Intro to Fairy Tales

I think all of us have heard (or seen, or read) at least one fairy tale in our lives. Some of them are familiar to us: Beauty and the Beast, or Snow White. Others may be more obscure (depending on where you live, of course). Examples of these include the Story of Sigurd, or The White Cat - these are two of my favorites, but are not often told in the US.

So what is a fairy tale? There’s a pretty broad range of stories that are counted as fairy tales. At their most basic definition, fairy tales are fantastical stories that are told by a culture - told, but not believed in. This is their primary distinction from mythology. Although many fairy tales feature royalty (normally princes or princesses) as their main characters, this is not always the case. Both Hansel and Gretel and Jack and the Beanstalk feature poor, lower class characters instead of royals.

A common misconception about fairy tales is that they all begin with the phrase “Once upon a time...” and end with “...and they lived happily ever after.” The first part is at least generally true. Setting a fairy tale in “once upon a time” instead of a specific timeframe is part of what gives fairy tales a timeless quality. Most fairy tales can be imagined happening now just as easily as a few hundred (or even thousand) years ago. By opening with “once upon a time”, the storyteller lets the listeners decide when the story is happening.

So while many fairy tales do begin with “once upon a time”, the “and they lived happily ever after” part is rarely heard. Oh, some fairy tales end with the line, to be sure. However, the vast majority of happy fairy tales end without it. Then you have those fairy tales that are not happy - and these unhappy fairy tales most certainly do not end with “and they lived happily ever after.”

Unhappy fairy tales can be as tragic as some of Shakespeare’s works. They rival both Doctor Who and Supernatural in terms of sheer depressing-ness. Want some examples? The Story of Sigurd, which I mentioned above, ends with the main character and his beloved dead. I personally hate the tale of The Steadfast Tin Soldier, despite how beautifully it is told. The story ends with the Tin Soldier melting, and the toy he loves being burned to a crisp. There are many more unhappy tales out there than those two examples, but I’ll leave it up to you to find them. In general they tend to not be as prominent as the happy fairy tales (in part because Disney tends to only give happy endings.)

One of the most interesting things about fairy tales (at least to me) is the fact that similar tales are told all over the world. I once checked out a book that was a series of essays on Cinderella stories from cultures all over Earth - over 50 versions of the story! A local kid’s shop in my town sells picture books like The Chinese Cinderella or The African Cinderella. Some of the versions of the story are almost identical to the Cinderella tale that we are familiar with. Others are highly different, but with the core elements of the story remaining the same.

The same is true of several other fairy tales. Cultures around the world tend to have tales that are remarkably similar to the stories told by cultures somewhere else in the world. Some of this can be chalked up to the story having migrated from its original home. However, one wonders how cultures that have been largely secluded from other people in the world have the same story as a culture that embraces immigrants. Is it possible that the stories sprang up independently from one another?

I personally would love to find that there are aliens in the universe, just so that I could ask people from another planet about the fairy tales they tell. Would they be similar to ours, I wonder?

Another interesting aspect of fairy tales is the similarity some of them bear to mythological stories. I’ll go into this in more detail in later posts, but several common fairy tales seem to have drawn inspiration from myths. The story East of the Sun, West of the Moon is remarkably similar to the Greek myth of Eros and Psyche. Beauty and the Beast shares some concepts with the Greek myth of Hades and Persephone, or the Mesopotamian one of Ereshkigal and Nergal. I am hardly the first person to remark on this, but I do find it fascinating. There’s a quote from a man named Max Muller that sums it up nicely:

“The gods of ancient mythology were changed into the demi-gods and heroes of ancient poetry, and these demi-gods again became, at a later age, the principal characters of our nursery tales.”

And with that, I’ll wrap up this post. My plan for the foreseeable future is to do posts about individual fairy tales. In that post, I’ll give a rundown of the story, talk about any mythological ties that I can find for it, and end with a recommendation of an adaptation (book or movie) of the story that I particularly enjoyed.

I hope that this was interesting for you guys! I really love fairy tales, especially the more timeless ones, and I’m looking forward to talking about them with you. If you have a fairy tale that you’d like me to cover, please comment below or email me! I’ll be back next week with a post about East of the Sun, West of the Moon.