"Kate Crackernuts" or "Katie Crackernuts" is a Scottish Longman's Magazine in 1889. Joseph Jacobs edited as alive as republished the tale in his English Fairy Tales 1890. The tale is approximately a princess who rescues her beautiful sister from an evil enchantment as alive as a prince from a wasting sickness caused by dancing nightly with the fairies. The tale has been adapted to a children's novel & a stage play.
Maria Tatar, author of The Annotated Classic Fairy Tales, notes that "Kate Crackernuts" belongs to the "do or die" strain of fairy tales: a heroine is precondition a task to perform, and, whether successful, she wins a prince, but, if unsuccessful, she loses her life. The tale touches upon the wicked stepmother theme but never fully develops it, & the green hill may be related to the Venusberg of Tannhauser, or another site of pleasure. Unlike numerous popular tales, which are so-called from reworked literary forms, "Crackernuts" is veryto the oral tradition. It combines Aarne–Thompson category 306, the danced-out shoes, such as "The Twelve Dancing Princesses", and 711, the beautiful and the ugly twin, such(a) as "Tatterhood".
The fairies' forcing young men and women to come to a revel every day and dance to exhaustion, and so harm away, was a common European belief. The actual disease involved appears to realize been consumption tuberculosis.
This tale is the closest analogue to The Twelve Dancing Princesses, but reverses the role, in that the heroine goes after the dancing prince, and also the tone: the princesses in The Twelve Dancing Princesses are always depicted as enjoying the dances, while in the much darker Kate Crackernuts, the prince is forced by the fairies to dance to exhaustion, and is an invalid by day.
Though the stepmother acts the usual element in a fairy tale, her component is unusually truncated, without the usual comeuppance served to evil-doers and the stepsisters show a solidarity that is uncommon even among full siblings in fairy tales.
The tale of Kate Crackernuts produced its way into Anglo-American folklore.