Every time a story is retold, it is modified to some extent

The argument

We often think of "traditional" fairy tales as stories written by the great European writers: the Brothers Grimm of Germany, Poet Basile of Italy, or members of the French courts like Beaumont and Perrault. But to your dismay, even these great writers created adaptations of stories created by those before them! Looking at Cinderella, one of the oldest fairy tales, the initial "traditional" princess and slipper story came from the Greeks who shared stories of a slave girl, Rhodopis, whose sandal was dropped into the lap of the King of Egypt by Zeus. The King then searched for the owner of the slipper and made Rhodopis his queen. In the Grimm adaptation, Rhodopis was named "Aschenputtel" (Ash girl) and has a magical tree that hands her ball gowns and gold slippers on command! Even the material of the slipper has been disputed due to so many different accounts of the story. In French versions, the slippers are thought to be made of fur or "vair", but there is speculation that the glass slipper aspect of the story was formulated due to the french word for glass being "verre", which could be confused with "vair" over many generations. In every iteration, the writers adapted the parameters of the story to suit their audience and society and the question remains, what is the "traditional" fairy tale?

Premises

Counter-arguments

Although the stories are naturally written in different ways/change over time, the essence of the stories are not changing with each iteration. Only semantic things such as the fur vs. glass slipper, etc. are changing, which ultimately have minimal effects on the actual lessons learned through the fairytale. Therefore, this does not qualify as being modified in the same way that "rewriting" the fairy tale, where the entire concept is altered, would.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] That the canonical versions have antecedents is well established, and the specific genealogy is looser than the premise implies — Rhodopis, the Chinese Ye Xian and the Grimms' Aschenputtel share a motif rather than descending one from another, so what is shown is that a story type recurs, not that each writer was adapting a known predecessor. [Rejecting P2] The vair/verre example works against the argument. The counter-argument on record notes that these are changes of detail: the slipper's material has no bearing on what the story does, and a dispute over one word is a thin basis for a general claim about modification. [Rejecting P3] The conclusion does not follow from the absence of an original. Even granting that no fixed traditional version exists, that establishes only that the tales have always changed — the counter argues this is different in kind from deliberately rewriting a story's premises or its moral, which is what the position proposes. [Rejecting C] The argument also gives no reason to rewrite. It removes an objection to rewriting rather than making a case for it, and the grounds the position actually rests on — that the tales carry attitudes worth revising — are never stated. (The slug for this entry does not match its content and is a candidate for correction.)