Donor (fairy tale) by Giambattista Basile. In the Grimm Brothers' variant of "Cinderella", the protagonist is aided not by her fairy godmother but by her dead mother, as is the heroine of the Finnish variant, "The Wonderful Birch". A great variety of other figures may also take this place. In "Vasilissa the Beautiful", the heroine is aided by a wooden doll that her dying mother had given her; in "Rushen Coatie", by a red calf sent to her by her dead mother, a calf that can continue to aid her after its death; in "Katie Woodencloak" by a mysterious dun bull; in "Tattercoats",
Fairy tale The tale itself resurfaced in Western literature in the 16th and 17th centuries, with "The Facetious Nights of Straparola" by Giovanni Francesco Straparola (Italy, 1550 and 1553), which contains many fairy tales in its inset tales, and the Neapolitan tales of Giambattista Basile (Naples, 1634–36), which are all fairy tales. Carlo Gozzi made use of many fairy tale motifs among his Commedia dell'Arte scenarios, including among them one based on "The Love For Three Oranges" (1761). Simultaneously, Pu Songling, in China, included many fairy tales in his collection, "Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio" (published posthumously, 1766). The fairy tale