When talking folktales, there is NO SUCH THING AS THE “ORIGINAL.” There just isn’t. We can talk about the “oldest recorded version,” we can talk about the “most widespread,” we can talk about “most influential,” but none of those mean “original.” Folklore doesn’t work like that: it’s not like the game of telephone, where there’s a correct singular version and everything else is a bastardized descendant. It’s more like–multiple versions spring up at different times and places and travel and crossbreed with each other.
When people started writing down fairy tales, we also have to consider who, when, and for what audience. Perrault was writing in France, in 1697; he was part of a group of (mostly female) writers known as the “salon writers,” who were engaged in one of the key intellectual debates of the day: which is better, ancient Greece and Rome, or modern France? Perrault, as a “modern,” collected and rewrote multiple existing folk narratives as his entry in the debate: his versions were witty confections with semi-ironic morals, aimed at an educated courtly audience. He, like his fellow salon writers (and their Italian predecessors Straparola and Basile) were deliberately tarting up existing folk narratives to appeal to haut-bourgeois readers.
(FYI, there’s a standard piece of bullshit often trotted out about Perrault’s “Cendrillon,” that the glass slipper was a mistranslation and it was “originally” fur: NOT TRUE. Perrault loved including all sorts of details about luxurious dress and decor, and “glass slippers”–beautiful, fragile, completely impractical–is exactly what he said. Again, stop with these claims about the “original” versions, there’s no such thing.)
The Grimms, writing a century or so later, were coming out of a radically different intellectual tradition: they were Romantic nationalists, and saw the stories and beliefs of peasants as containing the True Spirit of Germanness (Volksgeist). Their goal was to take down the stories, unchanged, straight from the mouths of the dirtiest rudest peasants they could find. (They didn’t actually do this–many of their informants were middle class–but they claimed that that was their goal and method.) Their first edition (1812) was aimed at scholars, but then when it proved to be a hit, they started expanding and further editing the collection for a more general readership–the seventh and final edition came out in 1857. There’s literally mountains of scholarship that’s been done on the increasingly intrusive editing that the Grimms did, to better fit with bourgeois sensibilities, vs. their actual field notes.
(There’s also the fact that, during the Grimms’ lifetimes, the concept of children as a separate and unique audience, who required stories designed specifically for them, was solidifying; “children’s literature,” as we know it, really starts taking off during the 1800s. Most fairy tales are far older than this, and were told by and for all ages. The changes made to the later editions of the Grimms’ fairy tales reflect this. It’s not surprising that Disney, coming after 150 years of increasingly more intense policing of what stories children should and should not see, chose the Perrault version.)
Given all that, from my position as a folklorist, I’m prepared to say that the Grimms’ version of the story is almost certainly closer to the folk versions of “Cinderella” that would have been circulating in Western Europe from the medieval period onward: not because it’s omg bloody and gruesome, but because we know how Perrault worked, and he deliberately was changing and fancifying stories for a highly specific elite audience.
For anyone who’s interested, I highly recommend Jack Zipes’s great collection The Trials and Tribulations of Little Red Riding Hood: versions of Little Red vary even more intensely than Cinderella does (LRRH has 3 possible endings, all radically different), and there’s a great essay about the history of fairy tale writing and collecting.
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