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",
The Riddle (fairy tale) The Riddle (fairy tale) "The Riddle" () is a German fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm, tale number 22. It is Aarne-Thompson type 851, winning the princess with a riddle, and is mainly used in children's adaptions of Grimm's Fairy Tales. Andrew Lang included it in "The Green Fairy Book". It is sometimes known as "A Riddling Tale" and is about a man whose wife is transformed into a flower. Both Joseph Jacobs and John Francis Campbell noted the similarity between this and Campbell's Scottish variant "The Ridere of Riddles", but that there is no information to discern which