Human culture exists to provide us with a context in which to live. In every culture there is a tension between the needs of the community and the needs of the individual. The fairy tale, in my view, exists as a kind of ultra-sensitive balance between these two needs. It mediates between the life we have and the life we want; between the world we inherit and the world we imagine.

Anthropologist Harold Scheub walked more than six thousand miles through southern Africa recording oral narratives. One of his key sources was the Xhosa storyteller Nongenile Masithathu Zenani, who told him: ‘These are the storyteller's materials: the world and the word’ (Scheub 1992: 3). It would be hard to phrase this truth more simply or more fully. From those materials has been fashioned every story ever told. ‘In the beginning was the Word’ (John 1: 1).

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote that ‘Every word was once a poem’ (1964: 189). It would be equally true to say that every word was once a story, and that storytelling is as intrinsic to human culture as language itself. To tell a story is to interpret the world (what we experience and what we observe) through the word (what we imagine and what we perceive). All stories do this.

Fairy tales in particular seek to hold a balance between reality and dream. The realm of Faërie, wrote J. R. R. Tolkien (1964: 16),

The definition of the fairy tale, as opposed to any other kind of narrative, is fraught with problems. The standard term among folklorists is the German Märchen which is perhaps best translated as ‘wonder tale’. They are stories with an element of fantasy or magic, located in the world of ‘once upon a time’.

Märchen are only one kind of oral narrative.