Tale type In
folkloristics,
Puss in Boots is classified as
Aarne–Thompson–Uther ATU 545B, "Puss in Boots", a subtype of ATU 545, "The Cat as Helper".
Folklorists Joseph Jacobs and
Stith Thompson point that the Perrault tale is the possible source of the Cat Helper story in later European folkloric traditions. Similarly, Frisian professor
Jurjen van der Kooi noted that variants from oral tradition were only starting to be recorded from the 19th century onwards, and tales from
Central and
Western Europe follow Perrault's and Grimm's redaction very closely. In the same vein, French folklorists
Paul Delarue and
Marie-Louise Ténèze, editors of the French Folktale Catalogue, concur that oral variants where the cat appears as the helper (especially those in which he wears boots) were influenced by Perrault's tale.
Motifs The animal helper According to scholars (e.g., van der Kooi,
Hans-Jörg Uther, Stith Thompson and
Ines Köhler-Zülch), while the cat appears mostly in Europe as the animal helper, variants across cultures replace the cat with a jackal, a fox or another species of animal, like a dog, a rooster, or an ape. German folklorist Köhler-Zulch noted the geographical distribution of the different animal helpers: a fox in
Eastern and
Southeastern Europe, as well in the Caucasus and
Central Asia; and an ape, a jackal or a gazelle in
Southern Asia and in Africa. For instance, professor
Damiana Eugenio remarked that the helpful animal is a monkey "in all Philippine variants". In the Hungarian National Catalogue of Folktales (MNK), in tale type 545B, ("The (Tom)cat with boots"), the protagonist may be helped either by a cat or a rooster received from his father as his inheritance, or rescues a fox from peril (e.g., starvation or hunters), and the animal promises to help him in return. According to Swedish scholar , a cycle of tales that developed in Northern Europe involves the
spirit of a dead man instead of a cat. This cycle is found in
Denmark,
Finland and
Estonia.
The fox helper French folklorists Paul Delarue and Marie-Louise Ténèze, editors of the French Folktale Catalogue, argued that the existence of variants with a helpful fox instead of a cat indicate an "oral tradition [that is] independent from the printed versions". As such, they locate such variants in - besides some tales in France - peninsular Italy, in Sicily, Serbia, Bulgaria, Romania, Russia, Finland, Turkey and Mongolia. Similarly, folklorist
Erika Taube noted that "the Asian Central version" has the fox instead of the cat, a feature that also appears in Eastern Europe. According to the description of the tale type in the
East Slavic Folktale Catalogue (), last updated by scholar in 1979, the hero may be helped either by a cat (), or by a fox (). Similarly, the
Bulgarian Folktale Catalogue names type 545B as ("The Miller and the Fox"). In the ("Turkish Folktale Catalogue"), by
Wolfram Eberhard and
Pertev Naili Boratav, both scholars listed the variants with the fox as the animal helper under Turkish type TTV 34, ("The Miller and the Fox"), which corresponds in the international classification to tale type ATU 545B. Hungarian orientalist
László L. Lőrincz established the classification of the
Mongolian tale corpus. In his system, the story appears as type 32, ("The grateful, sly
red fox"), in two variations: the fox replaces the cat as the protagonist's helper; the protagonist either hunts the fox himself and releases it (variation "A"), or he hides the fox from a hunter (variation "B"); in return, the red fox helps the protagonist marry a khan's daughter. Tales of the Caucasian Region also register the fox in the place of the cat. For example, Georgian scholarship registers tale type ATU 545B in
Georgia, with the name "The Fox and the Peasant", wherein the cat is replaced by the helpful fox. Similarly, in the index of Adyghe folktale corpus, a fox helps a poor carpenter to marry the daughter of a (lord), and in the
Azerbaijani Folktale Index, in Azeri type 545B,
Armudan bəy, the fox helps the miller's son in marrying the padishah's daughter.
Distribution The tale has also spread to the Americas, and is known in Asia (India, Indonesia and Philippines). Greek scholar Marianthi Kaplanoglou states that the tale type ATU 545B, "Puss in Boots" (or, locally, "The Helpful Fox"), is an "example" of "widely known stories (...) in the repertoires of Greek refugees from Asia Minor". ==Adaptations==