I like to see these myths debunked as well as anyone, but I’m left unsatisfied with the debunking job (cf. column 1/29/99.) I looked up verre and vair in my French dictionary. Verre indeed means glass, but vair is translated as vair. Not very helpful, but you know how French people are. Anyway, a quick check in Webster’s informs me that vair is a particular type of squirrel fur much prized during medieval times. It doesn’t specifically mention if it was prized for making slippers however.
The way I see it, the point that glass slippers appear in versions of the story other than the French one is irrelevant. We already know they appears in the English versions. The questions to answer are: 1) Could those versions be based on an earlier French version which made the switch? 2) Are there any known versions of the story in which Cinderella did wear fur (especially vair fur) slippers? Obviously, more research is needed.
Snopes maintains that Perrault’s slippers were indeed constructed of glass, not fur. Indeed, wiki notes that the key phrase appears as verre (glass) a total of 3 times, and not in the homophone variety vair (fur). It wasn’t a typo. There has been some controversy over the years: Honore de Balzac advocated the fur hypothesis during the mid 1800s, but most modern scholars are not convinced. As Sandra Ragsdale of the National Court Reporters Association notes, “We simply have no text of Perrault’s story where fur slippers appear, only glass ones.” And since this has been issue has been investigated on and off for 150+ years, I’d say the odds that fur slippers appear anywhere among the 300 or so traditional versions of Cinderella are pretty slim.
I hope Mr. Charles accepts my apologies for taking 17 years to address his question. I’m still working through my inbox.
Vair isn’t just any squirrel fur, it’s the winter coat of the Eurasian red squirrel, from the really cold areas of the Baltics. In those specific circumstances, the coat has a strong contrast between the white belly fur and the darker “blue-grey” fur on the back, legs, and head. You can make striking patterns. From the looks of the picture, you can get a good display on a cloak, or some other large, flat area of garment, but it would be pretty pointless on slippers, which are too small to hold a repeating pattern.
As a heraldic pattern on shields, the standard vair pattern looks like a stack of bells to me.
What does the column 1/29/99 in the OP have reference to? I went through the archive and couldn’t find either a column by Cecil or a staff report of that date. Anyone have a link?
Hi Greg Charles and welcome to the Straight Dope Message Board! Generally speaking, we like to link to the original columns here, so that posters can absorb and celebrate the original words of the Perfect Master. Here’s the link. It originally addresses Chinese foot binding, but a followup delves into the Cinderella story.
Well, it beats this thread, which was also a revival of a single post. In fact, it beat it by about half a year, so that’s impressive.
This thread has a thread number of only 19, but that doesn’t mean it was the 19th thread on the boards. I looked through several of the lowest numbered threads and found that there’s no correlation between the thread number and the post date. Thread #1 was actually posted in Jan 2000, for example. I’m going to guess that the conversion to vBulletin was responsible for this.