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Once Upon a Time, fairy tales weren't written for children... In spite of their name, the popular fairy tales usually have very little to do with fairies. We took the name from the French "contes des fee", and the French literary fairy tales of the 17th century do feature far more fairies, than the tales, which are best known today. The Grimm brothers collected the folk tales of the German people to make up their volume, but fairy tales are more than just folk tales. The German term for them is "Märchen", a word for which there is no satisfactory English equivalent - it is the diminutive of Mär, a story or a tale, and has come to mean a story of wonder and enchantment, as the fairy tale is. Although large numbers of literary fairy tales were written in 17th century France, most of the tales which are still told and retold now are far older in origin. Many of the stories were edited and changed as they were written - down, removing the darker and more gruesome elements of the stories. The intended audience of the stories has also changed. Perrault's collection of tales was written; to be presented at the court of Versailles, and each tale ended with a moralistic verse. At the same time, literary fairy tales of great imagination and invention, often quite cruel and gruesome, were being created by the women surreptitiously rebelling against the constraints placed on them by their restrictive society. They were not written for children. Yet throughout history, fairy tales have been women's stories, passed down orally by the mothers and grandmothers. When the tales began to be a literary form, the number and output of female authors vastly exceeds that of the males. The Grimm Brothers collected their tales from peasants and edited them to suit their audience; most of Perrault's stories are retellings of old tales. Although the female authors included familiar elements, their now-forgotten tales were largely more inventive, original and fantastical than their male counterparts - and frequently nastier, too. In 1634, a cycle of fifty tales was published by Giambattista Basile, in which can be found some of the earliest written versions of familiar stories like "Sleeping Beauty". Basile's tone is bawdy and comic; his narrators within the tale are old women, hags, crones and old gossips, the stereotypical tellers of the "old wives' tale". The women who brought the literary fairy tale to popularity fifty years or so later were anything but "old wives".
Approximate Word count = 1644
Approximate Pages = 6.6
(250 words per page double spaced)
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