Seven-league boots
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 bottes de sept lieues,popularised 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 ; 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 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 (novel)|Howl's Moving Castle]; Evelyn Waugh's The [Loved One (book)|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; Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Village Uncle, and Catherine Besterman's The Quaint and Curious Quest of Johnny Longfoot.
- Russia – Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Monday Starts on Saturday.
Etymology
Other variations
In fiction
Folklore
- Russian folklore has a similar magic item called Сапоги-Скороходы, 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 Seitsemän Peninkulman Saappaat and Seitsmepenikoormasaapad, 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.
- In Latvian tales, the phrase "nine-mile boots" 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.