Fairy tale

• 1. Introduction

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  Fairy tales exist in every human culture on earth, and some of them, researchers now believe, are older than writing itself. A story about a smith making a deal with the devil has been traced back to the Bronze Age, roughly 6000 years ago. Jack and the Beanstalk may have split off from a common ancestor tale at the moment when Eastern and Western branches of the Indo-European language family separated, more than 5000 years ago. These are not children's stories that someone invented last century. They are some of the oldest surviving narratives our species possesses.

  What exactly is a fairy tale? That question turns out to be surprisingly contested. Scholars have disagreed for centuries, and no single definition has settled the matter. How did these stories move from oral tradition into the parlors of 17th-century Paris, into the printed collections of the Brothers Grimm, and eventually onto cinema screens? What do they mean, and why do they endure? And who, originally, were they even for?

• 2. Defining the Undefinable

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  Stith Thompson, writing in his 1977 edition of The Folktale, described the fairy tale as a story moving in "an unreal world without definite locality or definite creatures," filled with the marvelous, where humble heroes kill adversaries and marry princesses. That definition captures something real. But the moment scholars try to draw firmer lines, the genre resists.

  The name itself traces to a specific moment. Madame d'Aulnoy coined the French phrase Conte de fée, or fairy tale, in her 1697 collection. Yet the term quickly became contentious, because fairies themselves are not actually required. As Stith Thompson observed, talking animals and the presence of magic are more common to the fairy tale than fairies. Steven Swann Jones identified magic as the single distinguishing feature. Davidson and Chaudri proposed transformation. The Italian writer Italo Calvino valued the genre above all for what he called "quickness," the economy and concision with which a story delivers its force.

  Vladimir Propp took a structural approach in his Morphology of the Folktale. He studied Russian tales and concluded that any fairy tale is built from up to thirty-one narrative functions, always appearing in the same order, organized around seven character types. The donor who gives the hero magical assistance appears in tale after tale: the fairy godmother in Cinderella, the talking fox in The Golden Bird, the Buddhist monk in The Boy Who Drew Cats. Propp's framework has been found useful well beyond Russia, though critics note it fits quest tales more naturally than tales that do not involve a journey. J. R. R. Tolkien, in his essay "On Fairy-Stories", placed the stories in a domain he called Faerie, but then excluded tales that Andrew Lang had placed in his Lilac Fairy Book, which shows how slippery even an expert's categories can be.

• 3. Ancient Roots

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  Written evidence of fairy-tale-like stories surfaces across literate cultures long before any modern collector gave the genre its name. The Golden Ass, a Roman text from roughly 100-200 AD, contains the story of Cupid and Psyche. The Panchatantra from India dates to the 3rd century BC. Aesop, working in ancient Greece in the 6th century BC, is often cited as the first famous Western figure in this tradition.

  China contributed its own thread. Taoist philosophers Liezi and Zhuangzi wove fairy tales into their philosophical writings. The Arabian Nights, compiled around 1500 AD, is sometimes treated as an ancient ancestor of the form, but researchers point out that tales like Vikram and the Vampire and Bel and the Dragon are older still.

  Medieval European literature contains early versions of motifs that later collectors would recognize: the grateful dead, the quest for the lost wife. Jack Zipes notes fairy-tale elements in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene, and plays by William Shakespeare. King Lear, he argues, can be read as a literary variant of tales like Water and Salt and Cap O' Rushes.

  Genetic analysis has given researchers a new tool for tracing these stories. The anthropologist Jamie Tehrani and the folklorist Sara Graca Da Silva used phylogenetic analysis, a technique drawn from evolutionary biology, to map the relatedness of tales the way biologists map the relatedness of species. Their findings suggest that Beauty and the Beast and Rumpelstiltskin each originated around 4000 years ago. Some studies push even further back, suggesting that the swan maiden tale type could reach the Upper Palaeolithic.

• 4. The Salon and the Printing Press

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  Giovanni Francesco Straparola published his Facetious Nights in Italy in 1550 and 1553, embedding fairy tales in a frame narrative. Giambattista Basile followed with the Neapolitan tales of his Pentamerone, published between 1634 and 1636. These are the oldest surviving written forms of many tales. But the genre's identity, and its name, crystallized in France.

  In the 1630s, aristocratic women in Paris began hosting salons in their own living rooms, gathering to discuss arts, letters, politics, and the social conditions of their lives: marriage, love, financial independence, access to education. Women were barred from formal schooling at the time. Writers such as Madeleine de Scudery and Madame de Lafayette emerged from these early circles.

  Sometime in the middle of the 17th century, a parlor game based on old folk tales swept through the salons. Each participant was called on to retell a traditional story or rework an old theme, displaying verbal agility while commenting, often obliquely, on the conditions of aristocratic life. The elaborate decorative language served a practical function: it helped slip subversive content past court censors. Critiques of the king, of arranged marriages, of women's dependence could be embedded in tales of wicked fairies and magical kingdoms. Tales by women of this period often featured clever young aristocratic girls whose lives were governed by arbitrary fathers, kings, and elderly wicked fairies, alongside groups of wise women who set things right.

  Charles Perrault published his Contes in 1697, the same year Madame d'Aulnoy coined the term Conte de fée. Perrault fixed the forms of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella that most readers know today. The salon tales were eventually collected in an enormous anthology called Le Cabinet des Fees, preserving stories from the 17th and 18th centuries.

• 5. Grimm, Collectors, and the Myth of Purity

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  The Brothers Grimm published their first edition in 1812 and 1815. They were the first major collectors to try to preserve not only the plots and characters of oral tales but also the style of their telling, which made the first edition a treasure for folklorists. But the Grimms rewrote the tales in later editions to make them more acceptable to their readership, which secured their popularity and their sales.

  The Grimms also made editorial decisions that reveal how fraught the idea of a "pure" folk tradition actually was. They rejected an oral version of Bluebeard because they believed it derived from Perrault, making it French rather than German. They included Little Briar Rose, despite its obvious relationship to Perrault's Sleeping Beauty, only after Jacob Grimm argued that the figure of Brynhildr in Norse mythology proved the sleeping princess motif was authentically Germanic.

  This logic reflected a belief widespread among 19th-century folklorists: that rural, illiterate peasants, if sufficiently isolated, would tell uncontaminated tales preserved from prehistory. Later research rejected this view entirely. Fairy tales never had a fixed form. Tellers constantly altered them. Oral storytellers read literary versions to expand their own repertoire, and literary writers drew on oral traditions. The two streams cannot be cleanly separated.

  The Grimms' influence spread quickly. The Norwegian collectors Peter Christen Asbjornsen and Jorgen Moe published their first collection in 1845. The Romanian Petre Ispirescu followed in 1874. The Russian Alexander Afanasyev published his collection beginning in 1855. The English Joseph Jacobs and the American Jeremiah Curtin, who focused on Irish tales, both published first editions in 1890. Andrew Lang drew on all of this material, plus stories gathered by ethnographers from Africa, the Americas, and Australia, to fill his coloured fairy books series, which ran from 1890 to 1913.

• 6. Children and the Expurgated Tale

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  Adults were originally just as likely as children to be the audience for a fairy tale. The précieuses who shaped the genre in 17th-century France aimed their work at adult readers, though they regarded their source material as stories servants told to children. A French novel of that period shows a countess exclaiming that she loves fairy tales as if she were still a child herself.

  The 19th and 20th centuries shifted the association firmly toward children. The Brothers Grimm titled their collection Children's and Household Tales and rewrote sections after complaints that the original content was unsuitable. In the first edition of their Rapunzel, the prince's visits are revealed when Rapunzel asks why her clothing has grown tight, indicating pregnancy. Later editions replaced this with a careless remark that it was easier to pull up the prince than the witch. Sexual content came out; violence against villains, however, often increased. J. R. R. Tolkien noted that the cannibalistic stew in The Juniper Tree was frequently cut from children's editions.

  Victorian moralizers went further. George Cruikshank rewrote Cinderella in 1854 to carry temperance themes. Charles Dickens protested: "In an utilitarian age, of all other times, it is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected."

  Psychoanalyst Bruno Bettelheim argued that stripping away the cruelty weakened the tales' value, because the darkness is precisely what lets children work through difficult psychological conflicts symbolically. G. K. Chesterton made a related point: fairy tales do not give a child the idea of evil, because that is in the child already. What they give the child, Chesterton wrote, is the first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. Albert Einstein put it simply, advising that if you want children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales, and if you want them more intelligent, read them more.

• 7. Across Media and Cultures

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  Walt Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, released in 1937, cost more than 400 percent of its original budget and required the work of more than 300 artists, assistants, and animators. The studio hired Don Graham to run animation training for more than 700 staff. For motion and personality, Disney used a dancer named Marjorie Celeste as a reference model from beginning to end. The film shaped how the fairy tale genre would be understood globally for decades.

  Disney returned to fairy tales repeatedly: Cinderella in 1950, Sleeping Beauty in 1959, The Little Mermaid in 1989, Beauty and the Beast in 1991. Critics have accused the studio of softening the darker, more naturalistic qualities of older folk tales. Others point out that the softening had already been underway long before Disney, partly at the hands of the Grimms themselves.

  Fairy tales have also fed into music. Igor Stravinsky's first ballet, The Firebird, drew on classic Russian tales. The French Opere feerie and the German Marchenoper are entire operatic traditions built on the genre. Humperdinck's Hansel und Gretel and Mozart's Die Zauberflote are among the German examples. Audrey Niffenegger wrote a contemporary fairy tale called Raven Girl specifically to inspire a new dance work for the Royal Ballet in London.

  Contemporary literature has used the fairy tale frame in every direction: Robin McKinley retold Donkeyskin as the novel Deerskin, exploring abusive family dynamics. Robert Munsch's picture book The Paperbag Princess reverses the rescue formula, with a princess saving a prince. Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber retells classic tales from a female point of view, with the protagonist's mother described as eagle-featured and indomitable, a woman who once shot a man-eating tiger with her own hand. Jack Zipes has spent years working to make traditional stories accessible to contemporary readers, and in a 2012 lecture he argued that fairy tales have, among other things, conditioned children to accept mistreatment and abuse.