Glass in Fairytales

Once upon a time...

Emerging from oral storytelling traditions, fairy tales are possibly  humanity's earliest narratives. Passed down through generations, they have continually evolved, transforming into new versions of themselves.

Rather than reproducing reality, fairy tales create fantastical worlds that reflect the human subconscious and cultural understandings of morality, desire, and fear. Even the very first thing encountered, the opening phrase, often functions as a portal, transporting the listener or reader from the familiar world into the magical and unknown.

While openings vary across cultures, they tend to serve a similar purpose. Some situate the story in an undefined past, such as "Long, long ago..." or "Someday, sometime...". Others locate it in distant, imagined landscapes, as in Eastern European tales that begin "Beyond nine seas, beyond nine lagoons..." or "Beyond nine mountain ranges, nine rivers and nine woods...". Some are even self-aware of their imaginative nature: "There was, or perhaps there wasn't, in the oldest of times..."

As Tatar (2010) observes in Why Fairy Tales Matter: The Performative and the Transformative, fairytales act as portals to “wonder worlds, to sites that combine danger and beauty in ways so alluring that they inspire the desire to wander into new imaginative domains".

Dzielawski, A. (2014). Portal III [Oil on board]. "The series “Portals” consists of paintings addressing the archetypal transition theme – in this case from the visible world to the fantastic spiritual and supernatural world. These parallel realities are interconnected by a system of life’s arteries, taking the form of the tree girdles entwining the branches."

The connection to glass

Glass in storytelling often acts as a liminal space, a boundary separating realities, allowing you to see a landscape, an ocean, or a different world without physically stepping into it. Like fairy tale openings, glass creates distance, but at the same time desire. The listener is invited into the magical world, but the boundary between fantasy and reality remains. 

Glass also appears in fairy tales as a symbolic and a metaphoric material. It is widely recognised through motifs such as Cinderella’s glass slipper, the glass coffin in Snow White and Sleeping Beauty or the mountain in The Glass Mountain. 

Susan Freda, Caeruleum Vitro Cypripedium Parviflorum (Blue Glass Slipper). Hand-woven tin-coated copper wire with clear cast-glass accents, inspired by Cinderella’s glass slippers from the 1950 film Cinderella. Courtesy of Susan Freda Studios.

Cinderella’s glass slipper is one of the most recognisable fairy tale objects, once the magic disappears she must rush to hide her identity and in the process loses one slipper. Glass is an unusual material for slippers to be made of, it is restrictive and fragile, it does not stretch or adapt and only fits one person exactly. This becomes a challenge for the prince, and at the same time raises questions about control, selection and exclusion. 

As Warwick (2022) explains in Cinderella's glass slipper: Towards a cultural history of Renaissance Materialities - fairytales can be literary prisms that allow for the study of Renaissance material culture, particularly the luxury goods associated with marriage. Glass held special significance in Renaissance and early modern Europe, it was prized for its brilliance, linked to alchemical transformation, and central to luxury industries.

The slipper in Cinderella made of glass specifically was a literary fiction introduced by the French author Charles Perrault. The versions known before featured a slipper made of fur, gold or the material was simply left unspecified. By choosing glass instead of more traditional fairy-tale materials, Perrault linked Cinderella’s journey from servant to princess to the transformative nature of glass itself. Just as glass is created from ordinary materials like ash and sand and turned into something beautiful and valuable, Cinderella is transformed into a figure of elegance and status. At the same time, the glass slipper reflected contemporary admiration for the skill, innovation, and luxury associated with French glassmaking.

The Glass Coffin

The glass coffin in Snow White and similar tales creates a different meaning of glass, apart from transformation, symbolising and representing suspension and control. 

The princess falls under a spell of enchanted sleep, and is displayed under a glass coffin until true love saves her. Trapped under a curse of eternal sleep, she may only be observed, lacking autonomy and for most of the plot of the fairy tale remaining a passive character. Not fully alive, but not gone either. 

Stokes, M. (circa 1902). Schneewittchen (Snow White) [Painting]. Wallraf–Richartz Museum, Cologne, Germany.

Deluse (2015) suggests several interpretations of the glass coffin as a central metaphor in the fairy tales. From a psychoanalytic view, the time spent in the glass coffin can represent a stage of growth and transition.  Feminist interpretations see the glass coffin as a symbol of extreme objectification, where the heroine becomes self-less and is treated as something to be displayed and desired. It can also be linked to the suppression of the female identity, when a “happy ending” in marriage depends on a woman learning to silence herself.

On a narrative level, the dwarfs place Snow White in a glass coffin because they cannot bear to bury her beauty, instead keeping her body visible and on display. (Deluse, 2015)

However, while the glass coffin can represent confinement and trauma, it can also act as a symbol of transformation, since it lets readers see their own struggles reflected in the heroine’s survival and eventual awakening. 

Shani, T. (2025). The spell or the dream [Exhibition]. Somerset House, London, United Kingdom "Resting atop a stepped plinth, where visitors can sit, gather or peer inside, the luminous blue figure gently breathes, caught in a suspended state, the spell. The dreamer sleeps through the warnings of present and imminent catastrophes, political and social disaster and environmental collapse – but it also dreams of resistance and renewal."

The Glass Mountain

The glass mountain is a recurring motif in fairy tales, often centred on a hero or heroine who must climb it to rescue a beloved figure as a form of reward or fulfilment. While mountains are common settings in folklore, the cases where they are explicitly made of glass are seen in the Norwegian tale The Princess on the Glass Hill and the Polish fairy tale The Glass Mountain.

Across these narratives, the journey typically follows a familiar archetype in which a trapped or distant love interest must be saved from an intricate location. The protagonist faces a series of challenges, often overcome with the help of magical aids such as enchanted horses, apples, or even protective claws made from animals like lynx or bear, as in the Polish version.

In European folklore, particularly within Germanic, Polish, and Lithuanian traditions, the Glass Mountain is believed to mark the soul’s path to Paradise after death. According to legend, souls must climb its steep, slippery surface to reach the afterlife, while those who fail may slide back down as a form of judgement or punishment. The challenge was considered so significant that some burial customs included placing bear or lynx claws with the deceased, providing the soul with tools to grip the mountain’s glass-like surface during its journey. (Frank, 2022)

Kittelsen, T. (1915). Jomfruen fra Glasberget (The Princess on the Glass Hill) [Illustration]. In Barne-eventyr. Aschehoug.

Moreover, glass is slippery and smooth, the qualities of the material provide the challenge and barrier to reaching the afterlife or saving the trapped lover.

Like the opening words of a story, a material of glass marks a threshold between one world and another, between reality and magic. It has different meanings while retaining contradictory qualities. It is transparent and restrictive, beautiful and fragile, protective and confining.  Like the fairy tales themselves, it creates a space that feels close enough to reach and yet remains just beyond our grasp.

References: 

Deluse, A. (2015). Once upon a time to happily ever after: Enduring themes and life lessons of fairy tales in “Snow White” and “Beauty and the Beast” (Senior thesis, Trinity College). Trinity College.

Dzielawski, A. (2014). Portal III [Oil on board].

Frank, R. M. (2022). Exploring the Indigenous face of Europe: Rethinking fairytales, the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela and Glass Mountain before Cinderella [Working paper]. Iowa Research Online. https://doi.org/10.17077/pp.006733

Kittelsen, T. (1915). Jomfruen fra Glasberget (The Princess on the Glass Hill) [Illustration]. In Barne-eventyr. Aschehoug.

Shani, T. (2025). The spell or the dream [Exhibition]. Somerset House, London, United Kingdom

Stokes, M. (circa 1902). Schneewittchen (Snow White) [Painting]. Wallraf–Richartz Museum, Cologne, Germany.

Susan Freda, Caeruleum Vitro Cypripedium Parviflorum (Blue Glass Slipper).

Tatar, M. (2010). Why Fairy Tales Matter: The Performative and the Transformative. Western Folklore, 69(1), 55–64. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2573528

Warwick, G. (2022). Cinderella's glass slipper: Towards a cultural history of Renaissance materialities. In Elements in the Renaissance. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009263948