File:Sleeping Beauty by Harbour.jpg|Sleeping Beauty by Jenny Harbour
File:La_Belle_au_Bois_Dormant_-_Sixth_of_six_engravings_by_Gustave_Doré.jpg|Perrault's "La Belle au bois dormant" (Sleeping Beauty), illustration by Gustave Doré
File:De_schoone_slaapster_in_het_bosch.jpg|Book cover for a Dutch interpretation of the story by Johann Georg van Caspel
File:Briar Rose - Anne Anderson.jpg|Briar Rose
Image:Brewtnall - Sleeping Beauty.jpg|"Sleeping Beauty" by Edward Frederick Brewtnall
File:Louis Sussmann - Dornröschen - Mutter Erde fec.jpg|Louis Sußmann-Hellborn (1828- 1908) "Sleeping Beauty",
Image:Спящая царевна.jpg|"Sleeping Princess" by Viktor Vasnetsov
Image:Sleeping beauty by Edward Burne-Jones.jpg|The Sleeping Beauty by Sir Edward Burne-Jones
File:Märchenbrunnen Dornröschen.jpg|"Sleeping Beauty", statue in Wuppertal – Germany "Master Cat, or The Booted Cat" (; ), commonly known in English as "Puss in Boots", is a European literary fairy tale about a cat who uses trickery and deceit to gain power, wealth, and the hand of a princess in marriage for his penniless and low-born master. The oldest record of written history dates from Italian author Giovanni Francesco Straparola, who included it in his The Facetious Nights of Straparola (c. 1550–53) in XIV–XV. Another version was published in 1634, by Giambattista Basile with the title Cagliuso. The tale was written in French at the close of the seventeenth century by Charles Perrault (1628–1703), a retired civil servant and member of the Académie française.  The tale appeared in a handwritten and illustrated manuscript two years before its 1697 publication by Barbin in a collection of eight fairy tales by Perrault called Histoires ou contes du temps passé. The book was an instant success and remains popular.

Perrault's Histoires has had considerable impact on world culture. The original Italian title of the first edition was Costantino Fortunato, but was later known as Il gatto con gli stivali (lit. The cat with the boots); the French title was "Histoires ou contes du temps passé, avec des moralités" with the subtitle "Les Contes de ma mère l'Oye" ("Stories or Fairy Tales from Past Times with Morals", subtitled "Mother Goose Tales"). The frontispiece to the earliest English editions depicts an old woman telling tales to a group of children beneath a placard inscribed "MOTHER GOOSE'S TALES" and is credited with launching the Mother Goose legend in the English-speaking world. "Puss in Boots" has provided inspiration for composers, choreographers, and other artists over the centuries. The cat appears in the third act pas de caractère of Tchaikovsky's ballet The Sleeping Beauty, for example,  and makes appearances in other media. Puss in Boots is a popular pantomime in the UK.

Plot

The tale opens with the third and youngest son of a miller receiving his inheritance—a cat. At first, the youngest son laments, as the eldest brother gains the mill, and the middle brother gets the mules. The feline is no ordinary cat, however, but one who requests and receives a pair of boots. Determined to make his master's fortune, the cat bags a rabbit in the forest and presents it to the king as a gift from his master, the fictional Marquis of Carabas. The cat continues making gifts of game to the king for several months.

One day, the king decides to take a drive with his daughter. The cat persuades his master to remove his clothes and enter the river which their carriage passes. The cat disposes of his master's clothing beneath a rock. As the royal coach nears, the cat begins calling for help in great distress. When the king stops to investigate, the cat tells him that his master the Marquis has been bathing in the river and robbed of his clothing. The king has the young man brought from the river, dressed in a splendid suit of clothes, and seated in the coach with his daughter, who falls in love with him at once.

The cat hurries ahead of the coach, ordering the country folk along the road to tell the king that the land belongs to the "Marquis of Carabas", saying that if they do not he will cut them into mincemeat. The cat then happens upon a castle inhabited by an ogre who is capable of transforming himself into a number of creatures. The ogre displays his ability by changing into a lion, frightening the cat, who then tricks the ogre into changing into a mouse. The cat then pounces upon the mouse and devours it. The king arrives at the castle that formerly belonged to the ogre, and, impressed with the bogus Marquis and his estate, gives the lad the princess in marriage. Thereafter, the cat enjoys life as a great lord who runs after mice only for his own amusement. 

The tale is followed immediately by two morals: "one stresses the importance of possessing industrie and savoir faire while the other extols the virtues of dress, countenance, and youth to win the heart of a princess." The Italian translation by Carlo Collodi notes that the tale gives useful advice if you happen to be a cat or a Marquis of Carabas.

This is the theme in France, but other versions of this theme exist in Asia, Africa, and South America.  

Background

Perrault's "The Master Cataa, or Puss in Boots" is the most renowned tale in all of Western folklore of the animal as helper. However, the trickster cat was not Perrault's invention.  Centuries before the publication of Perrault's tale, Somadeva, a Kashmir Brahmin, assembled a vast collection of Indian folk tales called Kathā Sarit Sāgara (lit. "The ocean of the streams of stories") that featured stock fairy tale characters and trappings such as invincible swords, vessels that replenish their contents, and helpful animals. In the Panchatantra (lit. "Five Principles"), a collection of Hindu tales from the fifth century A.D., a tale follows a cat who fares much less well than Perrault's Puss as he attempts to make his fortune in a king's palace. 

In 1553, "Costantino Fortunato", a tale similar to "Le Maître Chat", was published in Venice in Giovanni Francesco Straparola's Le Piacevoli Notti (lit. The Facetious Nights),  the first European storybook to include fairy tales. In Straparola's tale however, the poor young man is the son of a Bohemian woman, the cat is a fairy in disguise, the princess is named Elisetta, and the castle belongs not to an ogre but to a lord who conveniently perishes in an accident. The poor young man eventually becomes King of Bohemia. An edition of Straparola was published in France in 1560. The abundance of oral versions after Straparola's tale may indicate an oral source to the tale; it also is possible Straparola invented the story. 

In 1634, another tale with a trickster cat as hero was published in Giambattista Basile's collection Pentamerone although neither the collection nor the tale were published in France during Perrault's lifetime. In Basile, the lad is a beggar boy called Gagliuso (sometimes Cagliuso) whose fortunes are achieved in a manner similar to Perrault's Puss. However, the tale ends with Cagliuso, in gratitude to the cat, promising the feline a gold coffin upon his death. Three days later, the cat decides to test Gagliuso by pretending to be dead and is mortified to hear Gagliuso tell his wife to take the dead cat by its paws and throw it out the window. The cat leaps up, demanding to know whether this was his promised reward for helping the beggar boy to a better life. The cat then rushes away, leaving his master to fend for himself. In another rendition, the cat performs acts of bravery, then a fairy comes and turns him to his normal state to be with other cats.

It is likely that Perrault was aware of the Straparola tale, since 'Facetious Nights' was translated into French in the C16 and from thence passed into the oral tradition.

Publication

The oldest record of written history was published in Venice by the Italian author Giovanni Francesco Straparola in his The Facetious Nights of Straparola (c. 1550-53) in XIV-XV. His original title was Costantino Fortunato (lit. Lucky Costantino).
 
Le Maître Chat, ou le Chat Botté was later published by Barbin in Paris in January 1697 in a collection of tales called Histoires ou contes du temps passé. The collection included "La Belle au bois dormant" ("The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood"), "Le petit chaperon rouge" ("Little Red Riding Hood"), "La Barbe bleue" ("Blue Beard"), "Les Fées" ("The Enchanted Ones", or "Diamonds and Toads"), "Cendrillon, ou la petite pantoufle de verre" ("Cinderella, or The Little Glass Slipper"), "Riquet à la Houppe" ("Riquet with the Tuft"), and "Le Petit Poucet" ("Hop o' My Thumb"). The book displayed a frontispiece depicting an old woman telling tales to a group of three children beneath a placard inscribed "CONTES DE MA MERE LOYE" (Tales of Mother Goose). The book was an instant success.

Le Maître Chat first was translated into English as "The Master Cat, or Puss in Boots" by Robert Samber in 1729 and published in London for J. Pote and R. Montagu with its original companion tales in Histories, or Tales of Past Times, By M. Perrault.The distinction of being the first to translate the tales into English was long questioned. An edition styled Histories or Tales of Past Times, told by Mother Goose, with Morals. Written in French by M. Perrault, and Englished by G.M. Gent bore the publication date of 1719, thus casting doubt upon Samber being the first translator. In 1951, however, the date was proven to be a misprint for 1799 and Samber's distinction as the first translator was assured. The book was advertised in June 1729 as being "very entertaining and instructive for children".  A frontispiece similar to that of the first French edition appeared in the English edition launching the Mother Goose legend in the English-speaking world.  Samber's translation has been described as "faithful and straightforward, conveying attractively the concision, liveliness and gently ironic tone of Perrault's prose, which itself emulated the direct approach of oral narrative in its elegant simplicity."  Since that publication, the tale has been translated into various languages and published around the world.

Question of authorship

Perrault's son Pierre Darmancour was assumed to have been responsible for the authorship of Histoires with the evidence cited being the book's dedication to Élisabeth Charlotte d'Orléans, the youngest niece of Louis XIV, which was signed "P. Darmancour". Perrault senior, however, long was known to have been interested in contes de veille or contes de ma mère l'oye, and in 1693 published a versification of "Les Souhaits Ridicules" and, in 1694, a tale with a Cinderella theme called "Peau d'Ane". Further, a handwritten and illustrated manuscript of five of the tales (including Le Maistre Chat ou le Chat Botté) existed two years before the tale's 1697 Paris publication. Pierre Darmancour was sixteen or seventeen years old at the time the manuscript was prepared and, as scholars Iona and Peter Opie note, quite unlikely to have been interested in recording fairy tales. Darmancour, who became a soldier, showed no literary inclinations, and, when he died in 1700, his obituary made no mention of any connection with the tales. However, when Perrault senior died in 1703, the newspaper alluded to his being responsible for "La Belle au bois dormant", which the paper had published in 1696.

Adaptations

Perrault's tale has been adapted to various media over the centuries. Ludwig Tieck published a dramatic satire based on the tale, called Der gestiefelte Kater,  and, in 1812, the Brothers Grimm inserted a version of the tale into their Kinder- und Hausmärchen.  In ballet, Puss appears in the third act of Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty in a pas de caractère with The White Cat. In film and television, Walt Disney produced an animated black and white silent short based on the tale in 1922.  It was also adapted into a manga by the famous Japanese writer and director Hayao Miyazaki in 1969, and in the mid-1980s, Puss in Boots was televised as an episode of Faerie Tale Theatre with Ben Vereen and Gregory Hines in the cast.  Another version from the Cannon Movie Tales series features Christopher Walken as Puss, who in this adaptation is a cat who turns into a human when wearing the boots. Another adaptation of the character with little relation to the story was in the Pokémon anime episode "Like a Meowth to a Flame," where a Meowth owned by the character Tyson wore boots, a hat, and a neckerchief. DreamWorks Animation released the animated feature Puss in Boots, with Antonio Banderas reprising his voice-over role from the Shrek films, on November 4, 2011. This new film's story bears no similarities to the book. The cat food named Puss n Boots is owned by Retrobrands USA LLC and is available in the USA and Canada.

Commentaries

Jacques Barchilon and Henry Pettit note in their introduction to The Authentic Mother Goose: Fairy Tales and Nursery Rhymes that the main motif of "Puss in Boots" is the animal as helper and that the tale "carries atavistic memories of the familiar totem animal as the father protector of the tribe found everywhere by missionaries and anthropologists." They also note that the title is original with Perrault as are the boots; no tale prior to Perrault's features a cat wearing boots. 

Folklorists Iona and Peter Opie observe that "the tale is unusual in that the hero little deserves his good fortune, that is if his poverty, his being a third child, and his unquestioning acceptance of the cat's sinful instructions, are not nowadays looked upon as virtues." The cat should be acclaimed the prince of 'con' artists, they declare, as few swindlers have been so successful before or since. The success of Histoires is attributed to seemingly contradictory and incompatible reasons. While the literary skill employed in the telling of the tales has been recognized universally, it appears the tales were set down in great part as the author heard them told. The evidence for that assessment lies first in the simplicity of the tales, then in the use of words that were, in Perrault's era, considered populaire and du bas peuple, and finally, in the appearance of vestigial passages that now are superfluous to the plot, do not illuminate the narrative, and thus, are passages the Opies believe a literary artist would have rejected in the process of creating a work of art. One such vestigial passage is Puss's boots; his insistence upon the footwear is explained nowhere in the tale, it is not developed, nor is it referred to after its first mention except in an aside. 

According to the Opies, Perrault's great achievement was accepting fairy tales at "their own level." He neither recounted them with impatience nor mockery, and without feeling that they needed any aggrandisement such as a frame story—although he must have felt it useful to end with a rhyming moralité. Perrault would be revered today as the father of folklore if he had taken the time to record where he obtained his tales, when, and under what circumstances.

Bruno Bettelheim remarks that "the more simple and straightforward a good character in a fairy tale, the easier it is for a child to identify with it and to reject the bad other." The child identifies with a good hero because the hero's condition makes a positive appeal to him. If the character is a very good person, then the child is likely to want to be good too. Amoral tales, however, show no polarization or juxtaposition of good and bad persons because amoral tales such as "Puss in Boots" build character, not by offering choices between good and bad, but by giving the child hope that even the meekest can survive. Morality is of little concern in these tales, but rather, an assurance is provided that one can survive and succeed in life.  Small children can do little on their own and may give up in disappointment and despair with their attempts. Fairy stories, however, give great dignity to the smallest achievements (such as befriending an animal or being befriended by an animal, as in "Puss in Boots") and that such ordinary events may lead to great things. Fairy stories encourage children to believe and trust that their small, real achievements are important although perhaps not recognized at the moment. 

In Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion Jack Zipes notes that Perrault "sought to portray ideal types to reinforce the standards of the civilizing process set by upper-class French society". A composite portrait of Perrault's heroines, for example, reveals the author's idealized female of upper-class society is graceful, beautiful, polite, industrious, well groomed, reserved, patient, and even somewhat stupid because for Perrault, intelligence in womankind would be threatening. Therefore, Perrault's composite heroine passively waits for "the right man" to come along, recognize her virtues, and make her his wife. He acts, she waits. If his seventeenth century heroines demonstrate any characteristics, it is submissiveness. 

A composite of Perrault's male heroes, however, indicates the opposite of his heroines: his male characters are not particularly handsome, but they are active, brave, ambitious, and deft, and they use their wit, intelligence, and great civility to work their way up the social ladder and to achieve their goals. In this case of course, it is the cat who displays the characteristics and the man benefits from his trickery and skills. Unlike the tales dealing with submissive heroines waiting for marriage, the male-centered tales suggest social status and achievement are more important than marriage for men. The virtues of Perrault's heroes reflect upon the bourgeoisie of the court of Louis XIV and upon the nature of Perrault, who was a successful civil servant in France during the seventeenth century.

According to fairy and folk tale researcher and commentator Jack Zipes, Puss is "the epitome of the educated bougeois secretary who serves his master with complete devotion and diligence." The cat has enough wit and manners to impress the king, the intelligence to defeat the ogre, and the skill to arrange a royal marriage for his low-born master. Puss's career is capped by his elevation to grand seigneur  and the tale is followed by a double moral: "one stresses the importance of possessing industrie et savoir faire while the other extols the virtues of dress, countenance, and youth to win the heart of a princess."

The renowned illustrator of Dickens' novels and stories, George Cruikshank, was shocked that parents would allow their children to read "Puss in Boots" and declared: "As it stood the tale was a succession of successful falsehoods—a clever lesson in lying!—a system of imposture rewarded with the greatest worldly advantages."

Another critic, Maria Tatar, notes that there is little to admire in Puss—he threatens, flatters, deceives, and steals in order to promote his master. She further observes that Puss has been viewed as a "linguistic virtuoso", a creature who has mastered the arts of persuasion and rhetoric to acquire power and wealth.  "Puss in Boots" has successfully supplanted its antecedents by Straparola and Basile and the tale has altered the shapes of many older oral trickster cat tales where they still are found. The morals Perrault attached to the tales are either at odds with the narrative, or beside the point. The first moral tells the reader that hard work and ingenuity are preferable to inherited wealth, but the moral is belied by the poor miller's son who neither works nor uses his wit to gain worldly advantage, but marries into it through trickery performed by the cat. The second moral stresses womankind's vulnerability to external appearances: fine clothes and a pleasant visage are enough to win their hearts. In an aside, Tatar suggests that if the tale has any redeeming meaning, "it has something to do with inspiring respect for those domestic creatures that hunt mice and look out for their masters." 
Briggs does assert that cats were a form of fairy in their own right having something akin to a fairy court and their own set of magical powers. Still, it is rare in Europe's fairy tales for a cat to be so closely involved with human affairs. According to Jacob Grimm, Puss shares many of the features that a household fairy or deity would have including a desire for boots which could represent seven-league boots. This may mean that the story of "Puss and Boots" originally represented the tale of a family deity aiding an impoverished family member. 

Stefan Zweig, in his 1939 novel, Ungeduld des Herzens, references Puss in Boots' procession through a rich and varied countryside with his master and drives home his metaphor with a mention of Seven League Boots.
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