Prefers Going Barefoot / Literature

• Acorna Series: Acorna, the Unicorn Girl, has hoof-like feet and finds human shoes uncomfortable (and unnecessary).
• In The Barrakee Mystery, the first Bony murder mystery, Mrs Thornton is in a running conflict with her Aboriginal servant Martha, who (although otherwise conforming to civilized dress standards) hates wearing shoes and contrives to lose whatever shoes Mrs Thornton gives her to wear. At the time of the murder, they've temporarily compromised on a pair of men's boots, which confuses the evidence trail because the murderer left the print of the same style of boot. In the end, Mrs Thornton dies and Martha is last seen with "her feet unencumbered by hateful, unnatural footwear".
• Books of the Raksura: The shapeshifting Raksura have tough feet in both their humanoid and scaled forms and are very resistant to temperature extremes, so they have no use for footwear. Moon exploits this by getting a pair of boots as a disguise when he goes undercover near someone who's familiar with Raksura.
• In Border, KS, Antigone Richards voluntarily wearing sensible shoes in the summer without trying to sneak out barefoot is enough to clue her father in that she and her sister are planning something. Additionally all the children in the family leave their shoes at the door at home.
• In Bridge to Terabithia, Jesse and Leslie both often run around without shoes because their shoes are hand-me-downs and because it wasn't unusual in rural 1970s areas. The 2007 film removed this element due to the Setting Update.
• O. Henry's Cabbages And Kings has one chapter where a shoe merchant tries to do business in a Banana Republic town where no one likes shoes. The solution was some prickly burrs he had to mail-order from back in the USA.
• In Zilpha Keatley Snyder's The Changeling 1970, Ivy is usually barefoot and (reasonably enough for a tree-climbing dancer) she always tucks her skirt into the legs of her underpants. Martha is used to seeing her this way when they are not in school. One of Alton Raible's illustrations◊ shows that Martha likewise takes off her shoes in the grove where they play.
• The Chronicles of Narnia: Many characters prefer to go barefoot: Coriakin, Ramandu, possibly his daughter, Lucy, Edmund... Similarly, stars and nymphs are always barefoot.
  "Edmund and Lucy wanted to [...] do their exploring with bare feet[...]"
• The Chronicles of Prydain: Princess Eilonwy apparently enjoys walking barefoot; her "unshod feet" are specially mentioned by Dallben in The Castle of Llyr. When she has to wear shoes, like in The Book of Three, she only wears light sandals. (Probably related to her extreme informality in general; though a princess, she tends to dress in plain tunics or hard-wearing boys' clothes and is happier in a scullery than a royal court.) This trait was going to be implemented into the Disney Animated Canon adaptation of the books, The Black Cauldron (pre-production◊ artwork◊), though she wears shoes in the final version.
• Briar in the first three books of Circle of Magic wears shoes only when a teacher makes him. He grew up in Barefoot Poverty as a Street Urchin and also is an Earthy Barefoot Character with magic linked to plants. But by fourth book, which takes place in late winter, he has a second-favorite pair of boots.
• In the Cross-Time Engineer series, Conrad meets a traveling monk who doesn't wear shoes. He assumes there's something wrong with the man's feet, because they're so leathery and coarse, but in fact they're perfectly normal for someone who's walked hundreds of miles, and disdains shoes as a needless luxury.
• In Deerskin, Robin McKinley's adaptation of the Brothers Grimm tale "Donkeyskin", protagonist Lissar refuses to wear shoes even when visiting royalty. "I like to know where I'm walking," she says at one point. "In shoes, I'm always walking on shoes."
• Referred to in Oriana's backstory in the second Dinotopia book, "The World Beneath". Oriana tells Arthur that she adapted to wearing shoes, but that she really didn't like them at first because they separated her feet from the feeling of the grass.
• In Dragon Bones Ciarra often went barefoot when she was younger. Her older brother Ward sometimes treated the resulting wounds, and eventually gave her a pair of men's boots — turns out she just didn't like the uncomfortable women's shoes her mother gave her.
• Dragon boys (the youths who tend fighting dragons) in the Dragon Jousters series normally go barefoot for practicality. Sandals would just get lost in the dragons' sand pits. But since the series is set in an Egypt-Expy, being barefoot doesn't really stand out.
• Flute/Aphrael/Danae in David Eddings's The Elenium and The Tamuli cycles. The cleaniness of them (minus the green-grass stains that seem to be important in some way to her as noted by Sparhawk) is justified as she's the Child Goddess of the Styrics.
• Firekeeper Saga: the title character, who grew up as a Wild Child, wears footgear as rarely as possible, and throws fits when told to put shoes on.
• In The Frontiersmans Daughter, Lael is teased for not wearing shoes. In response, she says that going barefoot is a sign of her free spirit.
• Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem "God's Grandeur" briefly expresses a disdain for shoes with the line "The soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod."
• In The Guardians by Meljean Brook, Michael's signature style is to go barefoot, no matter what the rest of his outfit may be. It's later explained that his senses have grown so acute he can feel the vibrations in the ground and know where everyone is. His aversion to shoes is so strong that, when he possesses Taylor, he vanishes her shoes for the same reason. She gets to the point where she doesn't even notice after he leaves.
• The main character of the Earth's Children, Ayla, is a Stone Age hunter-gatherer who prefers to be barefoot, though will wear foot coverings during the winter (she even makes foot coverings for her horse so she can walk on glacial ice without hurting her hooves). By the last book, the now thirty-ish Ayla, after a lifetime of going barefoot, has soles as hard and as durable as a horse's hooves and she doesn't mind.
• In the Israeli short story Images from Elementary^note ‘Elementary’ here means ‘1st through 8th grades’, which takes place in the early years of Israel, the protagonist, a Jewish immigrant from Syria, protests his teacher saying (with some racist undertones) that Egyptian farmers are so poor they can’t afford shoes, explaining that while they are in fact poor, this trope is the real reason they don’t wear shoes. He continues and argues that (predominantly Ashkenazi) kibbutzniks don’t usually wear shoes either, and asks his teacher if it means they’re poor too. The teacher, faced with the intense fervour he argued with, backs down and tells the protagonist, ‘You win. You win!’
• Farid from The Inkworld Trilogy grew up in the Middle Eastern desert prior to Inkheart (being a character from The Arabian Nights) and isn't used to wearing shoes. Dustfinger buys him a pair, but he's almost constantly taking them off in favor of going barefoot.
• Junie B. Jones has a minor example. In the thirteenth book, a recurring joke is that Junie B.'s parents tell her that girls like her need to be "footloose" and "fancy-free". Junie B. takes this literally, telling her parents that she doesn't need "loose feet". In the end of her Aunt Flo's wedding, her feet start to hurt, so she takes off her shoes. There, she realizes it's so much better to have "loose feet" and even talks her friend Bo into joining her. After that, the two girls spend the rest of the wedding and are even taken home barefoot.
• The Hairy Hat Man from Letterland does not wear shoes, because he says they make too much noise as he hops along.
• Mia Winchell from A Mango-Shaped Space doesn't like wearing shoes and would rather be barefoot at all times. In the first chapter, when she notices her shoes are untied, she doesn't bother tying them, and instead takes them off and throws them over her back.
• In Les Misérables, Éponine combines this trope with Barefoot Poverty. She does have a pair of men's shoes that she wears when absolutely necessary, but they're uncomfortable and squeak loudly, so most of the time she goes barefoot.
• Modesty Blaise grew up in Barefoot Poverty, and still often goes barefoot on country walks because having tough feet helps with her fighting style.
• In Momo, the Heartwarming Orphan Momo never wears shoes if she can help it. There's an element of Barefoot Poverty to it, but even when she has the opportunity to obtain shoes she doesn't want them.
• Denise the camp counselor in Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great. One day Sheila discovers the reason Denise doesn't wear shoes is because the bottoms of her feet are "covered in warts".
• The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System: Ren Zha Fanpai Zijiu Xitong: The demon saintess Sha Hualing is described to be barefoot. When Shen Qingqiu first meets her, he wonders if her feet don't hurt after travelling all the way from the demon realm to their mountain without any shoes.
• In The Soddit by "ARR Roberts", soddits never wear shoes. Instead of the tough feet of hobbits, however, soddit feet are a mess of corns, verrucas and blisters, such that anything touching their feet would be agony for them.
• Arya Stark of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire prefers to go barefoot unless decorum dictates otherwise. Later in the series, while undergoing assassin training with her Stealth Mentor (who may well be her actual mentor under an assumed identity), she's explicitly told to consider going barefoot because you can be stealthier that way.
• Zara in A Sorceress Reconstructed is always barefoot. Her main reason is because she can use both her hands and feet to cast her spells. Her ability to channel destructive magic through her feet led to her accidentally destroying a number of shoes when she was young, causing her master (at the time) to half-heartedly suggest she stop wearing them. Zara did so and eventually got used to it, by the time she learned how to properly control her powers. Zara is also the kingdom's previous Queen and the people often express their support for her by kissing her feet; which is another reason why she wears no shoes. There are times when her feet get injured and/or dirty, but her healing magic handles both of those problems and is naturally triggered whenever she touches water — her source of power. Although in the end, when she visits Eric in New York, she admits that the terrain there is a bit rougher than she is used to. In the sequel, A Sorceress In New York, Zara starts wearing sandals when the city streets prove a bit too much for her always-bare feet to handle. She transforms them into slide wedges, when working as a bartender at a local nightclub. When the antagonist attempts to have Zara killed, (via cement shoes, no less) she steals those wedges from her. Although Zara is able to escape with her life, she is forced to once again brave the rough unforgiving city terrain barefoot, until she eventually defeats the antagonist and takes her shoes back.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • Tahiri Veila, due to being raised by Sand People and liking the cool floors (in contrast to her native planet Tatooine's hot sands).
  • One of the hats of the Togruta species (like the Jedi Shaak Ti) was that they wouldn't wear shoes for a spiritual connection to the land.
• Tanith Lee's Tales from the Flat Earth:
  • Zhirem, from Death's Master, grew up barefoot; and after he has grown up into the powerful (and pretty evil) sorcerer Zhirek, he dresses in rich vestments, but still goes barefoot, as he is used to it. Later on, after he had become the philosopher Dathanja, a kind-hearted princess gave him shoes, "which he even wore sometimes".
  • Azhriaz, Night's Daughter, usually wanders barefoot as she scorns human convention and is completely indestructible so isn't inconvenienced by stepping on anything sharp.
• The Thora book The Incredible Crystals has six-year-old Felicity, who almost never wears shoes because she doesn't think they're worth the trouble. She doesn't worry about all the spiders and snakes in the area because she thinks they're more scared of her than she is of them.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • Hobbits don't need shoes most of the time because they have unusually tough and leathery soles and fur on top of their feet. However, there are exceptions. Tolkien originally intended to have Bilbo wear boots for most of The Hobbit (they're visible in his illustrations). He also says the Stoors, one of their ancestral tribes, sometimes wore boots, and hobbits who had a lot of Stoorish blood continued to do so in bad weather or swampy conditions.
  • Idril of the Silver Feet in The Book of Lost Tales/The Fall of Gondolin runs around Gondolin barefoot, except during major festivals. It is not mentioned whether she puts on shoes when she puts on armor.
• Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Those kids (particularly Huck) are barefoot whenever possible even if it is against the rules. It was actually common in America in the 1800s for kids (mostly boys but sometimes even girls) to go barefoot most of the summer, but there were still rules about when it was and wasn't appropriate. Huck broke 'em all.
• James, Victoria, and Laurent from The Twilight Saga prefer going barefoot so they can run at maximum Super-Speed without destroying their shoes.
• Giselle from An Unkindness of Ghosts refers to shoes as "blister machines."
• In The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle, the doctor is visited by Prince Bumpo, who is in England to study at Oxford. Bumpo says that he enjoys England immensely, except for the algebra he must learn and the shoes he must wear, which hurt his head and feet respectively. He cheerfully says that now that he's on break from his studies, he's forgotten the algebra and thrown the shoes over a wall, so all is well.
• In Robert A. Heinlein's Waldo, Waldo doesn't like shoes because he has lived his entire life being unable to walk, so when he finally is able to do so, he avoids them as they make his feet feel dead. He only makes himself wear them when he has to.
• In another Heinlein novel, I Will Fear No Evil, while holding a business meeting outdoors in a public park, Joan (formerly Johann) Smith enjoys the feel of grass on her bare feet and encourages her staffers to, in her own words, "Give your feet a treat," and take of their shoes as well.
• The heroine of Patricia A. McKillip's Winter Rose, Rois Melior, so prefers going barefoot that she often forgets to put on shoes even in foul and cold weather.

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