Campbell’s tale can clearly lay no claim to represent the original type of Cinderella.  The golden shoes are a gift of the hero to the heroine which destroys the whole point of the Shoe marriage test, and cannot have been in the original, wherever it originated.  Mr. Macleod’s version, however, contains an incident which seems to bring us nearer to the original form than any version contained in Miss Cox’s book.  Throughout the variants it will be observed what an important function is played by the helpful animal.  This in some of the versions is left as a legacy by the heroine’s dying mother.  But in Mr. Macleod’s version the helpful animal, a sheep, is the heroine’s mother herself!  This is indeed an archaic touch, which seems to hark back to primitive times and totemistic beliefs.  And more important still, it is a touch which vitalises the other variants in which the helpful animal is rather dragged in by the horns.  Mr. Nutt’s lucky find at the last moment seems to throw more light on the origin of the tale than almost the whole of the remaining collection.

But does this find necessarily prove an original Celtic origin for Cinderella?  Scarcely.  It remains to be proved that this introductory part of the story with helpful animal was necessarily part of the original.  Having regard to the feudal character underlying the whole conception, it remains possible that the earlier part was ingeniously dovetailed on to the latter from some pre-existing and more archaic tale, perhaps that represented by the Grimms’ One Eyed, Two Eyes, and Three Eyes.  The possibility of the introduction of an archaic formula which had become a convention of folk-telling cannot be left out of account.

The “Youngest-best” formula which occurs in Cinderella, and on which Mr. Lang laid much stress in his treatment of the subject in his “Perrault” as a survival of the old tenure of “junior right,” does not throw much light on the subject.  Mr. Ralston, in the Nineteenth Century, 1879, was equally unenlightening with his sun-myths.

[Footnote 2:  Chamber’s II. consists entirely and solely of these incidents.]

LXXIV.  KING O’ CATS

Source.—­I have taken a point here and a point there from the various English versions mentioned in the next section.

I have expanded the names, so as to make a jingle from the Dildrum and Doldrum of Hartland.

Parallels.—­Five variants of this quaint legend have been collected in England:  (1) Halliwell, Pop.  Rhymes, 167, “Molly Dixon”; (2) Choice Notes—­Folk-Lore, p. 73, “Colman Grey”; (3) Folk-Lore Journal, ii., 22, “King o’ the Cats”; (4) Folk-Lore—­England (Gibbings), “Johnny Reed’s Cat”; (5) Hartland and Wilkinson, Lancashire Legends, p. 13, “Dildrum Doldrum.”  Sir F. Palgrave gives a Danish parallel; cf. Halliwell, l.c.