Seven-league boots
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Seven-league boots are an element in European folklore. The boots allow the person wearing them to take strides of seven leagues per step, resulting in great speed. The boots are often presented by a magical character to the protagonist to aid in the completion of a significant task. From the context of English language, "seven-league boots" originally arose as a translation from the French Template:Lang,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> Template:Dead linkpopularised by Charles Perrault's fairy tales.
Mentions of the legendary boots are found in:
- France – Charles Perrault's Hop o' My Thumb; Madame d'Aulnoy's The Bee and the Orange Tree; Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.
- Germany – The Brothers Grimm's Sweetheart Roland; Adelbert von Chamisso's Peter Schlemiel; Goethe's Faust (Mephistopheles uses them at the start of Part Two, Act Four<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>); Wilhelm Hauff's Der Kleine Muck.
- Norway – Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe's Soria Moria Castle.
- Britain – Richard Doyle's Jack the Giant Killer; John Masefield's The Midnight Folk; C. S. Lewis's The Pilgrim's Regress; Master Merlin (Pseudonym) and Dugald A. Steer's Wizardoligy, A Guide to Wizards of the World; Terry Pratchett's The Light Fantastic; Jonathan Stroud's The Bartimaeus Trilogy; Jenny Nimmo's Midnight for Charlie Bone; Diana Wynne Jones's Howl's Moving Castle; Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One; E. Nesbit's The Enchanted Castle; George Eliot's The Mill On The Floss.
- United States – Zane Grey's The Last of the Plainsmen; Ruth Chew's What the Witch Left; Gail Carson Levine's The Two Princesses of Bamarre; Mark Twain's The Innocents Abroad; Roger Zelazny's Bring Me the Head of Prince Charming; Clair Blank's Beverly Gray at the World's Fair; Kelly Barnhill's The Girl Who Drank the Moon; and Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Village Uncle.
- Russia – Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Monday Starts on Saturday.
Etymology
From the context of the English language, "seven-league boots" originally arose as a translation from the French Template:Lang,<ref>Template:Cite web</ref>Template:Dead link popularised by Charles Perrault's fairy tales. A league (roughly Template:Convert) was considered to represent the distance walked in an hour by an average man. If a man were to walk seven hours per day, he would, then, walk seven leagues, or about Template:Convert. In the 17th century, postboys' boots were called "seven-league boots". While some suggest that the "seven leagues" references the distance between post houses (postboys would only have their boots touch the ground at every coach inn, when changing the horses), this is inaccurate: the distance between coach inns was fixed at no more than five leagues.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>
Other variations
In fiction
Folklore
- Russian folklore has a similar magic item called Template:Lang (fast-pace boots), which allows the person wearing them to walk and run at an amazing pace.
- In Finnish and Estonian translations of stories with seven-league boots, they are often translated as Template:Lang (Finnish) and Template:Lang (Estonian),<ref>Template:Cite book</ref> literally "boots of seven Scandinavian miles".
- Japanese scholar Kunio Yanagita listed a tale titled The Thousand-ri Boots from Yamanashi and wondered about its great similarity to a tale in the Pentamerone with a pair of seven-league boots.<ref>Yanagita, Kunio; Translated by Fanny Hagin Meyer (1986). Yanagita Kunio Guide to the Japanese Folk Tale. Indiana University Press. p. 97. Template:ISBN.</ref>
- In Latvian tales, the phrase "nine-mile boots" (Template:Lang) is used.
- Jewish Folklore: the concept of kefitzat haderek (קפיצת הדרך), jumping, or folding, the way, is a concept found in Talmud, midrash, folklore, and mysticism.