Fairy Tale

"''"Fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already because it is in the world already. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey.

The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St George to kill the dragon."''"

- GK Chesterton

A story which depicts a fantastic sequence of events. Often, fairy tales include creatures from folklore such as goblins, witches, and dragons. Fairy tales usually take place "Once Upon a Time", with few (if any) references to real people, places or events.

Orally told fairy tales are told in extremely spare and laconic style. Even the fancy dresses the heroine wears to a ball are discussed briefly; "three dresses, one as golden as the sun, one as silvery as the moon, and one as bright as the stars" and the story goes on. Likewise, characters are defined by their actions. Even when motives are provided (which is only for human characters), they are short and simple: the heroine is out to find her fortune; the hero wants to marry the princess; the Wicked Stepmother is greedy and doesn't want her stepchild to have an inheritance, or envious of her beauty, or if she has a stepson, destroy his wife; the false hero wants to marry the princess; the king falls in love with the strange woman he meets in the woods because of her beauty. And motives may not be; in the Grimms' "The Twelve Dancing Princesses", we never find out why the princesses are going to the nightly dances, and indeed never discover whether they are doing so voluntarily or not.

"Fairy tale" is often used in modern times to depict an idealized romance or ending, although many classic fairy tales are much darker than many people realize. Heroes may be the victims of such violence as having hands chopped off or eyes gouged out; at the end of the story, villains may be disposed of by such methods as having them wear red-hot shoes and dance until they die, or putting them in a barrel lined with nails and having a horse drag it until they die. The spare style helps minimize the impact, as it can deal with the violence briefly and without gory detail, but even so many fairy tales have produced Nightmare Fuel. In some cases, this is intentional, to Scare Em Straight.

Fairy tales are found in cultures all over the earth. Many tale types have wide-spread variants. However, only a tiny handful of them are widely known in modern culture. Consequently, when a writer goes to rewrite a fairy tale into Fractured Fairy Tale, with parody or subversion, it generally invokes one of that handful. For instance, the Fairy Godmother is a relatively rare figure in fairy tales, but having featured in "Cinderella" and "Sleeping Beauty", is epidemic in the Fractured Fairy Tale. Even retellings that do not parody the fairy tales generally stick to the best known.

Fairy tales were originally intended for all ages, but for a long period of time, they were only written or presented as children's stories. Disney is rather famous for adapting fairy tales into movie musicals, often with changes to make them more light-hearted. Writers who seek to restore fairy tales to their original intensity may intensify it to the point of Grimmification.

Very few fairy tales actually feature fairies; even those European countries with a developed fairy folklore preferred to use Talking Animals instead. The name of the genre can be traced to Madame d'Aulnoy's Les Contes de Fées, which appeared only after literary fairy tales became all the rage. Folklorists have made valiant attempts to give the category more accurate names, such as "wonder tale", or the Grimms' original term "household tale" or Märchen, but the name sticks. Other names include "folk tales" and "tall tales".

Several extremely popular tales such as Perrault's "Cinderella" and "Sleeping Beauty" did feature fairies, helping give weight to the name, while others like "Rumpelstiltskin" alluded to a more sinister kind of folkloric fairies. On the other hand, Perrault's "Cinderella" is an odd-ball; normally the Cinderella figure is helped by her dead mother, and "Sleeping Beauty" is as likely to be a victim of prophecy as a Curse). Many, such as "Rapunzel", "Puss in Boots", "Hansel and Gretel", and "Snow White", contain no such figures. Some, like "The Emperors New Clothes" contain no magic of any kind.

See also Fairy Tale Tropes and Propp's Functions of Folktales. Not to be confused with the similarly-named manga Fairy Tail.

For a list of tropes common to fairy tales, see Fairy Tale Tropes.


 * Gianfrancesco Straparola -- author of the first notable collection of European (specifically, Italian) fairy tales, The Facetious Nights of Straparola (1550/53)
 * Giambattista Basile -- The Pentameron (1634/36)
 * Charles Perrault -- Tales of Mother Goose (1697)
 * Madame d'Aulnoy -- coined the term "fairy tale" with her Les Contes des Fées (1697/98)
 * The Brothers Grimm -- Children's and Household Tales (1812)
 * Hans Christian Andersen -- the maybe most famous author of literary fairy tales (Fairy Tales, 1835)
 * Asbjørnsen and Moe -- Norwegian Folktales (1842/43)
 * Alexander Afanasyev -- Russian Fairy Tales, 8 volumes (1855-67)
 * Andrew Lang -- Fairy Books, 12 volumes (1889-1910)
 * Joseph Jacobs -- Fairy Tales, 5 volumes (1890-1916)
 * Angela Carter -- The Bloody Chamber (1979)


 * The Hero With A Thousand Faces - Joseph Campbell
 * The Writer's Journey - Christopher Vogler
 * The Morphology of the Folktale - Vladimir Propp
 * On Fairy Stories - JRR Tolkien
 * The Aarne-Thompson folktale classification system, an attempt to catalogue every folktale plot there is.


 * "Adalminas Pearl"
 * Arabian Nights
 * "Aladdin"
 * "Ali Baba and The Forty Thieves"
 * "Ara the Handsome"
 * The Baba Yaga fairy tales
 * "Beauty and The Beast"
 * "Bluebeard"
 * "The Brave Little Tailor"
 * "The Big Fancy House"
 * "The Bremen Town Musicians"
 * "Brother and Sister"
 * "Childe Rowland"
 * "Cinderella"
 * "Yeh Shen"
 * "Rhodopis"
 * "Dick Whittington and His Cat"
 * "Donkeyskin"
 * "East of the Sun And West of The Moon"
 * "The Elves and The Cobbler"
 * "The Enchanted Stag"
 * "The Frog Prince"
 * "The Gingerbread Man"
 * "Goldilocks"
 * "Hansel and Gretel"
 * "Hop O My Thumb"
 * "Jack and The Beanstalk"
 * "Jack the Giant Killer" (predecessor to "Jack and the Beanstalk" and itself a variation of "The Brave Little Tailor")
 * "Kate Crackernuts"
 * "Kintaro"
 * "Little Red Riding Hood"
 * "Red Cap"
 * "The Ludicrous Wishes"
 * "Molly Whuppie"
 * "Momotaro"
 * "Peter and The Wolf"
 * "The Pied Piper of Hamelin"
 * "Puddocky"
 * "Puss in Boots"
 * "Rapunzel"
 * "Rumpelstiltskin"
 * "Sleeping Beauty"
 * "Sun Moon and Talia"
 * "The Snow Maiden"
 * "Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs"
 * "Snow White and Rose Red"
 * "Tam Lin"
 * "Tatterhood"
 * "Three Billy Goats Gruff"
 * "Three Little Pigs"
 * The Tom Thumb tales
 * "The Twelve Dancing Princesses"
 * "The White Duck"
 * The Wolf and The Seven Young Kids

Literary Fairy Tales

 * "The Emperors New Clothes"
 * "The Fair One With Golden Locks"
 * "King of the Golden River"
 * "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" - A literary fairy tale known mostly for providing the basis for a ballet by Tchaikovsky.
 * "Petronella"
 * "The Princess and The Pea"
 * "Saint George and The Dragon"
 * "The Shadow"
 * "The Snow Queen"
 * "The Steadfast Tin Soldier"
 * "The Tale of Norna Gest"
 * "The Tales of Beedle the Bard"
 * "The Ugly Duckling"

Fairy Tale Adaptations and Retellings:

 * The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter's collection of popular fairy tales such as "Bluebeard," "Beauty and The Beast," and "Cinderella" rewritten with a feminist slant.
 * The Company of Wolves
 * Deerskin
 * Delightful Girl Choon Hyang: A modern retelling of a South Korean Tale of a rich man's son and a courtesan's daughter.
 * The Korean Movie Chunhyang is a more accurate version of the folk tale.
 * Erstwhile
 * Ever After
 * Märchen - a Symphonic Metal Rock Opera that bases itself on seven of the Grimm's fairy tales.
 * The Little Mermaid - Disney's adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's literary fairy tale.
 * Pulchritude
 * The Slipper and The Rose
 * Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs, the ground-breaking Disney animated film from 1937.
 * Snow White a Tale of Terror
 * Snow White and The Huntsman
 * The Storyteller, TV series by Jim Henson
 * Swan Lake
 * White As Snow

Fairy Tale parodies, pastiches, and deconstructions:

 * The 10th Kingdom
 * The Brothers Grimm - The Terry Gilliam movie.
 * The Devil and Daniel Webster
 * Fables - A comic book series that deals with the lives of classic fairy tale characters stuck in New York City.
 * Half Upon a Time
 * Into the Woods
 * No Rest for The Wicked
 * Once Upon a Time
 * The Princess Series- by Jim C. Hines. Its basically the Disney princesses meets Charlie's Angels
 * Puss in Boots -- spin-off of the Shrek series.
 * Shrek
 * The Sisters Grimm
 * The Stinky Cheese Man
 * Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms - a world in which the Fairy Tale Tropes are the laws of nature.

Fairy Tale Fantasy

 * The Adventures of Pinocchio
 * Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Notable for being a fairy tale of nonsense instead of magic.
 * The Black Swan
 * Castle in The Air
 * Coraline, a book by Neil Gaiman.
 * Coraline, a film adaption of the same name.
 * Corpse Bride
 * Edward Scissorhands
 * Fantaghiro
 * Farmer Giles of Ham
 * Half Upon a Time
 * Howl's Moving Castle - A novel in which a witch bewitched the hatter's daughter, as well as the loose anime adaptation of the same name.
 * Labyrinth
 * Land of Oz
 * The Wonderful Wizard of Oz
 * The Marvelous Land of Oz
 * Tales of the Magic Land - The Soviet version of Oz.
 * Wicked - A novel about the Wicked Witch of the West, later adapted into a much more famous musical.
 * Wicked - The musical adaptation of the novel.
 * The Wiz
 * The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus
 * The Light Princess - And many of the other stories of George MacDonald.
 * Little Otik
 * Once Upon a Time
 * The Ordinary Princess
 * The Orphans Tales
 * Pans Labyrinth
 * The Paper Bag Princess
 * Penelope
 * Peter Pan
 * The Plucker - An illustrated novel by Brom
 * The Princess Bride
 * Princess Tutu
 * Revolutionary Girl Utena
 * Stardust, the novel by Neil Gaiman
 * Stardust, the film adaptation of the above
 * Sylvie and Bruno
 * The Tale of Despereaux
 * Tales of the Frog Princess
 * The Velveteen Rabbit