Fairy Tales
Aiton's Encyclopedia (1910)
as generally used. juvenile stories in which fairies of any sort play an important part. The fairy tales which are of greatest interest are the old stories which were handed down orally from one generation to another and which, since the invention of printing, have appeared in a variety of forms and in many collections. These may be called folk tales; while fairy stories written in more recent times are classed as individual or modern fairy tales. A few of the best known folk tales are: Puss in Boots . Cinderella. Tom Thumb . Beauty and the Beast . Hop o' My thumb. Jack, the Giant-Killer. The Sleeping Beauty. Little Red Riding Hood . Hans and Gretel. Babes in the Wood . A collection of fairy tales was printed in Venice as early as 1550. Charles Perrault, a French writer, rewrote eighteen charming fairy tales, which he published in 1697. In the early part of the nineteenth century Jacob and William Grimm made the most complete collection of fairy tales ever published. Their work includes folk tales from nearly all nations. Modern or individual fairy tales for the most part demand only passing interest. A few, however, deserve and have obtained a wider and more lasting popularity. Such are the tales of Hans Christian Andersen,--The Ugly Duckling, The Tin Soldier, and The Fir Tree. Mrs. Craik's The Little Lame Prince, George Macdonald's At the Back of the North Wind, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland , and some of the tales in Mary Wilkins' The Pot of Gold deserve a place among the best fairy tales.
What Has Changed in the Last Century
Aiton's Encyclopedia in 1910 treats fairy tales as "juvenile stories" and dismisses modern ones as of "only passing interest" — both judgements have been overturned. Fairy tales are now a serious academic field: Antti Aarne began indexing tale types in 1910, a system expanded by Stith Thompson and revised by Hans-Jörg Uther in 2004, while Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktale (1928) and Bruno Bettelheim's psychoanalytic The Uses of Enchantment (1976) made the stories objects of structural and psychological study, later of feminist criticism. Scholars such as Jack Zipes have also shown that the Grimms' collection, praised here for gathering "folk tales from nearly all nations," was in fact heavily rewritten between its 1812 and 1857 editions and drew on educated, often French-influenced informants rather than pure peasant tradition. The 1550 Venice collection Aiton mentions is now firmly identified as Straparola's Le piacevoli notti, and since Disney's Snow White in 1937 the versions most children meet have been films rather than books.
Written for this edition, 2026.