Catskin

DESCRIPTION: A king's daughter is forced to leave home. She hides her rich clothes and dresses in the skins of donkeys/cats. She takes service with a lord, and when he holds a ball, appears in her fine clothes. He seeks her and learns she is Catskin. They marry.
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: 1877 (Bell-Combined-EarlyBallads-CustomsBalladsSongsPeasantryEngland); as a folktale, it is clearly older
KEYWORDS: love courting disguise servant royalty trick clothes marriage incest
FOUND IN: Britain(England)
REFERENCES (5 citations):
Bell-Combined-EarlyBallads-CustomsBalladsSongsPeasantryEngland, pp. 335-342, "The Wandering Young Gentlewoman" (1 text)
ADDITIONAL: Katherine Briggs, _A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language_, Part A: Folk Narratives, 1970 (I use the 1971 Routledge paperback that combines volumes A.1 and A.2), volume A.2, pp. 177-179, "CAtskin I: The Wandering Gentlewoman's Garland"; "Catskin II: The Princess and the Golden Cow" (2 prose versions, one of them summarized)
Maria Tatar, editor, _The Classic Fairy Tales_, A Norton Critical Edition, Norton, 1999, pp. 109-116, "Donkeyskin"; pp. 122-125, "Catskin" (2 prose versions, one of them a translation)
Maria Tatar, _The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales_, edited and with an Introduction by Maria Tatar, Norton, 2002, pp. 212-228, "Donkeyskin" (1 prose version, a translation from Perrault)
Jack Zipes, _The Great Fairy Tale Tradition_, a Norton Critical Edition, Norton, 2001, pp. 26-50, section on Incestuous Fathers, "Tebaldo," "The Bear, "Donkey-Skin," "All Fur" (4 prose versions, translations from Giovan Francesco Straparola, Giambattista Basile, Perrault, and the Grimms)
ST BeCo335 (Partial)
Roud #20165
NOTES [99 words]: I have no evidence that this was ever an actual song. But the tale of Catskin/Donkeyskin is a very common folktale, as the ADDITIONAL references indicate, so I've included it.
According to Jack Zipes, editor, The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales: The Western fairy tale tradition from medieval to modern, Oxford, 2000, p. 134, the tale was already popular when Charles Perrault created his "Donkey-skin" version; Zipes pushes its literary heritage back to Sraparola's "Doralice" ("Tebaldo") and Basile's "L'Orza." He also notes a twentieth century movie version featuring Catherine Deneuve. - RBW
Last updated in version 2.8
File: BeCo335

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