The Sharp Grey Sheep The Sharp Grey Sheep The Sharp Grey Sheep or The Sharp-Horned Grey Sheep is a Scottish fairy tale collected by John Francis Campbell in "Popular Tales of the West Highlands", listing his informant as John Dewar, labourer, from Glendaruail, Cowal. It is Aarne-Thompson type 510A. See also "Rushen Coatie", a nearly identical Scottish version of the "Cinderella" tale. A king and queen had a daughter, but the queen died and the king married another. The stepmother was cruel to the princess and sent her to watch the sheep while not sending her enough food to survive. A sharp (horned) grey
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