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About fairy tale


Fairy Tale: Definition and Examples

I. What is a Fairy Tale?

A fairy tale is a story, often intended for children, that features fanciful and wondrous characters such as elves, goblins, wizards, and even, but not necessarily, fairies. The term “fairy” tale seems to refer more to the fantastic and magical setting or magical influences within a story, rather than the presence of the character of a fairy within that story. Fairy tales are often traditional; many were passed down from story-teller to story-teller before being recorded in books.

 

II. Examples of Fairy Tale

Fairy tales, in the literary sense, are easy to find. Look at your bookshelf or your DVD collection.You may see titles likes these:

  • Snow White
  • Cinderella
  • Rip Van Winkle
  • The Twelve Dancing Princesses
  • Rumpelstiltskin
  • Thumbelina

They are all fairy tales. They belong to no one and have been adapted and retold countless times.

Fairy tales do not need to be written down to be legitimate. Many tales that your parents or grandparents may have told you off the top of their heads are also fairy tales. For example, stories of the tooth fairy, the boogeyman, leprechauns and pots of gold or even Santa Claus.

If a story takes place in a magical land, with fantastical creatures who perform wondrous tasks, it is very likely a fairy tale.

 

III. Types of Fairy Tales

There are no rules that define fairy tales. Therefore, they are categorized by their elements, types, or motifs.

Here are some of those types and examples of stories that fit those types:

  • Supernatural Adversaries: Hansel and Gretel, Red Riding Hood
  • Supernatural or Enchanted Relatives: Sleeping Beauty, Beauty and the Beast
  • Supernatural Helpers: Cinderella, Puss In Boots
  • Magic Objects: The Magic Ring, Aladdin
  • Supernatural Power or Knowledge: The White Snake, Ali Baba
  • Religious Tales: The Three Green Twigs, The Flower of Lily-Lo
  • Realistic Tales: The Falsely Accused Wife, Ariadne
  • Tales of Fate: The Robber Bridegroom, Oedipus (Aarne-Thompson)

 

IV.

The Importance of using Fairy Tales

Fairy tales are important because they spark the imagination. They give us an outlet for experiencing things in our minds before we experience them in the real world. It is where the troubles of the real world can meet the supernatural and mix things up. In a fairy tale anything can happen and any kind of creature can exist, and when anything can happen, we can find solutions to things in our real lives. Through imagination, we learn about our world. We can explore outcomes and possibilities.

 

V. Examples of Fairy Tales in Literature

Fairy tales exist in every culture in the world and there are elements of the fairy tale going back for as long as people have been telling stories. In Western culture, there are a few authors who were particularly important in the formal recording of fairy tales.

Example 1

Hans Christian Anderson

Hans Christian Anderson was a Danish author who published his fairy tales in the late 1800s. Here are a few of his titles:

The Tinder-Box, The Princess and the Pea, Thumbelina, The Little Mermaid, The Emperor’s New Clothes, The Staunch Tin Soldier, Willie Winkie, The Nightingale, The Ugly Duckling, The Snow Queen. (Larsen)

Example 2

Brothers Grimm

Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm and Wilhelm Carl Grimm were German brothers who published their stories in the early 1800s. Here are a few of their titles:

The Good Bargain, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Cinderella, Little Red Cap, The Bremen Town Musicians, The Robber Bridegroom, The Juniper Tree, Little Brier-Rose, and Little Snow-White. (Ashliman)

More recently, the fairy tale has undergone a resurgence and a reinvention. Many popluar authors have set out to write fairy tales that are more in line with our time. Neil Gaiman is one of these authors. With books like Stardust and Coraline, he takes the fairy tale to a new place.  Kate DiCamillo is another, with The Tale of Despereaux. Those are only 3 examples, but the list is long!

 

VI. Examples of Fairy Tales in Popular Culture

We can find fairy tales in every element of our culture. They are, in many ways, given life through popular culture. They appear in books, movies, music, and art. As the fairy tale is such a creative art-form, itself, it is understandable that it would appear in all creative mediums. With each new interpretation or retelling of a fairy tale, we learn a little bit about the story-teller, the audience, the culture and the time in which it is told.

Probably the most recognizable producer of fairy tales in our culture is Walt Disney. Disney has turned the fairy tale into an industry, producing movies, books, toys, clothing, and just about anything else you can think of and branding them with fairy tale characters.

The television show Once Upon A Time is based upon the idea of the fairy tale and uses classic stories in some unique and surprising ways.

Recently there have been several movies made that tell more gruesome and dark versions of well-known fairy tales. Snow White and the Huntsman, Maleficent and Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters are a few of these.

In art, we also find images of fairy tale characters everywhere. Children’s picture books are an abundant source for these works. Picture books make the fairy tales come alive with their images.

 

fairy tale | Britannica

Key People:
Oscar Wilde Hans Christian Andersen E.T.A. Hoffmann Adelbert von Chamisso Giambattista Basile
Related Topics:
children’s literature fable Märchen fiction tale

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fairy tale, wonder tale involving marvellous elements and occurrences, though not necessarily about fairies. The term embraces such popular folktales (Märchen, q. v.) as “Cinderella” and “Puss-in-Boots” and art fairy tales (Kunstmärchen) of later invention, such as The Happy Prince (1888), by the Irish writer Oscar Wilde. It is often difficult to distinguish between tales of literary and oral origin, because folktales have received literary treatment from early times, and, conversely, literary tales have found their way back into the oral tradition. Early Italian collections such as Le piacevoli notti (1550, vol. 1; 1553, vol. 2; “The Pleasant Nights”) of Gianfrancesco Straparola and Il Pentamerone (1636; originally published [1634] in Neapolitan dialect as Lo cunto de li cunti) of Giambattista Basile contain reworkings in a highly literary style of such stories as “Snow White,” “Sleeping Beauty,” and “The Maiden in the Tower.” A later French collection, Charles Perrault’s Contes de ma mère l’oye (1697; Tales of Mother Goose), including “Cinderella,” “Little Red Ridinghood,” and “Beauty and the Beast,” remains faithful to the oral tradition, while the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812–15; “Children’s and Household Tales,” generally known as Grimm’s Fairy Tales) of the Brothers Grimm are transcribed directly from oral renderings (although often from literate informants). The influence of Perrault and the Grimms has been very great, and their versions have been commonly adopted as nursery tales among literate people in the West. For example, Grimm’s “Rumpelstiltskin” has replaced the native English “Tom Tit Tot,” and Perrault’s “Cinderella” has replaced “Cap o’ Rushes,” once almost equally popular in oral tradition.

Art fairy tales were cultivated in the period of German Romanticism by Goethe, Ludwig Tieck, Clemens Brentano, and E.T.A. Hoffmann and in Victorian England by John Ruskin (The King of the Golden River, 1851) and Charles Kingsley (The Water-Babies, 1863), but few of these tales have found permanent popularity. The master of the art fairy tale, whose works rank with the traditional stories in universal popularity, is the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen. Though his stories have their roots in folk legend, they are personal in style and contain elements of autobiography and contemporary social satire.

Twentieth-century psychologists, notably Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Bruno Bettelheim, have interpreted elements of the fairy tale as manifestations of universal fears and desires. In his Uses of Enchantment (1976), Bettelheim asserted that the apparently cruel and arbitrary nature of many folk fairy stories is actually an instructive reflection of the child’s natural and necessary “killing off” of successive phases of development and initiation.

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About fairy tales

Everyone loves a fairy tale. But why? You won't answer right away...

Some guys say: "The stories are interesting." Of course, who can argue! But not only in this matter. After all, there are enough interesting books and besides fairy tales.

The good thing about a fairy tale is that anything can happen in it. Here, for example, a good fellow is in a hurry for a just cause, and then, as luck would have it, the road ended. Do not pass, do not pass. And he will throw forward a magic handkerchief, and again the road is in front of him. Download wherever you want!

When the first fairy tales were formed in Rus', our people lived very hard, and only in fairy tales did they get rid of severe poverty, overwork, untruth and oppression. That's why they loved the story.

And the good thing about the fairy tale is that good always triumphs over evil in it. Who reads a fairy tale and involuntarily feels brave, powerful, ready to fight any insidious and strong enemy. And this is very important! Once you feel it, you feel it twice, and then, you see, you really become a hero.

And what is also precious in a fairy tale is that everything is told in a very neat way. There is also a reason for this: before fairy tales were not written, but told. One will listen, another will tell, the third. And everyone tries to make it better. But these are folk tales. But there are still fairy tales that writers have written. Remember, Pushkin has fairy tales, Leo Tolstoy, Gorky. Almost all famous writers have written fairy tales. Why is everything so difficult for them?

But because, before starting to create a fairy tale, the writer will read and listen to a lot of fairy tales, of course, he will study how they are built, what words they are written in. Writers write down folk tales, listen to how they sound, and compose new tales themselves. That's why it works.

Fairy tale invented the flying carpet, and we invented the spaceship.

Walking boots - for one person. Cars, planes, ships - for many.

Travel to the end of the world? A click of a button, and on the screen - Africa, the Amazon, a polar bear on an ice floe.

We can do more than a fairy tale! But why, then, is she more and more dear to us, more and more dear?

Why are fairy tales still made up? Then the old man Hottabych suddenly appears, then Carlson, who lives on the roof, Cheburashka?

The fact is that all adults were once children, and children are always told fairy tales.

Nanny Arina Rodionovna told fairy tales to Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin. When the poet grew up, he composed poems and even a novel in verse. But the memory of a miracle and joy constantly lived in him. Miracle and joy, from which the heart aches sweetly, were the nanny's fairy tales. And then Pushkin composed:

The squirrel sings songs

And the nuts gnaws everything,

And the nuts are not simple,

All the shells are golden,

The nuclei are a pure emerald...

Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy, the author of great novels, also never forgot the miracle , which was only a guest in palaces, but was born and lived under the thatched roof of a peasant hut - about the miracle of a Russian fairy tale.

Wishing to measure the power of words with folk storytellers, Leo Tolstoy composed a fairy tale about Masha and three bears and many others. He wrote it well, the people accepted these tales and, to the delight of the writer, recognized them as their own.

But that's all in the past, but does the fairy tale have a future? Will you children of today tell stories to your grandchildren?

Whatever we invent, wherever we fly, even beyond the Galaxy, the fairy tale will remain with us. There is not even a secret here. A fairy tale was born with a man, and as long as a man is alive, the fairy tale will be alive.

She is like a firefly before going to sleep in the cradle. And for the little one who listens, and for the old one who speaks.

A fairy tale has a quiet voice,

But a miracle lies ahead.

Expensive in the legs - a belt,

The forest is cramped,

The fence is high,

And the heart - ah! - in the chest.

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