Short answers, pulled from the story.
The term fairy tale traces to Madame d'Aulnoy, who coined the French phrase Conte de fée in her 1697 collection. The name was adopted into English translation and gradually replaced the more general term folk tale.
Researchers using phylogenetic analysis have traced the story of The Smith and the Devil to the Bronze Age, roughly 6000 years ago. Jack and the Beanstalk has been dated to the split of Eastern and Western Indo-European peoples, over 5000 years ago, and both Beauty and the Beast and Rumpelstiltskin appear to have originated around 4000 years ago.
The Brothers Grimm published their first collection of German fairy tales in 1812 and 1815, becoming the first major collectors to try to preserve the style of oral telling alongside plot and characters. They rewrote the tales in later editions to make them more acceptable, and their work inspired collectors across Russia, Norway, Romania, England, and Ireland to document local traditions.
Fairy tales were originally told to adult audiences and were written by aristocratic women in 17th-century French salons as sophisticated parlor entertainment that embedded social and political critique. The association with children developed primarily in the 19th and 20th centuries, driven in part by the Brothers Grimm retitling their collection Children's and Household Tales and by later Victorian moralists who reshaped the stories as educational material.
Vladimir Propp studied Russian fairy tales and identified thirty-one narrative functions and seven character types that he argued underlie all fairy tales. He found that when these elements appear in a tale, they always do so in an invariant order. His framework, published in Morphology of the Folktale, has been applied to tales from many countries beyond Russia.
Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, released in 1937, was a pivotal film that required more than 300 artists, assistants, and animators and cost over 400 percent of its original budget. Disney returned to fairy tales with Cinderella in 1950, Sleeping Beauty in 1959, The Little Mermaid in 1989, and Beauty and the Beast in 1991, and has been credited with helping establish the genre as primarily children's entertainment while also being criticized for softening the naturalism of older tales.