Rushen Coatie Rushen Coatie Rushen Coatie or Rashin-Coatie is a Scottish fairy tale collected by Joseph Jacobs in his "More English Fairy Tales". It is Aarne–Thompson type 510A, the persecuted heroine, as is Cinderella. A queen with a daughter died. On her deathbed, she told her daughter that a red calf would come to her, and she could ask it for help. The king remarried, to a widow with three daughters, and the stepmother and stepsisters maltreated her, giving her only a coat made of rushes to wear—calling her Rushen Coatie—and too little food. A red calf came to her, and when
Fairy tale existed for thousands of years before the literary forms, there is no pure folktale, and each literary fairy tale draws on folk traditions, if only in parody. This makes it impossible to trace forms of transmission of a fairy tale. Oral story-tellers have been known to read literary fairy tales to increase their own stock of stories and treatments. The oral tradition of the fairy tale came long before the written page. Tales were told or enacted dramatically, rather than written down, and handed down from generation to generation. Because of this, the history of their development is necessarily obscure