Fairy Tale

Fairy Tale, originally traditional fantasy story about magical people; the term now also covers fantastic tales from many sources, including folktales and fables, which do not always include magic. The original stories are of great antiquity; India claims to have the oldest collection of children’s fantasy stories in the world, the pre-5th century Panchatantra. Australian Aboriginal stories were passed down accurately by ritual word of mouth for thousands of years before they were collected (for example in Langloh Parker’s Australian Legendary Tales; 1896). Fairy tales are often supposed to have “timeless” elements, and there are certainly recurrent features: strong heroes, fortunate peasants, beautiful princesses, and wicked stepmothers (or stepfathers). Similar stories are found in many countries, and early tales very often contain the fears and dreams of the common people. (The wolves of modern versions of the tales were originally the werewolves in the unknown darkness outside the firelight; in later cultures, working girls could dream of finding a sapphire slipper that would fit them and win them a prince as a husband.) Many of the tales are heavy with violence and sexual symbolism. Despite their “universal” characteristics, the tales are repeatedly modified to suit the conscious or unconscious tastes of each generation, especially when they are adapted for children.

Britain has a long tradition of magic and magical beings, which have passed through many fashions. Shakespeare briefly popularized the idea of gauzy-winged little creatures in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595-1596) but on the whole the native British tradition was more robust, with giants, ogres, goblins, and banshees (whose wails foretold death); the Irish leprechauns have a reputation for playfulness, whereas kelpies were originally water-demons, and pixies led people astray. The Faerie Queene (1589-1596), by Edmund Spenser, used some of the traditions for political and religious allegory. During the 16th and 17th centuries the tales appeared in chapbooks and their equivalents in many countries.

The modern fairy tale derives from a fashion in late 17th-century France under Louis XIV, whose key figures were the Comtesse d’Aulnoy, and the intellectual Charles Perrault. The Comtesse produced three volumes of Contes des Fées, which were translated in 1699, and which brought the term “fairy story” into the English language. Perrault’s collection Histories ou Contes du Temps Passé in 1697 (translated into English in 1729) may have been derived from earlier French chapbooks (the bibliothèque bleue) and the Italian Pentamerone (1634-1636), which was probably the source of “The Sleeping Beauty”, “Cinderella”, and “Puss in Boots”. The French tales were highly influential in Germany.

In Britain, from the 1760s, the tales appeared in cheap popular editions (although they were less popular in the United States). In the 19th century the stock of fairy tales was increased by the addition of English folktales, such as “Dick Whittington“ and “Jack and the Beanstalk” and stories derived from the Arabian Nights. Stories such as “Aladdin“, “Ali Baba“, and “Sindbad the Sailor“ had originally been translated into French from the Syrian (1704-1717) and thence into English; the first versions for children appeared in c. 1791, and were popularized through Benjamin Tabart’s Popular Stories (1804-1809).

Despite opposition from moralists and educationalists, the fairy tale became increasingly popular in the 19th century, moving rapidly from adults’ to children’s editions. German Popular Stories by the Grimm Brothers appeared in English in 1823, and T. Crofton Croker’s Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland in 1825-1829. There was a strong tradition of Irish storytelling, by the seanchaithe; the poet W. B. Yeats produced a collection, Irish Fairy Tales (1892). Icelandic stories were retold in The Heroes of Asgard by Annie and Eliza Keary (1857), and no fewer than four versions of the Hans Christian Andersen collection Eventyr (fairy stories) appeared in 1846. Some scholars feel that Andersen was the writer who had the most influence on the development of children’s literature in the 19th century, and his often poignant tales, notably “The Little Mermaid”, “The Ugly Duckling”, and “Thumbelina” have remained popular and have been successfully filmed. In 1890 Joseph Jacobs published his English Fairy Tales, and 12 “colour” fairy books by Andrew Lang, beginning with The Blue Fairy Book (1899), drew together hundreds of tales from many sources.

As a result of this popularity, fairies of various kinds appeared in children’s literature: famous examples are Jean Ingelow’s Mopsa the Fairy (1869), George MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin (1872), and the collection of short stories, The Happy Prince (1888) by Oscar Wilde. At the end of the 19th century, fairies became part of a very sentimental view of childhood; the ancient English spirit, Puck, in Puck of Pook’s Hill (1906) by Rudyard Kipling, complained that they misrepresented the tough, powerful, magical figures of legend.

As fairy tales became more and more exclusively reading material designed for children in the 20th century, they have developed and changed. Generally, the cruder, more violent and frightening elements have been cut out. A good example is “Little Red Riding Hood”. In its earliest versions, the wolf kills the grandmother and puts her flesh on a plate, and her blood in a bottle; Little Red Riding Hood then comes to an unpleasant end in the wolf’s bed. Other versions show her (but not the grandmother) escaping through her own ingenuity. Nineteenth-century versions introduced the male woodcutter to save the “helpless” females, and many 20th-century versions provide a happy ending in which only the wolf is actually harmed—and latterly, even he has been rehabilitated. Psychologists have seen the story as being fundamentally about relationships (especially sexual) between men and women.

Major influences on the development of the tales have been the films of Walt Disney. These have been criticized for sexism, for sentimentality, and for embodying specifically American values. In recent years there has been a fashion for “adult” fairy tales, for example, The Bloody Chamber (1979) by Angela Carter, and for feminist and “politically correct” versions. Other nations with strong fairy-tale traditions include Russia (Arthur Ransome published a collection Old Peter’s Russian Tales in 1916) and Turkey, with its tales of the Hodja.

Fairy tales are at the heart of the British pantomime tradition, and have become absorbed into the national (and international) culture. Such is the assumed pervasiveness of the tales that Roald Dahl was able to include fairy-tale characters in his parodies Revolting Rhymes (1982), and Janet and Allan Ahlberg were able to allude to many in their best-selling picture books, Each Peach Pear Plum (1978) and The Jolly Postman (1986). The fairy tale seems likely to continue to be a basic feature of world culture.