Fairy tales did not begin with Disney, or with the Grimms, or even in Europe. They were copied onto papyrus under the pharaohs, told in Tang dynasty China, argued over in Paris salons and edited hard for the nursery. These thirty-six stories follow the tales, the people who collected them, the creatures that walk through them, and the long arguments about where any of it started.
Every tile in a Fairy Tales and Folklore game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
A mistreated stepdaughter, a lost shoe, a king who hunts for its owner: the pattern is familiar, but this telling was written down in Tang dynasty China around 850. The scholar Duan Chengshi credited the story to Li Shiyuan, a man from the far south of the country. In place of a fairy godmother, Ye Xian befriends a fish with red fins and golden eyes, and after the fish is killed its bones grant her wish.
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The story goes that a translator mixed up vair, a squirrel fur, with verre, glass, and put Cinderella in the wrong shoes. Perrault's own title says otherwise. He called the tale "Cendrillon, ou la Petite Pantoufle de Verre" — the little glass slipper — in French, before any translator touched it. An English edition of 1922 still carried a footnote insisting that the fur was the true version, which is roughly how stubborn the confusion has been.
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Charles Perrault's Little Red Riding Hood has no huntsman and no happy ending. The wolf eats the grandmother, then the girl, and the tale stops there, followed by a verse warning young ladies about smooth-talking strangers. The rescue everyone remembers belongs to the Grimms, who published their Little Red Cap more than a century later and sent in a passing hunter to cut grandmother and granddaughter free.
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In the Grimms' telling, the princess does not kiss the frog. "Now you will have your peace, you disgusting frog," she says in D. L. Ashliman's translation, and throws him against the wall with all her might. That is what breaks the spell. The tale opens the collection, number one in every edition from 1812 through the last one the brothers saw published in 1857. The kiss belongs to later, gentler retellings.
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The first Grimm edition gives Snow White no stepmother. The woman at the mirror, the one who wants her gone, is her own mother. Beginning with the 1819 edition the brothers added a line about the mother dying in childbirth and the father remarrying, and the stepmother took her place. The early ending is rougher too: a servant, out of temper with the sleeping girl, strikes her and knocks the apple loose.
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In the 1812 Rapunzel, the girl gives the game away by asking her guardian why her clothes have grown too tight. Readers understood. By the final edition of 1857 that line had become a complaint that Frau Gothel is harder to haul up the tower than the young prince is. Same slip, different secret. The brothers spent forty-five years sanding their tales down for the nursery.
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Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve published Beauty and the Beast in 1740 as a story of nearly two hundred pages, framed as a tale told to a young emigrant by her chambermaid on a ship bound for America. It carries family histories, fairy politics and a long stretch of plot after the spell breaks. Sixteen years later Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont condensed it for a book of lessons for young ladies, and that is the version the world kept.
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Perrault gave the cat his boots in 1697, but the tale is older. In Giovanni Francesco Straparola's version, printed in the early 1550s, the hero is a poor boy from Bohemia and the helpful cat is a fairy who has taken that shape. Basile told it again in Neapolitan in the 1630s. Perrault's cat is the coolest customer of the three: he ends the story a great lord, and chases mice only for his own amusement.
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The invisible cloth is older than Andersen. A Spanish collection written in 1335 by Juan Manuel, Prince of Villena, has swindlers selling a king a fabric that only a man born to the father he claims can see. Andersen's version of 1837 changes the test: his cloth is invisible to anyone unfit for his office or hopelessly stupid. He also added the small child in the crowd who says out loud that the emperor has nothing on.
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The fairy tales were a side project. In 1838 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm began a dictionary of the German language meant to trace every word back to its roots, and neither lived to see it done. Other scholars carried it on, and the Prussian Academy of Sciences took the project over in 1908. The first edition was completed in 1960, in thirty-two volumes, one hundred and twenty-two years after the brothers started.
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Dorothea Viehmann gave the Grimms around forty tales, and they presented her to readers as a Hessian peasant woman, the plain voice of the German countryside. The museum in Kassel corrects the picture: she was a tailor's wife from the Niederzwehren district of Kassel, and her parents were Huguenot refugees from Metz. She grew up in a household where French culture was kept alive, and many of the tales she told the brothers were not German at all, but French.
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When Histoires ou contes du temps passé appeared in 1697 with eight prose tales, among them Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella and Bluebeard, the dedication was signed P. Darmancour. That was Charles Perrault's son Pierre, born in 1678. The frontispiece carried the phrase that became the book's other title, Contes de ma mère l'Oye. The French national library reads the tales as father and son together, with the father doing the polishing.
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Every spine reads Andrew Lang: the Blue Fairy Book, the Red, the Green and the rest. In the preface to the Lilac Fairy Book, Lang gave the credit away. The books, he wrote, "have been almost wholly the work of Mrs. Lang, who has translated and adapted them from the French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, and other languages." His own share he compared to Adam's in Eden: "Eve worked, Adam superintended."
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The French phrase conte de fées, which English turned into fairy tale, comes from Marie-Catherine d'Aulnoy, who used it for her collection in the 1690s. She published about twenty-five tales in her lifetime, more than Perrault did, and Princeton University Press credits her rather than him with shaping the genre for the writers who came after. She wrote for the Paris salons, in a talking voice, more than a century before the Grimms went collecting.
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Giambattista Basile wrote his stories in Neapolitan, the speech of his city, rather than in literary Italian, and they were printed in 1634 and 1636. Forty-nine tales sit inside a fiftieth that frames them, and versions of Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel and Hansel and Gretel are all in there, generations before Perrault or the Grimms put them into print. The dialect kept the book out of most European hands. The first unabridged English translation made straight from the Neapolitan appeared in 2007.
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Norway's answer to the Grimms was a pair of school friends who went opposite ways. Jørgen Moe took holy orders and ended as bishop of Christiansand. Peter Christen Asbjørnsen turned to natural science, dredged a starfish new to science out of the Hardangerfjord, and in 1861 introduced Norwegian readers to Darwin. Their Norske folkeeventyr, published from 1841, is where the three billy goats and the troll under the bridge come from.
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Antoine Galland had run out of Arabian Nights to translate when he met Hanna Diyab, a young Maronite from Aleppo who had come to Paris with a French traveler. On May 5, 1709, Diyab finished telling him the story of the lamp, and over the following weeks told fifteen more, Ali Baba among them. No Arabic manuscript of Aladdin older than Galland's French has ever turned up. Diyab's own memoir sat unread in the Vatican Library for generations.
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Franz Xaver von Schönwerth collected folk tales in the Bavarian Oberpfalz at the same time the Grimms were working, and then his papers went into an archive in Regensburg and stayed there for more than 150 years. Five hundred of them came back to light in 2012, a hoard of magic animals, bold young princes and witches. Daniel Drascek, a professor at the University of Regensburg, called Schönwerth's legacy the most significant collection in the German-speaking world in the nineteenth century.
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Baba Yaga lives deep in the forest, in a hut that walks around on chicken legs. She keeps a broom, but only to sweep away her tracks; for travel she uses a mortar and pestle, which makes her an unusual witch by any standard. And she is not simply a villain. A 2004 study of her by Andreas Johns is subtitled The Ambiguous Mother and Witch of the Russian Folktale. Depending on the tale, she is the danger or the one who hands over what the hero needs.
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Along the Shetland and Orkney coasts they told of seal folk who came ashore, slipped off their skins and danced as people. A man who hides a skin can keep its owner as a wife, and sooner or later the skin turns up again. In a Shetland telling printed in 1889, a child finds it under a stack of corn. The mother takes it and goes, telling the Shetlander that she had always loved her first husband much better.
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Why the hidden people are hidden: Eve was washing her children when God appeared, and she hid the ones she had not finished, ashamed to let him see them dirty. God told her, "What man hides from God, God will hide from man." Jón Árnason printed the tale in his Icelandic collection in 1862. The belief has practical effects. Iceland's road and coastal administration keeps a standard reply for reporters, explaining that projects are sometimes delayed while the elves living there move on.
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A kelpie in Scottish tradition is a water spirit that takes the shape of a horse. It looks tame on land, and anyone who sits on its back is carried into the water and never seen again. Near Falkirk two of them stand a hundred feet high in steel, at the eastern entrance to the Forth and Clyde Canal. The sculptor Andy Scott calls them the largest equine sculptures in the world, and says they were inspired by the Clydesdale draft horses that worked the canals and the land.
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Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague died in 1609, and the story that he shaped a man out of clay to guard his community is told as though it were as old as he is. It is not. Nothing in his own writings, his contemporaries' or his students' mentions a golem. The legend surfaces in the early nineteenth century, and the version everyone knows was written in 1909 by a Warsaw rabbi, Yudl Rosenberg, who credited it to a manuscript that did not exist.
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A taniwha is a creature of Maori tradition that lives in rivers and dangerous water. In 2002 the people of Ngati Naho told Transit New Zealand that one lived where the agency planned to rebuild a deadly stretch of State Highway 1 near Meremere. Work stopped and the two sides negotiated. Their spokesman, Remi Herbert, told the New Zealand Herald they were not looking for compensation but to make sure their spiritual needs and their mana were intact.
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In 1847 a skull pulled from the bank of the Murrumbidgee River went on display at the Colonial Museum in Sydney, now the Australian Museum, as a possible bunyip, the water creature of Australian tradition. The naturalist William Sharp Macleay compared it with a misshapen skull found in the Hawkesbury in 1841 and wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald that this one too was a foal's, and no water creature at all. Colonists were already collecting Aboriginal accounts of the bunyip before the skull surfaced.
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For centuries European courts bought unicorn horn, and the horns were narwhal tusks. Brown University's library notes that merchants, trading on stories of the tusk's mystical powers, sold the specimens for exorbitant sums, and that an explorer at her court presented Queen Elizabeth I with an elaborately decorated tusk of a sea unicorn. The narwhal is a whale of the Arctic Ocean, and the horn is a tooth: in males the left one grows forward, out through the front of the jaw.
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In the Irish stories the little shoemaker will show you where the gold is, and the trouble starts after that. In The Field of Boliauns, printed by Thomas Crofton Croker in 1825, a man named Tom Fitzpatrick is pointed to the right ragweed stalk, ties his red garter around it and runs home for a spade. He comes back to find every stalk in the field wearing a red garter, the very model of his own, and more than forty acres to dig.
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A scholar who wants to set an Irish Cinderella beside a Vietnamese one needs a shared vocabulary. Antti Aarne built one in 1910, numbering tale types; Stith Thompson translated and expanded it; Hans-Jörg Uther expanded it again in 2004. Animal tales run from 1 to 299, tales of magic from 300 to 749. Thompson also indexed motifs, the building blocks inside a tale, a job that occupied him from 1932 to 1958.
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In 2016 an anthropologist and a folklorist borrowed a tool from biology. Jamie Tehrani of Durham University and Sara Graça da Silva of the New University of Lisbon treated folktales like species, tracing how they branch along the Indo-European language family, and published the result in Royal Society Open Science. Beauty and the Beast and Rumpelstiltskin came out at three to four thousand years old. A blacksmith story, The Smith and the Devil, came out at about six thousand.
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Before anyone could argue about where Cinderella came from, someone had to line the versions up. Marian Roalfe Cox did it for Britain's Folk-Lore Society. Her book of 1893 runs past six hundred pages and abstracts three hundred and forty-five variants of Cinderella, Catskin and Cap o' Rushes, each one broken into its parts so the parts could be compared. It is the sort of work that makes later theories possible and gets forgotten first.
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One of the oldest stories that reads like a fairy tale is a roll of papyrus in the British Museum. The Tale of Two Brothers was copied out while Seti II was still crown prince, more than three thousand years ago, and the manuscript is unusual in naming its scribe, Inena. A wife's false accusation drives the plot, and the younger brother dies and returns more than once before he ends up on the throne. An 1898 edition called it a fairy tale of ancient Egypt.
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UNESCO keeps a register for documents rather than monuments, the Memory of the World, and in 2005 it added the Grimms' Kinder- und Hausmärchen. The citation calls the collection the first systematic compilation and the first scientific documentation of the entire European and Oriental fairy tale tradition, and counts translations into more than a hundred and sixty languages and cultural dialects from every continent.
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Vladimir Propp read a hundred Russian folktales from Afanasev's collection and asked not what happens in them but what job each event does. He called those jobs functions, counted thirty-one of them, and set down two rules: the number known to the fairy tale is limited, and the sequence of functions is always identical. No tale uses them all, and leaving some out does not disturb the order of the rest. Morphology of the Folktale appeared in 1928.
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Grimms' Fairy Tales is not a fixed book. Tales came and went across seven editions between 1812 and 1857, and two famous ones were cut early: Puss in Boots and Bluebeard. The brothers were building a German collection and judged those too French to belong, a standard they later admitted was a poor one. Others went for being too literary, too fragmentary, or too cruel for the children the books were now aimed at.
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Disney's Snow White of 1937 is remembered as the first feature-length cartoon. The Library of Congress essay on the film says otherwise: like most celebrated firsts, it was not really the first animated feature. Eleven years earlier Lotte Reiniger finished The Adventures of Prince Achmed, drawn from the Arabian Nights and animated in cut-paper silhouettes, figures of black cardboard hinged with wire. It took three years and some 250,000 individual images, of which 96,000 frames were edited into the finished film.
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Visitors to Boston's Granary Burying Ground are shown a stone and told it marks Mother Goose. It reads Mary Goose, and the woman under it was buried in 1690. The Mother Goose of the legend is someone else, Isaac Goose's second wife Elizabeth Foster Goose, whose son-in-law is said to have printed her rhymes in 1719. No copy of that book has ever been found, and people have searched. The name is older and French: by the middle of the seventeenth century, mère l'Oye already meant a woman who charmed children with tales.
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