Over the past however long its been that I have been doing this assessment task, I have made many discoveries of which include the bloody true stories of the two not so ugly step sisters of the classic tale Cinderella, that I am hopeless at forming my thoughts into sentences then sentences into paragraphs and so on and that I need more practice at organising my research and ideas before the product is due. (I also need to work on shorter sentences as what you just read is a single sentence)

Tonight I have completed by critical analysis which I have to admit was an absolute trek. I have just spent a week in Japan on an international education forum and am exhausted, physically and mentally, from that so it was a big as to complete at least that component of the task. The final aspect of the assignment I need to complete is writing my own appropriation of the text. There is no way physically possible to complete that by tomorrow (sorry Ms!) but...I will get round to it as I, believe it or not, am actually looking forward to writing. I have decided by form for that at least; a suite of short poems. Also, I have been tossing up ideas and brainstorming about the actual poems themselves. So far my ideas are to give different perspectives of major events in the tale and give characters a voice and opinion on the event at hand. For example, I was thinking of writing a poem expressing the view of one of the sisters when they get handed a knife to cut part of their foot off. I don't know about you but personally, regardless of a life of royalty, I wouldn't be too happy about doing that. 

So there are some ideas and thoughts from my jumbled up head. Have a nice week and wish me luck in presenting the assignment tomorrow!

In procrastination of completing this task I found myself browsing youtube for Cinderella stuff and came across this. It is so brainless that its addictive and now it is stuck in my head...oh great. Cinderella- Debbie and Friends is once again another appropriation of the classic tale of Cinderella which also steers away from the original storyline.

Cinderella is a well known fariytale with many adaptations including Andy Tennant's Ever After (1998) and Disney's Cinderella but Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm's original telling of this tale isn't how I recall... Blood and gruesome scenes overlayed my mind as the tale concluded.

The Grimm brothers have a reputation which I hadn't remembered upon reading their version of Cinderella. I was slightly shocked at how the representation was so different from that of fairy godmothers and magical pumpkin carriages which I had grown up with. Although many aspects of Cinderella are common, some are vastly different.

Once I read the Grimm's Cinderella, I went on to research about the Grimm brothers themselves. They were born into a large German family and throughout their lives collected folk law for the people of Hesse which was where they lived for a time. Their collecting was influenced by close friends who were romantics and by the importance and value to preserve German culture as France was very influential during this period of history.

I discovered that Aschenputtel is the German translation of Cinderella. Both mean; 'One that unexpectedly achieves recognition or success after a period of obscurity and neglect' which is a summary of the plot itself. What I also found interesting was that the 'glass' slipper was not in fact glass in the Grimm's tale but simply a beautiful golden shoe. Throughout my continued research this week variations of the shoes' material reappeared in different versions of the fairytale. Some said that the slipper was made out of squirrel fur. One solution to the confusion was in translation. Vair, from Charles Perrault's version where the shoes were 'pantoufles en vair' meaning 'slippers of white squirrel fur', was lost from the French language so it was changed to verre which means glass.

For next week I plan to continue my research into the authors of each appropriation, begin to analyse both Ever After and the Grimm's Cinderella as well as continuing to add to the content of my website.