You can fix it via:
or
Old Tumblr Dashboard (July 2023) 1. Install the Stylus extension 2. then install the actual script for the fix
God bless people who code these things. I love you all.
You guys rlly don't realise how much knowledge is still not committed to the internet. I find books all the time with stuff that is impossible to find through a search engine- most people do not put their magnum opus research online for free and the more niche a skill is the less likely you are to have people who will leak those books online. (Nevermind all the books written prior to the internet that have knowledge that is not considered "relevant" enough to digitise).
Whenever people say that we r growing up with all the world's knowledge at our fingertips...it's not necessarily true. Is the amount of knowledge online potentially infinite? Yes. Is it all knowledge? No. You will be surprised at the niche things you can discover at a local archive or library.
i wish i was one of those girls from classical mythology……. i could just turn into a cypress tree or a crystalline lake and be done with it
“It is extraordinary that nobody nowadays under the stress of great troubles is turned into stone or a bird or a tree or some inanimate object; they used to undergo such metamorphoses in ancient times (or so they say), though whether that is myth or a true story I know not. Maybe it would be better to change one’s nature into something that lacks all feeling, rather than be so sensitive to evil. Had that been possible, these calamities would in all probability have turned me to stone.” ― Anna Comnena, The Alexiad, written ca. 1148
"When considering the great victories of America’s conservationists, we tend to think of the sights and landscapes emblematic of the West, but there’s also a rich history of acknowledging the value of the wetlands of America’s south.
These include such vibrant ecosystems as the Everglades, the Great Dismal Swamp, the floodplains of the Congaree River, and “America’s Amazon” also known as the “Land Between the Rivers”—recently preserved forever thanks to generous donors and work by the Nature Conservancy (TNC).
With what the TNC described as an “unprecedented gift,” 8,000 acres of pristine wetlands where the Alabama and Tombigbee Rivers join, known as the Mobile Delta, were purchased for the purpose of conservation for $15 million. The owners chose to sell to TNC rather than to the timber industry which planned to log in the location.
“This is one of the most important conservation victories that we’ve ever been a part of,” said Mitch Reid, state director for The Nature Conservancy in Alabama.
The area is filled with oxbow lakes, creeks, and swamps alongside the rivers, and they’re home to so many species that it ranks as one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth, such that Reid often jokes that while it has rightfully earned the moniker “America’s Amazon” the Amazon should seriously consider using the moniker “South America’s Mobile.”
“This tract represents the largest remaining block of land that we can protect in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta. First and foremost, TNC is doing this work for our fellow Alabamians who rightly pride themselves on their relationship with the outdoors,” said Reid, who told Advance Local that it can connect with other protected lands to the north, in an area called the Red Hills.
“Conservation lands in the Delta positions it as an anchor in a corridor of protected lands stretching from the Gulf of Mexico to the Appalachian Mountains and has long been a priority in TNC’s ongoing efforts to establish resilient and connected landscapes across the region.”
At the moment, no management plan has been sketched out, but TNC believes it must allow the public to use it for recreation as much as possible.
The money for the purchase was provided by a government grant and a generous, anonymous donor, along with $5.2 million from the Holdfast Collective—the conservation funding body of Patagonia outfitters."
Video via Mobile Bay National Estuary Program, August 7, 2020
Article via Good News Network, February 14, 2024
if it's covered on your formulary (that i had to fight you to give me) without step therapy or prior authorization requirements why are you telling me it has step therapy AND prior authorization requirements?
I’m just thinking about how many times I’ve heard my dad on a long call with an obvious scammer and I’ll start begging him to get off the phone because I always think he’s a very easy mark and he’ll just keep going and then after a while he’ll say something like “I died 20 years ago” and hang up.
Virgin Millennial Daughter with 20 hrs of screentime a day: Dad! They’re scamming you! Dad! Stop! They will take your savings and your identity! Hang up before they SWAT you!
Chad Boomer dad with a flip phone he has not recharged since 2014: Well gee I wish I could give you my bank account number after you spent all this time on the phone explaining this car deal with me but I don’t have access to my finances because I am in Rikers for felony murder.
I haven't actively used this site in years but this grabbed my imagination so thoroughly I had to draw it
It seems to be understood, at least through the southern US, that "bless his/her/your heart" is a thinly veiled insult. However, when I was growing up, technically southern, my mother always used it more literally. F'rinstance, if I took her flowers she might say "Oh, bless your heart" and would 100% mean it. Based on that example, I use it the same way. I've wondered a little about that, since I realized how other people mean it.
Anyhow. I posted a scan of a letter from my great grandmother (daughter of Irish immigrants on both sides) to my grandmother dated 1944. At the end of that she refers to a Valentine's card that my very young mother had sent to her, and added "Bless her heart." Clearly meaning it sincerely. It made me wonder if the southern Bless-your-heart met up with the Irish diaspora tendency to use the term 'Bless' frequently and literally and created a little coal-mining-town pocket of folks who say it when they're truly delighted with someone or something.
Just pondering. Anyone else out there use B-y-h in a positive, loving way? Is Bless-your-heart George's Creek* an outlier that should not be counted?
'* George's Creek follows a major Appalachian coal seam and has lots of tiny, defunct mining towns.
The consensus in the notes is that there is a fair amount of positive or mixed use of this term, more than I would have guessed. Apparently the positive use is fairly frequent and the negative connotation just gets talked about more. Thanks to those who responded!
My understanding of the usage is that the insincere version wouldn't work if the sincere meaning wasn't around. It's not a direct insult, it's a backhanded compliment.
Even when it's used to indicate the negative behavior of another party, there's still a wide variety of usage from "You are endearing" to "I'm trying to be genuinely compassionate with gentle humor while acknowledging the complexity of the human experience (and the fact that we're all learning)" to "I am spitting poison at you and maybe even baiting you because when you flip out and cuss me out, you'll be the aggressor because I am being scrupulously polite."
I will say that in my part of the US south it was used more as a tone-softener and less like a genuine blessing (you wouldn't write it in a valentine), but the usage may have been different among older folks. Actually, I think when I'm thinking about 'sweet little old church ladies' growing up, they would use it sincerely, usually in a context of expressing gratitude. Usage really does depend on whether you're using the second or third person, I think (whether it's said of you to your face, or of someone else not present).
Among the younger crowd, it was often used kindly, but usually in the context of either 1) acknowledging human folly with good-natured humor (of a teen: shortly after discovering body odor, he discovered axe body spray, bless his heart), or 2) acknowledging that something really sucks or that someone is persevering despite really difficult circumstances (said with genuine admiration or pity, like when someone goes through one family trial after another or has multiple deaths in the family).
As I'm writing this out, I'm realizing that in my experience, you can say it about someone who's stubborn or ignorant with a tone ranging from loving to backhanded to aggressive, and you can also say it in admiration, compassion, or pity for someone who's going through something terrible.
"Despite years of relentless attacks and dehumanizing rhetoric, LGBTQ+ people and our allies have never given up the fight for Florida."
here’s a compilation of different people driving box trucks into a low bridge over and over
It’s worth knowing a few fun facts, courtesy of 11foot8.com:
The guy who runs the website (and owns the cameras) says he sees a lot more trucks pull up to the stoplight, look at the warnings, and turn off onto the side road, but about once a month, someone hits the bridge.
the penske business is probably sick of this shit
Since all the information is from 2017, here some updates from April 2022 according the website 11foot8.com
connection
The ask implied, that foldable rulers are not super common to use or own outside of Germany, and now I am wondering about exact demographics and why. Pls spread and add your country in the tags if you want. I can not imagine owning a tool box without one of these. And no, I am not talking about measuring tape, I specifically mean these foldable rulers. They also exist with cm + inch measurements.
EDIT: I specifically mean the item from the image. A long ruler, 1-3m long, can have inch + cm, or just cm measurememts, and it may be called a folding ruler or folding rule. The reddit post called it a foldable ruler however, hence I used this term.
I have a question for the non-Germans in the audience: how tf do you measure Long Things???
I think in the US we primarily use these things:
or a yard/meter stick if it's shorter, but our yard sticks typically look like this:
In Cinderella Tales From Around the World, I've now reached the tales from Sweden and Norway.
*In many of these variants, just like in many versions from Great Britain and Ireland and some from Denmark, the Cinderella character is a princess by birth, and her stepmother is a queen. At first it odd strange to me that a princess should be forced to clean, cook, and pasture animals, when royalty should have servants for those things. But then I remembered Disney's Snow White and how the wicked Queen forces Snow White to work as a scullery maid. In fairy tales, that sort of thing can happen.
*Whether there are two stepsisters or one can vary, though most often there's just one. But in all these versions, the heroine's abusers are a stepmother and stepsisters – neither Sweden nor Norway seems to have variants where she's abused by her biological family.
*In a few Swedish versions, the heroine is known as "Crow-Cloak," because her stepfamily forces her to wear a cloak of crow feathers. But in most others, as in other countries, she has a nickname related to cinders or ashes.
*The heroine's helpers in the Swedish versions come in a wide variety: a pike in a well, an ermine, an old man, a bird, a black ox, a midwife, a mountain troll, or even a magical apple, pear, and plum.
*The theme of the heroine being ordered to sort or prepare peas or grain, and her helper doing it for her, reappears in several versions.
*Almost all Swedish and Norwegian versions have the heroine go to church in her finery, not a ball or festival. Just one Swedish version, Askungen, has a ball instead, and that version seems heavily influenced by Perrault, because so far it's the only other version I've seen with a pumpkin transformed into a coach (along with rats into horses and caterpillars into footmen), and one of the very few where she has to leave by midnight.
*As in the Danish versions, the heroine usually says "Light before! Darkness behind!" to prevent anyone from following her from home to church or vice-versa.
*The theme of the stepsister(s) cutting her/their feet to make the shoe fit, but a bird revealing the trick, is once again constant.
*Several different Norwegian variants are called Kari Woodencloak, or in some English translations, Katie Woodencloak. As her name implies, this Cinderella figure does her dirty work wearing a dress made from boards of wood.
**The most famous of these versions, the one collected by Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, is another variation on the "abused stepdaughter runs away with her magical bull" theme. Kari is a princess whose wicked queen stepmother tries to starve her, but the bull magically feeds her each day, until the stepmother finds out and plans to kill the bull, so they flee. The bull is forced to fight three trolls, which leaves him gravely wounded, and he implores Kari to kill him, then lay his skin under a stone. Sadly she obeys, and from then on whenever she knocks on that stone, her wishes are granted. The story then, of course, becomes a Donkeyskin/All-Kinds-of-Fur variant as she becomes a scullery maid at the castle of the prince, who treats her scornfully, only to fall in love with her when she comes to church dressed in magical finery.
***There are Swedish variants almost identical to this one too. Although they don't include the wooden dress, and in one of them, the bull is replaced by a white bear.
**There are other, simpler Kari Woodencloak tales too, though. One is like Cinderella meets Puss in Boots: Kari inherits only a pet cat when her parents die, so she and the cat set out to seek their fortune, she becomes a castle scullery maid, and the cat becomes her helper, who hunts animals and sells them to the king, then uses the money to buy finery for Kari. Others are more standard Cinderella tales where Kari doesn't leave home, but simply slaves for her stepmother; in one of these, she gets her finery from a mysterious hill where disembodied voices speak, and another is like a vastly simplified version of Asbjørnsen and Moe's, where the stepmother kills Kari's bull and Kari then gets her finery from his grave.
*There are many other Norwegian variants too. The heroine's various helpers in these versions include her mother's spirit, a bird, several birds, a mysterious old woman from inside a hill, or a fairy who appears from inside a lime tree and calls herself "the lime tree queen." (In virtually all the Scandinavian versions that include a magical tree, it's a lime tree, just like it's usually a hazel tree in Germany.)
*In some Norwegian versions, the stepmother is a sorceress who magically imprisons the father and forces him to marry her against his will at the beginning.
*At least two Norwegian versions continue after the heroine's marriage; her stepsister throws her into the sea and takes her place, but she comes back in the form of a duck, and her husband eventually breaks the spell.
Next stops: Finland, Estonia, and Russia.
For the princess forced to cook, clean and whatnot, if there had been an Icelandic version I could have explained it, because I read a book about the "olden days" in Iceland and it explained how the lords and royalty of old Iceland did not live in "castles" as we understand it today, but rather lived in very big, very large farms - mega-farms if you want... But I don't think it applies to Sweden or Norway X)
Yes, the pumpkin into coach and similar transformations was an invention of Perrault - even in France we have identified that, since the old "folkloric" versions of the tale do not have any fairy godmother. Similarly, in French "countryside versions" the ball also becomes the mass at Church - I'll drift a bit around a general thing true in many European countries, but people tend to forget how important the Sunday mass was in old European countryside in Christian countries. It wasn't just a religious gathering each Sunday - it was also usually a time where the entire village gathered together in a same building, it was a time where people were forced to appear before each other and had to look good (not just for the Church, where you had to appear in your finest clothes, but also for others, because people could judge you on your behavior each Sunday - in many folktales fairy-wives or supernatural-brides are discriminated upon when they don't come to the big village mass each Sunday, or when they act weird there) ; and by extension, the Sunday mass was also the time for villagers all gathered here to strike various deals and bargains - ranging from an almost unofficial market to arranged weddings. It was a big, big social event, and thus explains why in many Cinderella versions it easily replaces a royal ball.
I am also going to comment I always kind of smile at the version of Cinderella or other abused-heroine where she is secretly fed by a magical animal because in several I found out, there is an explicit mention of the heroine becoming fat due to the magical animal's help, and so we have canon plus-size Cinderellas in these stories. Body-positivity wins in folktales Xp
It is so fascinating to have a Cinderella meets Puss in Boots - due to the old "She-Cat in the ashes" and all that...
The mysterious hill where disembodied voices speak is definitively an elf-hill (or a "hidden people hill", very typical of Northern Europe). It echoes well one of the stories the brothers Grimm had included in their first edition but then removed, about a girl passing each time by a mound where a little hand appeared from a crack offering her a gift - it was an elf that wanted to make her happy. But one day she asked for a knife and she cut off the elf's hand so it all would stop... It is one weird and cruel tale.
I've still been reading Heidi Ann Heiner's Cinderella Tales From Around the World. I've just finished reading all the variants from Ireland, Scotland, and England.
Here are the patterns:
*In Gaelic variants (e.g. two Irish versions and one Scottish), the heroine and her two sisters typically have names that describe their appearance or demeanor, with the sisters' names implying that one is blonde and the other brunette. For example, Fair, Brown, and Trembling, or Fair-Hair, Brown-Hair, and Mangy-Hair, or the Fair Maid, the Swarthy Maid, and the Snow-White Maid.
*As usual, it varies whether the heroine is abused by a stepmother and stepsister(s) or by her own mother (or both parents) and sister(s), or just by her sisters alone, and whether there are two (step)sisters or just one. In the three Gaelic versions with hair-themed naming, the girls are biological sisters, though in The Snow-White Maid, the Fair Maid, the Swarthy Maid, and Bald Pate Their Mother, they're half-sisters and Balt Pate is the Snow-White Maid's stepmother.
*It seems far more common in these versions for the heroine and her (step)sister(s) to be princesses. This has sometimes turned up in other countries' variants so far, most notably in Finette Cendron, but so far the British Isles seem to have the biggest number of Cinderellas who are princesses by birth.
**In the Irish, Fair, Brown, and Trembling, not only is Trembling seen by her own prince at church, but the fame of her beauty spreads throughout the world, and all the princes of Ireland come to see her, as do princes from other countries like Spain and Greece. They all want to marry her and agree to duel for her hand after the slipper fits her, but after four days of fighting they all concede to the prince who first fell in love with her.
*The heroine's magical helper is either an old woman or an animal in these variants, and if it's an animal, it's almost always either a black sheep or a red calf. The beginning of one Irish version explains that black ewes were considered good luck.
**In almost all the versions with an animal, as in the Grimms' One-Eye, Two-Eyes, Three-Eyes or French tale of The Blue Bull, the (step)mother sends the heroine out to pasture each day with barely anything to eat, hoping to slowly starve her, but the animal magically provides her with good food.
**As usual, the animal companion tends to be killed by the (step)mother, but unusually, it doesn't stay dead in these variants. Instead, after the heroine gathers up the bones, the animal comes back to life, limping because the heroine lost one shank bone, but otherwise none the worse for wear. There are also some variants where the animal doesn't die at all. In one Scottish version, the heroine is ordered to behead the calf herself, but instead she kills her sister (!), takes the calf and runs away.
*In both Irish and Scottish versions, the special event the heroine attends is always church, not a festival or party. Several versions take place at Christmas and have her attend the special Yuletide Masses.
*The old woman or animal typically not only provides the girl with finery and a horse to ride, but cooks the family's dinner for her by the time she gets back. In one Scottish version, Ashpitel, the black lamb doesn't even give her finery – she just dresses herself in her own fine clothes that she rarely gets to wear, while the magic the lamb provides is just to cook the dinner for her.
*In the Gaelic versions, the prince rides after the heroine the third time she rides away from church, and grabs her by the foot, but only succeeds in pulling off her shoe. Whereas in the Scots versions, she just loses her shoe by accident.
*In Scotland, the story (and the heroine) is most often called Rashin Coatie (a.k.a. Rashie Coat, or Rushen Coatie), because the heroine wears a coat made of rushes, or "rashes" in Scots dialect.
** It varies whether Rashin Coatie is simply forced to serve her (step)mother and (step)sister(s) at home, or whether she runs away, to escape either from a cruel family or from an arranged marriage, and becomes a servant at the prince's castle, a la Donkeyskin.
*Both Irish and Scottish versions tend to include the motif of foot-cutting to make the slipper fit, just like the German versions do. A bird alerts the prince, typically in a rhyme which says that "nipped foot and clipped foot" is riding with him while "pretty foot and bonny foot" is elsewhere. But it's not always the (step)sisters who do it. In the Donkeyskin-like versions of Rashin Coatie, where the heroine runs away and becomes a servant at the prince's castle, the rival who tries to trick the prince is a henwife's daughter instead.
**Henwives are ubiquitous in these variants. But in the Gaelic versions (both Irish and Scottish), the henwife is benevolent, often serving as the heroine's magical helper, while in the Scots-dialect Rashin Coatie variants, she's a secondary villain, with the above-mentioned daughter who aspires to marry the prince.
*The Gaelic versions usually continue the story after the heroine's marriage, and have her eldest sister (the blonde one) throw her into the sea or a lake, then take her place. But either the princess's bed stays afloat so she doesn't drown, or she's captured by a whale or a water monster that keeps her a prisoner in the deep, yet briefly lets her onto the shore now and then. A cowherd sees her and alerts her royal husband, who rescues her, slaying the whale or monster if there is one, and the sister is executed.
*There doesn't seem to be a strong tradition of localized, oral Cinderella stories in England the way there is in Ireland and Scotland. But this book does include an English literary version: The Cinder-Maid by Joseph Jacobs, the folklorist who gave us the best-known versions of Jack and the Beanstalk and The Three Little Pigs.
**As usual in Jacobs' retellings of folktales, he borrows motifs from various different oral versions in an attempt to write down the "definitive" version of the tale. So The Cinder-Maid is basically the Grimms' Aschenputtel, with the three-day royal festival, the heroine getting her finery from a hazel tree on her mother's grave, the prince smearing the palace steps with tar to catch her golden slipper, and the stepsisters cutting off parts of their feet. But Jacobs also includes the motifs of "finery from a nutshell" and "hollow tree opens to reveal gifts" from other versions – each dress and pair of shoes comes from inside a hazelnut from the tree, and then the trunk opens to produce a coach and horses. And the bird in the tree instructs Cinder-Maid to leave by midnight, as in Perrault. (The midnight deadline is a rare motif in international Cindrellas, despite the fame Perrault gave it; in most versions she just leaves early to ensure that she gets home before her family does.)
**In his footnotes to The Cinder-Maid, Jacobs notes the existence of Rhodopis, but he argues that the entire Cinderella story (the persecuted heroine, magical help to attend an event, etc.) most likely originated in Germany, because it was a German betrothal tradition for a man to put a shoe on his fiancée's foot. He makes no mention of Ye Xian, or the more common belief that the story was born in China from the Chinese view of tiny feet as the height of feminine beauty. This reminds me of a hypothesis I once read that maybe Ye Xian isn't really as ancient a tale as it's believed to be – that maybe the story originated in Germany, then spread to China by way of the Silk Road, and that the name "Ye Xian" may derive from the similar-sounding "aschen," the German word for "ashes" that starts every German form of Cinderella's name (Aschenputtel, Aschenbrödel, etc.). Personally, though, I don't see why the reverse can't be true: couldn't the story just as easily have travelled from China to Germany? Maybe the heroine's association with ashes started when Germans heard the name "Ye Xian" and thought it sounded similar to "aschen"!
But I'm getting ahead of myself talking about China. The next several Cinderellas I'll be reading come from Scandinavia.
Daily reminder that, as said above, while Joseph Jacobs did collect a good handful of traditional British fairytales, one shouldn't mistake his entire stories as being purely collected stories. Because several, wrongly presented as "traditional British tales", actually come from his "Europa's Fairy Book", a book where he attempted to "recreate" the proto-story behind each fairytale type. (Now we know the theory of an original tale from which all the others sprung forth is false, but it was still the main and dominant theory by Jacobs' type that there were "tale-ancestors" from which all the others came from). Thus is the case of Cinder-Maid, the first tale in his book of "European Folktales", and Jacobs' attempt at recreating what he believed to be the "original" Cinderella tale.
If you are curious he also wrote in it the "original" Hansel and Gretel (Johnnie and Grizzle), the "original" Puss in Boots (The Earl of Cattenborough), the "original" Snow-White and many more... Stories which, again, are not actually the "true origins" of the fairytales despite Jacobs' effort, but are funny scholarly recreation of what a "typical tale exemplifying each fairytale type" could look like.
The latest series of stories I've read in Cinderella Tales From Around the World are from Eastern and Central Europe: Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Hungary.
*In several Eastern European versions, the Virgin Mary is the girl's helper who gives her finery. She appears either from a well or from inside an oak tree or a fir tree.
*In most of these variants, the heroine goes to church. Only a very few have a ball instead.
*Several also have the stepmother give the heroine a task similar to the Grimms' lentils in the ashes – typically poppy or millet seeds to sort either from the ashes or from sand, or bushels of wheat to clean – and birds help her. Also recalling the Grimms' version (and many others, of course), the third time the heroine flees, the prince usually has the church or palace steps smeared with tar or wax, causing her to lose her shoe.
*In the one Ukrainian version, the heroine has a cow who magically finishes the impossible amount of spinning and weaving the stepmother demands she do every day. Of course the stepmother eventually has the cow killed, but in its entrails the girl finds a grain of corn, which she plants, and it grows into a willow tree. From then on, when she wants finery for church, the tree opens and ladies come out to dress her. In this version, she also loses both of her golden shoes rather than just one in the tar on the church steps.
*Two Hungarian versions, The Three Princesses and Popelusa, and one unnamed Polish version are all near-identical to Finette Cendron. Three daughters of a deposed king are abandoned in the forest, they find an ogre couple's castle, the youngest outwits the ogres and slays them, but then her ungrateful sisters treat her like a servant, etc. Since Madame d'Aulnoy's tale is a literary story, could this be a sign of French influence in Eastern and Central European culture?
*Another Polish version, The Princess with the Pigskin Cloak, combines Cinderella with themes from Snow White. A wicked queen has a magic mirror, which tells her that her stepdaughter is more beautiful than she is. So she orders her servants to kill the princess and bring back her heart, but they let her go and bring back a dog's heart instead. The princess dresses herself in pigskin and finds work as a swineherd, but she knows a certain hollow oak tree that's sacred to the Virgin Mary, and when she goes inside it, she finds a room where she receives finery for church. She finally loses a shoe, is found by the prince and marries him, and the queen dies of rage and grief when her magic mirror tells her the news.
*Several of these versions have the heroine run away from her stepfamily, but unlike most others that use this device, they don't have her work as a servant at the prince's palace, but just find farm work somewhere nearby, a la Perrault's Donkeyskin.
*This brings me to an issue that's appeared in many versions so far, but which I didn't bother to discuss until now. I suppose now is as good a time as any, because it's a theme that appears in many of these Eastern and Central European tales. In so many versions of Donkeyskin/All-Kinds-of-Fur, or any Cinderella story where the heroine leaves her home and finds work as a lowly servant at the royal palace or elsewhere, the prince tends to repeatedly meet her in her rags or animal skins, and he mistreats her. In the versions where she works at the palace, when she takes off his boots or brings him bath water, a towel, and a comb, he throws them at her. Or in versions where she works elsewhere, she meets him on the road, he drops things and she hands them back to him, but instead of thanking her, he hits her with them. Then at the ball or at church, when she's in her beautiful gowns and he's smitten with her, he asks her where she came from, and she replies with allusions to his earlier rudeness, which he fails to understand.
**This is obviously uncomfortable by modern standards. I suppose to the original audiences, it was funny, ironic social commentary: the prince pines over the "mystery princess" with no idea that she's really the scraggly kitchen maid he treats like dirt, and he's clueless when she alludes to her identity. But does it bode well for "happily ever after" when she marries a man who treated her badly? I think this goes to show that in traditional oral fairy tales, there tends to be less emphasis on finding "true love" than on simply escaping from bad situations and achieving safety, comfort, and preferably wealth and high status. It doesn't matter that the prince is a bit of a jerk, what matters is that he makes the girl a princess in the end. Still, when you want her to marry a worthy man and believe he'll make her happy, it's uncomfortable. Different adaptations obviously find different ways to handle it. For example, Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics' "The Coat of Many Colors" avoids all this and has the prince always be kind to Aleia, while "Sapsorrow" from Jim Henson's the Storyteller keeps his rudeness but gives him a small redemption arc, first by finally sharing a sympathetic conversation with "the Straggletag," then by agreeing to marry her when the slipper fits her before he learns her identity.
**Maybe this tradition partly explains why the prince in the classic movie Three Wishes for Cinderella is slightly bratty and rude at first. I know that @thealmightyemprex found that choice off-putting when he reviewed the movie, and I have mixed feelings about it too, but maybe it stems from the fact that in Europe's oral Cinderella stories, bratty princes are surprisingly common.
Speaking of which...
*This book includes the two Cinderella stories from the Czech-Austrian writer Božena Němcová's collection that inspired Three Wishes for Cinderella. One is called The Three Sisters, the other O Popelusce ("Of Cinderella").
**They both follow the same formula. The heroine's kind father (whom the movie replaces with a surrogate-father manservant) sets out on a journey, and his daughter asks him to bring her the first thing that knocks against his head. This turns out to be the branch of a nut tree, containing three nuts, which produce beautiful dresses and shoes that she wears to church three times.
*Each version is slightly different, though, and both are slightly different from the 1973 movie. In The Three Sisters, the heroine Anuska is abused by her own mother and sisters, while in O Popelusce she has a stepmother and stepsisters. Meanwhile, the movie uses a stepmother and just one stepsister. In both stories, the (step)mother cuts the sisters' feet to make the slipper fit, with the movie replaces with their stealing Cinderella's clothes to pass Dora off as her. As I said, both stories have the heroine go to church, while the movie draws on the Western European Cinderella tradition and has a ball, and unsurprisingly, neither the movie Cinderella's sassy tomboy personality nor her dressing as a boy to join a royal hunt can be found in Němcová's original tales.
*Still, it's clear that in some ways the movie draws strongly on Němcová's texts. In The Three Sisters, the second sister's name is Dorotka, which must explain why the one stepsister in the movie is named Dora. And Anuska's first church dress is rose colored with silver trim, just like the movie Cinderella's ball dress
**From now on, in Three Wishes for Cinderella, I think I'll imagine "Anuska" as Cinderella's real name, as it is in The Three Sisters. It's a Czech equivalent of "Annie," and she's definitely a spunky Little Orphan Annie type of character in the movie!
*There's also a Hungarian version that's almost identical to Němcová's, with three dress-producing walnuts. But it has a completely different ending. The heroine doesn't lose a shoe. Instead the prince's servant follows her as far as her house, then puts a golden rose on the gatepost to mark it. Meanwhile, her loving father can't bear to let her be abused anymore and takes her to live with a childless widow in the forest – she's still poor and still has to work, but she's better off than with her stepfamily. When the prince comes to the family's house to look for her, only her stepsisters are there, but then the golden rose magically rises up and floats through the air to the forest cottage, and there she is. But then, in a different (and sadly racist) twist on the common "false bride replaces Cinderella" plot line, a Romani woman pushes the heroine into a lake, steals her magic walnuts, and dresses in her clothes to trick the prince. But the heroine survives by turning into a golden duck, then resumes her true form and finds work as a servant near the palace. But one day, the prince brings his new bride out in public and urges her to tell everyone the story of her life. The Romani woman fabricates a story, but then the real Cinderella speaks up and reveals the truth, and the prince instantly recognizes his true bride. He has the Romani woman executed, the stepmother jailed, and the stepsisters' hair cut off, while the father marries the widow from the forest in a double wedding with his daughter and the prince.
Oh yes I can confirm that the "abuse of Cinderella by the prince when she is in rag" is very typical - and it is also part of many oral/folkloric versions of both Cinderella and Donkeyskin in French tradition. In fact I suspect the abuse-joke is part of all the oral traditions of Europe when it comes to this type of fairytale about the persecuted heroine in disguise - again, Cinderella and Donkeyskin are basically twin tales.
And yes this is supposed to be a joke and/or a revenge. I can safely claim that because since I have been looking into the various oral folktales of France I have a bit of the bigger picture when it comes to this specific episode - and I suspect it will be true for other countries. Now here's the thing: the problem with collected oral tales is that, very often, due to their oral nature they are "incomplete". Details in them are omitted in many ways - either because the narrator forgot them, or because it seemed obvious, or simply because they didn't know it had to be said. That's the nature of oral tale, they are in a constant flux around some core elements, and this is why some of those stories seem very abrupt or nonsensical, they are just cut short. So to have a complete idea one needs to collect and compare a lot of versions together to reconstruct some of the "worn-out" elements. And this whole "three times hit" joke has a full version, but which only comes out when you piece together the variations.
(That, or the reverse, maybe the original joke was just very short, simple and abrupt, fit for a cruder time - after all oral fairytales did start out as crass, crude stories of sex, gore and violence, so abuse jokes were VERY very common, still in oral folktales of France you have a lot of instances where men beating up their wife or abusing their animal is treated as a joke, reminding of the kind of mindset stuff such as the Punch and Judy show or the Reynard tales came from. But maybe with time people felt a need to expand on the joke was needed, and thus it was woven into a longer narrative to better have the idea, or to turn just the "haha he hits her" into a more vengeful plot showing the heroine's cunning. It can go both ways, and with oral fairytales we can never be sure)
So, after this very long introduction, here's what I mean: The core joke is that, the three times before she meets the prince at the ball/party/mass whatever, Cinderella-Donkeyskin (I'll call her "the persecuted heroine"), in her disguise of poor, ugly, stinky, worst of the worst slave-girl, gets hit as a way to punish her unfairly, each time with a different object. And when she appears before the prince in her beautiful, impressive, fairy-dresses, and when he asks where she comes from or who she is, she uses the object that hit her as a pun. (For example she can say she comes from the country known as Broom, or the land known as Bucket). Now, I need to mention that in oral folktales it isn't always the prince that hit her. In many stories, it is rather a third party - in Cinderella tales it can be the stepmother that hits her for daring to go to the ball ; in Donkeyskin tales it can be the person she took refuge with and works for, and who will for example hit her for daring to say "Can I have some free time?" before agreeing to let her have this free time, but only in a limited way. In such cases, it seems to be part not so much of a joke as rather a way to sublimize her own abuse, and is more of a symbolical clue or riddle the prince is given to solve about her true identity - because she cannot just simply tell him "Oh i'm just a scullery maid, your probably saw the little wriggling mount of dirt in a corner of the kitchen, that's me". So rather, she says more poetically "I am where the broom is", or "I come from where the bucket can be found", only for the prince to completely miss the riddle.
But we are here to talk about the cases where it is the prince himself that abuses the persecuted heroine, and that throws an item at her/hits her with it before each "ball". In this specific case, which happens often, important points have to be highlighted, most notably - very often the prince doesn't simply act just like that because he is an abusive brat (though sometimes it looks like that, because the story is cut short/not developed), but he precisely is said to be in rage or angry because of the preparations for the next "ball" and his care that everything must be perfect for when his beloved return, or his anger at not being able to find her. As such, he can lash out at the persecuted heroine for what he perceives as her doing a bad job - and here we go into the bizareness of their entire relationship, because yes the prince hits her when he does not recognize her, and basically uses her as a punching ball that just happened to go by here - typical medieval slapstick comedy - but he often does so precisely because of his love FOR her, even though he doesn't know it, and thus in a paradoxical way Cinderella/Donkeyskin seeing the prince being so anxious/worried/angry at the thought of seeing her again, or not seeing her again, proves to her that it works and that his feelings are true... though it also comes at the negative consequences of him hitting her and abusing her (though again, hitting servants was not seen as a bad thing back then, it was just regular stuff - again, the way the world and society was viewed was VERY different, and masters had the right to beat up their servants, it was the social contract).
What is very interesting with folk-Cinderellas is that they have this deep ambiguity within them or... what exactly is Cinderella trying to do? What is going on in her head? What is her real plan? Does she even love the prince at all? Notice how in many oral versions, if not all, the word "love" never appears when it comes to Cinderella - she just wants to go to the ball. The prince's emotions and psyche are very clear and simple, but Cinderella is a mysterious figure just as secretive as her otherwordly helpers. And thus, her "game" at toying and playing with the prince with the three "abuse-answers" is also part of this bizarre, ambiguous plot that can be interpreted in various ways depending on how you tell the story.
Each time the prince asks her where she comes from, she uses the item he himself used earlier to hit her (usually the very morning before the ball). Is it a form of mockery, is it toying with him, blaming him in hope that he will know she somehow spied on him, only for the prince to be too dense? Or are we still in the "sublimation" of abuse" I described earlier in cases where the prince is not involved, and is she trying to give him subtle clues about who she really is in hope he will pierce the mystery only for him to completely fail? Is she trying to hide her identity as hastily and clumsily as possible by saying the last thing she recalls tied to him, or is she preparing the way for him regretting his actions towards her once she revealed her identity?
And this is where I say the "extensions" or "expansions" of the tale can be of great use - because in several oral folktales... we have a follow-up on the joke. As in, some versions do mention that the prince sent his entire army, or gathered all of his lords, or sent his best agents throughout the world in search for the country/land the girl was supposed to come from, only for them to fail - some versions even go as far as to have the prince antagonize the one he put in charge of the research and consider him not as good as he claims to be, despite him doing his best. I don't know if this whole "search for nothing" element was part of the original joke, or if it was added later, but it can again lead to two very likely interpretations as to why the "abuse joke" is in here. Explanation 1: it is all to show how dumb and dense the prince is. The joke here is at the expanse of the prince/king, who fails to recognie the girl he loves when she is in dirty rags, fails to understand she is mocking him when she says her land is called "Comb" or "Rag", and fails to kow the geography of the real world (in some cases it is even worst as he believes this fictional land to be one of his provinces/domains, showing he doesn't know his own country). Or explanation 2: It shows that it is a subtle revenge from Cinderella. As a sly form of revenge for being hit earlier, she sends the prince on a "goose chase". She knows he is going to search everywhere, send all his men and probably spent quite a lot of money on searching for a country that does not exist, wasting his time and effort for nothing. And as such, it kinds of make them even - a blow on the body exchanged to a blow on the ego, Cinderella proving to the prince he can't have everything he wants, he doesn't know everything, and some beings are far beyond his scope.
But all in all, I do believe no matter how you interpret it or the way you chose to tell it, I think the fundamental trait of this episode, that always come out, is that Cinderella/Donkeyskin is supposed to be cunning, or at least to be shown as being able to manipulate and trick the prince, even in the most innocent way, enhancing her ascendance and dominance over him as a mysterious object of desire wrapped in secrets that he can't solve, despite the very clues she gives him. And again it is all part of an entire theme centered around "the desire for the unknown", "the love for the mysterious lady".
