First published in 1845, Danish author Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale The Red Shoes is a cautionary tale about vanity and pride, in which a young girl who values her beautiful red shoes over her ailing stepmother finds to her horror that the shoes have come to life and are forcing her to dance, whether she wants to or not.
As she dances across graveyards, over moors and through forests, the red shoes having grafted themselves to her feet, an angel tells her that she is cursed to dance forever, even after she is dead, as a warning to vain girls everywhere. Desperate for rest she successfully begs an executioner to chop off her feet, only to be confronted by the accursed red shoes, her severed feet inside them, still dancing, when she limps on crutches and new wooden feet to church to pray for forgiveness.
