Pepelyouga (Serbia)

This is a pretty drastic retelling. The story begins with a clumsy mistake by Pepelyouga (Cinderella), where she drops her basket off of a cliff. Because of this, her mother is turned into a cow. The father remarries, and the step-mother challenges Pepelyouga to spin a top out of hemp. Pepelyouga almost fails, but is assisted by a cow who turns out to be her mother. The step-mother has this cow slaughtered, and Pepelyouga makes sure that the bones receive proper burial (this moment of the tale definitely borrows from The Juniper Tree).
Soon, she is ordered to clean up millet while her family goes to church. She receives help at the tree where her mother's bones rest, finds new clothes in a treasure chest, and goes to church, where she meets a prince (This adds a religious moral to the tale). This church service happens three times, and on the third time, she runs off too quickly and loses her golden slipper.
The ending is exactly the same as the other tales. The prince goes door to door, making women try on the golden slipper. However, what is interesting is that after Pepelyouga and the Prince get married, absolutely nothing happens to the step-family. No one is punished or rewarded other than Pepelyouga.

The Wicked Stepmother from Kashmir

I found “The Wicked Stepmother” (from Kashmir) on Ashliman’s folk site to be very interesting. In it, a husband and wife promise each other not to eat anything, lest they turn into animals. One day, the husband came home to find a goat in his house, and knew it must be his wife, so he kept it tied up in the yard. The husband remarried, and the new wife was mean to the children and would not feed them, so the goat told her children to tap her horns with a stick and food would fall down. The stepmother was confused about how the children were getting bigger and stronger, so she sent her one-eyed daughter to watch them for a day and note where they got any food. Then, the stepmother faked an illness and convinced the doctor to have the goat killed and eaten as a remedy. The children were instructed by the goat to gather her bones and bury them and then food would be provided, and it was. One day, one of the daughters was washing her face in a river when her nose ring fell out and a fish ate it. The Prince’s cook found the ring in the fish, and the Prince wanted its owner to find him. He was so enamored with her beauty that he married her and provided for her family.

I thought this version of Cinderella was so interesting because of its staggering differences from the version I was brought up with. First, the Prince does not have parties to meet his wife. He simply wants to return a nose ring to its owner, and happens to find her beautiful. He did not have any goal of finding a Queen. Second, the man’s first wife did not die, but rather was turned into an animal and then acted as the “fairy godmother.” In the versions I am used to, the wife dies and another person acts as fairy godmother. Third, there is not a rivalry between the children of the first wife and the child of the second wife. The only resentment happens between the new wife and the old children. The lack of evil step-sisters really surprised me. Overall, the differences between cultures leading to the extremely different Cinderella stories are what brought my attention to this tale.

The Baba Yaga February 24, 2009

I thought The Baba Yaga story from Ashliman's site was very interesting. In this Russian tale, There is no stepsister, only a stepmother who attempts to kill the girl by sending her to the woman's sister. The girl realizes that her step-aunt is a Baba Yaga, or a witch who likes to eat small children so she goes to her other aunt to get advice. This aunt gives her tools to escape the Baba Yaga by feeding the Baba Yaga's dogs and cats who would harm her, oiling doors that would squeak and alert the Baba Yaga that she is escaping, and other things of that nature. When the girl goes to the Baba Yaga like her stepmother makes her she does these things and escapes. She returns home and her father finds out what her stepmother attempted to do, shoots her dead, and the father and daughter live on and flourished.
I thought the absence of a stepsister was significant. That seems to focus the conflict between the stepmother and the girl. Another interesting thing was the lack of a prince figure. There was no love story in the tale unlike the other Cinderella tales we have read. A similarity between this tale and the others is that the stepmother is defeated in the end, but a new twist is that the father himself shot the woman and took a more active role in protecting his daughter.

Audra Crosby

Assignment: 24 February 2009

Look through the sites below and choose either an illustration(s) or a version of the Cinderella story which we have not read for class and respond to it.

• D. L. Ashliman’s folktale site
• Sur La Lune
• The Cinderella Project at the University of Mississippi