Fairy tale  

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Although in the nineteenth and twentieth century the fairy tale came to be associated with children's literature, adults were originally as likely as children to be the audience of the fairy tale. The fairy tale was part of an oral tradition; tales were narrated orally, rather than written down, and handed down from generation to generation.

Despite the name, there never appears to have been a time where "fairy tales" depicted solely tales of encounters with fairies. Fairy tales were about princes and princesses, combat, adventure, society, and romance. Fairies had a secondary role.

In later versions, moral lessons and happy endings were more common, and the villain was usually punished. In the modern era, fairy tales were altered, usually with violence removed, so they could be read to children (who according to a common modern sentiment should not hear about violence).

Sometimes fairy tales are simply miraculous entertainments, but often they are disguised morality tales. This is true for the Brothers Grimm Kinder- und Hausmärchen, and much of the drily witty, dead-pan, social criticism beneath the surface of Hans Christian Andersen's tales, which influenced Roald Dahl.

The fairy tale has ancient roots, older than the "Arabian Nights" collection of magical tales, in antiquity: Cupid and Psyche, Bel and the Dragon. Fairy tales resurfaced in literature in the 17th century, with the Neapolitan tales of Giambattista Basile and the later Contes of Charles Perrault, who fixed the forms of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. Such literary forms did not merely draw from the folktale, but fed back into it. The Brothers Grimm rejected several tales for their collection, though told orally to them, because the tales derived from Perrault. The rediscovery of a manuscript of Cupid and Psyche quickly produced variants of that tale in regions where the tale had been unknown before.


According to a 2004 poll of 1,200 children by UCI Cinemas, the most popular fairy tales (in the USA) are:

  1. Cinderella
  2. Sleeping Beauty
  3. Hansel and Gretel
  4. Rapunzel
  5. Little Red Riding Hood
  6. Town Musicians

In addition, the Arabian Nights stories like Aladdin and his Wonderful Lamp and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves are often thought to be fairy tales themselves.

Contemporary fairy tales

In contemporary literature, many authors have used the form of fairy tales for various reasons, such as examining the human condition from the simple framework a fairytale provides. Some authors seek to recreate a sense of the fantastic in a contemporary discourse. Sometimes, especially in children's literature, fairy tales are retold with a twist simply for comic effect, such as The Stinky Cheese Man by Jon Scieszka. Other authors may have specific motives, such as multicultural or feminist reevaluations of predominantly Eurocentric masculine dominated fairy tales, implying critique of older narratives. The figure of the damsel in distress has been particularly attacked by many feminist critics. Examples of narrative reversal rejecting this figure include The Paperbag Princess, by Robert Munsch, a picture book aimed at children in which a princess rescues a prince, or Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, which retells a number of fairytales from a female point of view.

Other notable figures who have employed fairy tales include A. S. Byatt, Jane Yolen, Terri Windling, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Margaret Atwood, Kate Bernheimer, Tanith Lee, James Thurber, Kelly Link,Robin McKinley, Donna Jo Napoli, Robert Bly, Gail Carson Levine and many others.


Fairy tales are more than true -
not because they tell us dragons exist,
but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.
G. K. Chesterton

Motifs in fairy tales

Any analysis of fairy tales quickly discovers that many fairy tales have features in common with each other. Two of the most influential classifications are those of Antti Aarne, as revised by Stith Thompson, into the Aarne-Thompson classification system, and Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folk Tale.


This system groups fairy and folk tales according to their overall plot. Common, identifying features are picked out to decide which tales are grouped together. Much, therefore, depends on what features are regarded as decisive.

For instance, tales like Cinderella, in which a persecuted heroine, with the help of the fairy godmother or similar magical helper, attends an event (or three) in which she wins the love of a prince and is identified as his true bride, are classified as type 510, the persecuted heroine. Some such tales are The Wonderful Birch, Aschenputtel, Katie Woodencloak, Cap O' Rushes, Catskin, Fair, Brown and Trembling, Allerleirauh, and Tattercoats.

Further analysis of the tales shows that in Cinderella, The Wonderful Birch, and Aschenputtel, the heroine is persecuted by her stepmother and refused permission to go to the ball or other event, and in Fair, Brown and Trembling, by her sister, another female figure, and these are grouped as 510A, while in Cap O' Rushes, Catskin, and Allerleirauh, the heroine is driven from home by her father's persecutions, and must take in a kitchen elsewhere, and these are grouped as 510B. But in Katie Woodencloak, she is driven from home by her stepmother's persecutions and must take service in a kitchen elsewhere, and in Tattercoats, she is refused permission to go to the ball by her grandfather. Given these features common with both types of 510, Katie Woodencloak is classified as 510A because the villain is the stepmother, and Tattercoats as 510B because the grandfather fills the father's role.

This system has its weaknesses in the difficulty of having no way to classify subportions of a tale as motifs. Rapunzel is type 310 The Maiden in the Tower, but it opens with a child being demanded in return for stolen food, as does Puddocky, but Puddocky is not a maiden in the Tower tale, while The Canary Prince, which opens with a jealous stepmother, is.



Having criticized Aarne-Thompson type analysis for ignoring what motifs did in stories, he analyzed the tales for the function each character and action fulfilled and concluded that a tale was composed of thirty-one elements and eight character types. While the elements were not all required for all tales, when they appeared, they did so in an invariant order — except that each individual element might be negated twice, so that it would appear three times, as when, in Brother and Sister, the brother resists drinking from enchanted streams twice, so that it is the third that enchants him.

One such element is the donor who gives the hero magical assistance, often after testing him, and this function can be independent of any appearance of the donor. In The Golden Bird, the talking fox tests the hero by warning him against entering an inn and, after he succeeds, helps him find the object of his quest; in Cinderella, the fairy godmother gives Cinderella the dresses she needs to attend the ball; in The Red Ettin, the role is split into the mother, who offers the hero the whole of a journey cake with her curse, or half with her blessing, and when he takes the half, a fairy who gives him advice; in The Giant Who Had No Heart in His Body, three separate animals pledge the hero their aid in return for his aid. Other fairy tales, such as The Story of a Boy Who Went Forth to Learn Fear, do not feature the donor.


This analysis has been criticized for ignoring tone, mood, characters, and, indeed, anything at all that differentiates one fairy tale from another..


Many fairy tales have been interpreted for their (purported) significiance. One mythological interpretation claimed that many fairy tales, including Hansel and Gretel, Sleeping Beauty, and The Frog King, all were solar myths; this mode of interpretation is rather less popular now. Many have also been subjected to Freudian, Jungian, and other psychological analysis, but no mode of interpretation has ever established itself definitively.



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Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Fairy tale" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on original research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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