The term ‘fairy tales’ connotes tales about fairies such as ‘The Yellow Dwarf’ as well as fairy tales like ‘Cinderella’ and ‘Puss-in-Boots’. Tales about fairies and fairy tales differ considerably from one another. After a brief introduction, this article will deal chiefly, but not exclusively, with fairy tales.

Tales about fairies treat fairyland and its fairy inhabitants (e.g. elves, kobolds, gnomes, leprechauns, fairies) as well as the complex relationships that develop between fairies and human beings. Narratively elaborate and lexically rich, tales about fairies and fairyland typically include lengthening episodes such as entering a meta-human kingdom through a familiar and apparently ordinary aperture (well, cave, tree, or door in wall).

Fairy tales are commonly narratively and lexically simple, may or may not include fairies, unfold along predictable lines, with magically gifted characters attaining their goals with thrice-repeated magical motifs. They integrate fairy-tale motifs familiar throughout the western world, such as specific magical objects (rings, wands) and magical transformations (in appearance, size, and ability to understand the language of animals). Fairy-tale themes are similarly simple: a rise from poverty to wealth, marriage above one's class, and a triumph of good over evil, or of apparent weakness over overwhelming strength. The episodes in fairy tales are formulaic: quests, tasks, trials, enchantments, curses, and travelling with supernatural swiftness from one place to another. The characters are rarely distinguished in personal terms: good girls and women are kind, beautiful and industrious; good boys and men are handsome, benevolent and equally hardworking. Witches, stepmothers, occasional ogres, and frequently cannabalistic giants, who are all uncompromisingly murderous, comprise the company of the wicked.

As individual narrative elements fairy-tale motifs, themes and episodes each have long documentable histories in European literature. When the first fairy tales in the Western world were published in the Piacevoli Notti (‘Pleasant Nights’) of Giovan Francesco Straparola in Venice in 1551 they included magic rings, good and evil, tests and trials set by wicked antagonists, and exotic forms of transportation, including dragon-drawn chariots. Many such motifs came into the Mediterranean narrative world in story collections from Western Asia.