diff --git a/NEWS.md b/NEWS.md
index 7a2227f5..7fb6926c 100644
--- a/NEWS.md
+++ b/NEWS.md
@@ -1,10 +1,19 @@
 # readxl 1.1.0.9000
 
+## Breaking change
+
 * Missing or duplicated column names are now repaired with `tibble::set_tidy_names()` in `read_excel()` and friends. `set_tidy_names()` is intended to encourage name repair that is more principled and consistent, across multiple tidyverse packages. Its design is discussed in [tidyverse/tibble#217](https://github.com/tidyverse/tibble/issues/217). (#357, #453)
 
   - Example of change a user will see: consider a spreadsheet with three columns, one unnamed and two named `x`.
   - Column names in readxl > 1.1.0: `..1`, `x..2`, `x..3`
   - Column names in readxl <= 1.1.0: `X__1`, `x`, `x__1`
+  
+## Other changes
+
+* Path handling (#477):
+
+  - `.xls` paths are no longer normalized. (#476 xls)
+  - All paths are explicitly converted to the native encoding via `enc2native()`  (#370)
 
 # readxl 1.1.0
 
diff --git a/R/read_excel.R b/R/read_excel.R
index a6de3db2..29ead9ee 100644
--- a/R/read_excel.R
+++ b/R/read_excel.R
@@ -152,7 +152,7 @@ read_excel_ <- function(path, sheet = NULL, range = NULL,
   tibble::set_tidy_names(
     tibble::as_tibble(
       read_fun(
-        path = path, sheet_i = sheet,
+        path = enc2native(path), sheet_i = sheet,
         limits = limits, shim = shim,
         col_names = col_names, col_types = col_types,
         na = na, trim_ws = trim_ws, guess_max = guess_max
diff --git a/src/XlsWorkBook.h b/src/XlsWorkBook.h
index a02b4c60..ae756418 100644
--- a/src/XlsWorkBook.h
+++ b/src/XlsWorkBook.h
@@ -6,12 +6,6 @@
 #include "ColSpec.h"
 #include "utils.h"
 
-inline std::string normalizePath(std::string path) {
-  Rcpp::Environment baseEnv = Rcpp::Environment::base_env();
-  Rcpp::Function normalizePath = baseEnv["normalizePath"];
-  return Rcpp::as<std::string>(normalizePath(path, "/", true));
-}
-
 class XlsWorkBook {
 
   // common to Xls[x]WorkBook
@@ -26,7 +20,7 @@ class XlsWorkBook {
 public:
 
   XlsWorkBook(const std::string& path) {
-    path_ = normalizePath(path);
+    path_ = path;
 
     xls::xlsWorkBook* pWB_ = xls::xls_open(path_.c_str(), "UTF-8");
     if (pWB_ == NULL) {
diff --git a/tests/testthat/test-read-excel.R b/tests/testthat/test-read-excel.R
index b7268986..fefbd8be 100644
--- a/tests/testthat/test-read-excel.R
+++ b/tests/testthat/test-read-excel.R
@@ -93,3 +93,25 @@ test_that("trim_ws must be a logical", {
     "`trim_ws` must be either TRUE or FALSE"
   )
 })
+
+## xlsx: https://github.com/tidyverse/readxl/issues/370
+## xls:  https://github.com/tidyverse/readxl/issues/476
+test_that("non-ASCII filenames can be read", {
+  skip_on_cran()
+  ## chosen to be non-ASCII but
+  ## [1] representable in Windows-1252 and
+  ## [2] not any of the few differences between Windows-1252 and ISO-8859-1
+  ## a-grave + e-diaeresis  + Eth + '.xls[x]'
+  xls_filename <- "\u00C0\u00CB\u00D0\u002E\u0078\u006C\u0073"
+  xlsx_filename <- "\u00C0\u00CB\u00D0\u002E\u0078\u006C\u0073\u0078"
+  tricky_xls_file <- file.path(tempdir(), xls_filename)
+  tricky_xlsx_file <- file.path(tempdir(), xlsx_filename)
+  file.copy(test_sheet("list_type.xls"), tricky_xls_file)
+  file.copy(test_sheet("list_type.xlsx"), tricky_xlsx_file)
+  expect_true(file.exists(tricky_xls_file))
+  expect_true(file.exists(tricky_xlsx_file))
+  on.exit(file.remove(tricky_xls_file))
+  on.exit(file.remove(tricky_xlsx_file))
+  expect_error_free(read_xls(tricky_xls_file))
+  expect_error_free(read_xlsx(tricky_xlsx_file))
+})