27 Facts About Fairy tales

However, unlike legends and epics, fairy tales usually do not contain more than superficial references to religion and to actual places, people, and events; they take place "once upon a time" rather than in actual times.

Fairy tales occur both in oral and in literary form; the name "fairy tale" was first ascribed to them by Madame d'Aulnoy in the late 17th century.

Many of today's fairy tales have evolved from centuries-old stories that have appeared, with variations, in multiple cultures around the world.

Steven Swann Jones identified the presence of magic as the feature by which fairy tales can be distinguished from other sorts of folktales.

Indeed, Tolkien's "On Fairy tales-Stories" includes discussions of world-building and is considered a vital part of fantasy criticism.

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Fairy tales tale, told orally, is a sub-class of the folktale.

Yet while oral fairy tales likely existed for thousands of years before the literary forms, there is no pure folktale, and each literary fairy tale draws on folk traditions, if only in parody.

Fairy tales appear, now and again, in written literature throughout literate cultures, as in The Golden Ass, which includes Cupid and Psyche, or the Panchatantra, but it is unknown to what extent these reflect the actual folk tales even of their own time.

Recognizable folkFairy tales have been reworked as the plot of folk literature and oral epics.

The fairy tale itself became popular among the precieuses of upper-class France, and among the tales told in that time were the ones of La Fontaine and the Contes of Charles Perrault, who fixed the forms of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella.

The decorative language of the fairy tales served an important function: disguising the rebellious subtext of the stories and sliding them past the court censors.

However, further research has concluded that fairy tales never had a fixed form, and regardless of literary influence, the tellers constantly altered them for their own purposes.

Work of the Brothers Grimm influenced other collectors, both inspiring them to collect tales and leading them to similarly believe, in a spirit of romantic nationalism, that the fairy tales of a country were particularly representative of it, to the neglect of cross-cultural influence.

Fairy tales tend to take on the color of their location, through the choice of motifs, the style in which they are told, and the depiction of character and local color.

Brothers Grimm believed that European fairy tales derived from the cultural history shared by all Indo-European peoples and were therefore ancient, far older than written records.

Literary fairy tales appeared in works intended for adults, but in the 19th and 20th centuries the fairy tale became associated with children's literature.

The moralizing strain in the Victorian era altered the classical Fairy tales to teach lessons, as when George Cruikshank rewrote Cinderella in 1854 to contain temperance themes.

Fairy tales do teach children how to deal with difficult times.

Jungian Analyst and fairy tale scholar, Marie Louise Von Franz interprets fairy tales based on Jung's view of fairy tales as a spontaneous and naive product of soul, which can only express what soul is.

Fairy tales have been enacted dramatically; records exist of this in commedia dell'arte, and later in pantomime.

Some earliest short silent films from the Disney studio were based on fairy tales, and some fairy tales were adapted into shorts in the musical comedy series "Silly Symphony", such as Three Little Pigs.

However, others note that the softening of fairy tales occurred long before Disney, some of which was even done by the Grimm brothers themselves.

Many filmed fairy tales have been made primarily for children, from Disney's later works to Aleksandr Rou's retelling of Vasilissa the Beautiful, the first Soviet film to use Russian folk tales in a big-budget feature.

Any comparison of fairy tales quickly discovers that many fairy tales have features in common with each other.

Some such Fairy tales are The Wonderful Birch; Aschenputtel; Katie Woodencloak; The Story of Tam and Cam; Ye Xian; Cap O' Rushes; Catskin; Fair, Brown and Trembling; Finette Cendron; Allerleirauh.

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Many German folklorists, believing the Fairy tales to have preserved details from ancient times, have used the Grimms' Fairy tales to explain ancient customs.

Fairy tales suggests that there are terrible aspects to the tales, which have conditioned children to accept mistreatment and even abuse.