"How did the story of Cinderella come?"
The Cinderella we think is not the reality. But that's the Disney Cinderella, the one from the 1950 animated film and the new remake in theaters right now.
The real Cinderella isn't so easily defined. She is a character who weaves together centuries of storytelling and most human cultures.
And sometimes her forgotten slipper isn't even glass.
"The first Cinderella was Greek"
There are two faces to Cinderella: there's the European folk tale that evolved into the modern-day story of a girl in a big blue ball gown, and there's the centuries-old plot that has been passed between cultures for millennia.
The story of overcoming oppression and marrying into another social class to be saved from a family that doesn't love or appreciate is an incredibly powerful one, too powerful to be contained by the story we all know. At the center of most Cinderella stories(whether they use that name for their protagonist or not) is one thing: a persecuted heroine who rises above her social station through marriage.
The first recorded story featuring Cinderella-like figures dates to Greece in the sixth century BCE. In that ancient story, a Greek courtesan named Rhodopis has one of her shoes stolen by an eagle, who flies it across the Mediterranean and drops it in the lap of an Egyptian king.
Taking the shoe drop as a sign from the heavens (literally and metaphorically), the king goes on a quest to find the owner of the shoe. When he finds Rhodopis, he marries her, lifting her from her lowly status to the throne.
Another one of the earliest known Cinderella stories is the ninth-century Chinese fairy tale Ye Xian, in which a young girl named Ye Xian is granted one wish from some magical fish bones, which she uses to create a gown in the hopes of finding a husband.
Like Rhodopis' tale, a monarch comes in possession of the shoe(this time, the shoe has a gold fish-scale pattern) and goes on a quest to find the women whose tiny feet will fit the shoe. Ye Xian's beauty convinces the king to marry her, and the mean stepmother is crushed by stones in her cave home.
" The European version of the story originated in the 17th century"
In total, more than 500 versions of the Cinderella story have been found just in Europe, and the Cinderella we know best comes from there (France, specifically).
The first version of Cinderella that bears a significant similarity to the most famous version emerged in the 17th century, when a story called Cenerentola was published in a collection of Italian short stories. Cenerentola has all the ingredients of the modern-day tale—the wicked stepmother and stepsisters, the magic, and the missing slipper—but it's darker and just a bit more magical.
In the story, a woman named Zezolla escapes the king, who wants to marry her, at two separate celebrations—before he finally catches her at the 3rd one and prevents her from living. Instead of a story of required love, Cenerentola is a story of forced marriage and six very wicked stepsisters.
60 years later, the Italian tale got a French twist and became the story we know. In Centillion, Charles Perrault— a French writer credited with inventing the fairy tales — cast the form that Cinderella would take for the next 400 years. He introduced the glass slipper, the pumpkin, and the fairy godmother(minus the Bidibidi Bobbi boo). This is the version Disney later adopted into it's animated classic.
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