This is at the heart of nineteenth-century - and even subsequent - folklore studies. Folk narratives diffuse. That is, people who hear a good story often repeated it in a new location, and so it continues to be repeated, manifesting in new locations and in subsequent generations. How that process occurred and how new locations and the unfolding of time affected those narratives became the focus of elaborate method and subsequent monographs to consider each folktale "type". "Cinderella" for example, is Tale Type 510, with the classic study conducted by Anna Birgitta Rooth (1919-2000), a student of famed Swedish folklorist, Carl Wilhelm von Sydow (1878-1952). The method in question was developed in Finland, and it is known as the Finnish Historic Geographic Method.

All this paints an orderly picture of things, but of course, things are never that simple. Some folktale (and legend) types have fairly tight distributions both historically and geographically, so it is easy to imagine that things as simple as a folktale spreading in time and space and changing as it goes. Some scholars, however, have contested the Finnish method and see another process going on. In addition, a story such as Cinderella has such a wide international distribution that a single process of diffusion cannot explain all the variants: for example, narratives in the Americas that seem like Cinderella cannot be easily imagined as historically related to the classic story collected and popularized from France and Germany.

These "non-historical" parallels are accounted for by Jungians following the work of Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1861) who would see in this process, examples of an archetype - a core motif that speaks to the universality of the human condition (or specifically to the "collective unconscious"). In addition, some folklorists, following the example of Soviet folklorist, Vladímir Propp (1895–1970) look to inherent structures in oral tradition: they would maintain that "types" are illusions and that generations of storytellers used traditional motifs to "decorate" existing structures, which in themselves limited the possibilities and gave the appearance of repeated story "types". This approach became particularly popular in post-WWII North American folklore studies. It has found less favor in European studies.

In general, most folktale studies seem to indicate that stories are repeated because the narratives are good. They are adapted through time and as they diffuse from place to place, but a good story is hard to forget, and so it tends to be repeated. In those rare examples - and the international nature of Cinderella is indeed rare - there is likely a combination of diffusion and independent invention to account for how it spread in Europe but also appears in far-removed places.