Cinderella: The Complete Story and Its Many Versions Around the World | Folklore for Sleep

Cinderella: The Complete Story and Its Many Versions Around the World | Folklore for SleepA slow, quiet journey through the many versions of Cinderella, made for falling asleep to.There are somewhere between three hundred and a thousand of them, depending on who's counting, and the oldest written one is from ninth-century China. Which means the version most people carry around — the pumpkin, the mice, the glass — is about three hundred years old and roughly the fiftieth thing that happened to this story.What follows is the whole spread of it. A girl in Tang dynasty China with a fish that grants her wishes, and a shoe of gold. An Egyptian girl in a Greek telling, whose sandal is carried off by a falcon and dropped in a king's lap. A German version with no fairy godmother at all, where the help comes from a tree growing on her mother's grave and from birds, and where the stepsisters cut parts of their own feet off to make the shoe fit and are found out by the blood. An Italian one where the girl is considerably less passive and the stepmother doesn't survive the first act. Versions from Vietnam, from Scotland, from the Algonquin, all of them recognisably the same story assembled from different pieces.Put side by side over a couple of hours, it stops being a fairy tale and starts being something odder: evidence that people everywhere, with no contact between them, kept arriving at the same shape.The recording itself is the usual thing. A low, even voice, no music, no sound effects, nothing that rises or drops or suddenly arrives. Slow enough that following along stops feeling necessary somewhere in the first twenty minutes. If you drift off in one country and surface in another several centuries later, that's the intended use. Most people don't make it past the first half hour, and the rest will still be here tomorrow night.Put it on, turn the volume down, and let it go on without you.Mythology & Folklore for Sleep — long, calm retellings of Greek myths, Norse legends, Egyptian tales, Hindu epics, Chinese classics and old folklore from around the world, made for insomnia and the hours when you can't sleep. Bedtime stories for adults, told in a slow, quiet voice. New episodes every day.