#delarue-teneze

[adarkrainbow]

Given @princesssarisa has been sharing thoughts and infos about the French variations of Cinderella I just wish to add a little info which might be of interest for those into Cinderella stuff.

I have spoken before of what the Delarue-Tenèze is, but if you missed the post, here is a freshener. Delarue-Tenèze is the French equivalent of the European Aarne-Thompson (or ATU if you expand it a bit more). "Delarue-Tenèze" is the shortened form of the name of the two authors of this work (Paul Delarue and Marie-Louise Tenèze), who created "Le Conte populaire français, Catalogue raisonné des versions de France et des pays de langue française d'outre-mer" (The French folk-tale, Reasoned catalogue of the variants of France and of French-speaking countries beyond-sea). The Delarue-Tenèze is the complete typification, classification and catalogue of French folktales and oral fairytales, a "local ATU" if you wish. It does take into account the most famous literary variations of some fairytales (such as Perrault and d'Aulnoy's texts) but only in regard of how their massive popularity caused them to influence and "return" to the domain of orality and folklore (such as how Perrault invented the "red" in Little Red Riding Hood, and the "boots" in Puss in Boots, and as such in the centuries following his publication these elements became part of the oral-told folktales).

And when it comes to Cinderella, the Delarue-Tenèze highlights how in the French folktale tradition the Cinderella-type is not at all a type in itself, but rather one sub-type of a larger fairytale story.

This was already higlighted by the ATU itself, which classified them as the two sides of the "Persecuted Heroine" fairytale type (510A and 510B), but "Cinderella" and "Donkeyskin" in oral fairytales are closely related, frequently overlaping, and regularly confused, and even more so in French oral tales - it needed a Perrault's intervention to cut clear those two types of fairytales.

But here is where the Delarue-Tenèze takes a further step as opposed to the ATU: the Delarue-Tenèze adds a third variation to this "Persecuted Heroine" type, one that the ATU had classified as its own type (511), "One-Eye, Two-Eyes, and Three-Eyes". While for the ATU this fairytale type is close enough to Donkeyskin/Cinderella to be right next to them in the list, but different enough to be its own thing, for the Delarue-Tenèze "One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three-Eyes" should be, in the context of French folktales, the "510C", due to being much too close and much too linked to the previous two types to be separate.

This is notably why the Delarue-Tenèze, which usually has an "analysis" segment for each fairytale type, decided to do one single analysis for all these three "categories", insisting upon how the intricate relationship and confused similarities between the three make it impossible to clearly set them apart in the oral tradition. As such, in the folklore of France, "Cinderella", "Donkey-skin" and "One Eye, Two Eyes, Three Eyes", are just one and the same. (As opposed to the literary tradition where Cinderella and Donkeyskin are clearly separate, and One Eye Two Eye Three Eyes is unknown)