2 contributed an even fuller list to the
_Hand Book of Folk-Lore_. Most, if not all of these formulae, have been
found in all the countries of Europe where folk-tales have been
collected. In 1893 Miss M. Roalfe Cox brought together, in a volume of
the Folk-Lore Society, no less than 345 variants of "Cinderella" and
kindred stories showing how widespread this particular formula was
throughout Europe and how substantially identical the various
incidents as reproduced in each particular country.

It has occurred to me that it would be of great interest and, for
folk-lore purposes, of no little importance, to bring together these
common Folk-Tales of Europe, retold in such a way as to bring out the
original form from which all the variants were derived. I am, of
course, aware of the difficulty and hazardous nature of such a
proceeding; yet it is fundamentally the same as that by which scholars
are accustomed to restore the _Ur_-text from the variants of different
families of MSS. and still more similar to the process by which Higher
Critics attempt to restore the original narratives of Holy Writ. Every
one who has had to tell fairy tales to children will appreciate the
conservative tendencies of the child mind; every time you vary an
incident the children will cry out, "That was not the way you told us
before." The Folk-Tale collections can therefore be assumed to retain
the original readings with as much fidelity as most MSS. That there
was such an original rendering eminating from a single folk artist no
serious student of Miss Cox's volume can well doubt. When one finds
practically the same "tags" of verse in such different dialects as
Danish and Romaic, German and Italian, one cannot imagine that these
sprang up independently in Denmark, Greece, Germany, and Florence. The
same phenomenon is shown in another field of Folk-Lore where, as the
late Mr. Newell showed, the same rhymes are used to brighten up the
same children's games in Barcelona and in Boston; one cannot imagine
them springing up independently in both places. So, too, when the same
incidents of a fairy tale follow in the same artistic concatenation in
Scotland, and in Sicily, in Brittany, and in Albania, one cannot but
assume that the original form of the story was hit upon by one
definite literary artist among the folk. What I have attempted to do
in this book is to restore the original form, which by a sort of
international selection has spread throughout