Rags To Royalty / Fairy Tales

• In "The Beautiful Damsel and the Wicked Old Woman", a prince marries a peasant girl because she is beautiful, weeps pearls and brings flowers when she can smile, and sews exquisitely, but when she is coming to the wedding with an old woman, the woman gouges her eyes out and thrust her into a cave, to replace her with her own daughter. But the girl weeps pearls and buys back her eyes, and when she can see, she sews a handkerchief that the prince recognizes, so she regains him.
• In "The Blue Mountains", the hero, a soldier, wins the princess. The same happens in "The Three Princesses of Whiteland", where the hero is a peasant boy.
• In Grimms' "The Girl Without Hands", the miller's daughter marries a king; then the Devil conspires against her, she is driven out to the wilderness, but the king follows her and she regains her place.
• In "The Grateful Beasts", the peasant lad Ferko marries the princess and becomes king
• In "Fortunée", the title character is a peasant girl who is in conflict with her brother over a magical pot of pinks. It turns out that Fortunée is actually a princess who was sent away because her father threatened to kill her mother if she had another girl (she already had six daughters) and that the pot of pinks is a prince who is also her cousin.
• In "Starlight", the main character is a slave who is revealed to be an Arabian princess.
• In "The Maiden with the Rose on her Forehead", a woman finds a beautiful girl in enchanted sleep in her husband's house. Not knowing she is his niece, she enslaves her, but her husband finds out and restores the girl to her proper station. A similar plot is found in "The Young Slave".
• In "The Goose Girl", the heroine's servant overpowers her and makes her promise not to tell anyone; then the servant passes herself off as the princess and has the heroine turned into a goose-girl. She escapes when she confesses to a stove rather than a person.
• Gender Flip Cinderellas, Cinderlad or Askeladden, win princesses in such tales as "The Princess on the Glass Hill", "Boots and the Troll", and "The Seven Foals".
• "Molly Whuppie" does not only win the king's son for herself, but his older brothers for her older sisters.
• In "East of the Sun and West of the Moon", the woodcutter's youngest daughter marries a bear who proves to be a prince.
• In " The Dancing Water, the Singing Apple, and the Speaking Bird " and "The Three Little Birds", the king's children are abandoned and grow up in ignorance of their birth, until a magic bird informs the king and children of the truth.
• In Joseph Jacobs' "The Fish and the Ring", Alexander Afanasyev's "Vasilii the Unlucky", "The Devil With the Three Golden Hairs", "The King Who Would Be Stronger Than Fate", and many other fairy tales, a rich child is destined to marry a poor child, and the poor child always succeeds.
• In "Brother and Sister", when the king find Sister in the woods, with her transformed brother, he marries her.
• A central portion of the "Persecuted Heroine" fairy tale type.
  • Cinderella variants, such as "The Hearth Cat", "The Maiden and The Fish", "The Sharp Grey Sheep", "Tattercoats", and "The Wonderful Birch".
  • Variants which follow Snow White, such as "Catskin", "Katie Woodencloak", "Rashin-Coatie", "The Bear", Grimms' "All-Kinds-Of-Fur", "The King Who Wished Marry To His Daughter", and "Cap o' Rushes".
• In "Maid Maleen", after the princess falls in love with a prince her father does not approve of, the father imprisons her in a tower. Then her father loses his kingdom and is unable to get her out. She and her maid burrow out and live in appalling poverty until she can find her way to the prince's kingdom and win him back.
  Oh, nettle-plant, Little nettle-plant,
  What dost thou here alone?
  I have known the time
  When I ate thee unboiled,
  When I ate thee unroasted.
• In "The Story of The Black Cow", the hero ends up marrying a princess because of his gold hair.
• In "Catherine and Her Fate", Catherine, having chosen to be miserable in youth and happy in old age rather than the other way round, ends up as a Scullery Maid — except that her Fate, being an Anthropomorphic Personification, is always showing up and wrecking her position for seven years. Finally, however, her Fate gives her a MacGuffin, and when the king needs it, he decides to give her its weight in gold. It takes his whole treasury, he demands the story, and when she is done, he decides to marry her.
• In "Adalmina's Pearl", the cruel princess loses her enchanted pearl and becomes a plain, dumb peasant girl. Thanks to a back up enchantment, her heart however turns good now, and stays that even after she gets the pearl back.
• In The Grateful Prince, the prince goes to rescue a peasant girl who was captive to an ogre because his father had promised him to the ogre, and substituted to the girl. After he does, he marries her.
• In The Three Little Men in the Wood, the stepdaughter marries a king.
• In Little Annie the Goose-Girl, Annie declares early that she means to have the king's son, and gets him in the end.
  so little Annie the goose-girl came to have the king of England's son for her husband after all, just because it was written that she should have him.
• Ironically, despite her Trope Codifier status above, Cinderella herself would fall more precisely under "Goose Girl Style." As Jane Yolen has pointed out, Cinderella was already nobility and/or an heiress, just made to wear rags and work a menial job by her Wicked Stepmother.
  "'Cinderella' is not a story of rags to riches, but rather riches recovered; not poor girl into princess but rather rich girl (or princess) rescued from improper or wicked enslavement."
• In "The Two Brothers", collected by The Brothers Grimm, the son of a poor broom-maker rescues a princess from a dragon and marries her.

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