Why should fairy tales need interpretation? Are they not simple, capable of being understood by children, often fantastic, unimportant to the great literary world? And what do we mean when we speak of fairy tales? The answers are surprisingly controversial and have generated a vast secondary literature. Even the modern literary world has wakened to the power of fairy tales and has used fairy tales, often in perverted ways, to create its own peculiarly modernistic messages.

Examples of the stories we think of nowadays when we refer to fairy tales are ‘Cinderella’, ‘Beauty and the Beast’, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, ‘Diamonds and Toads’, ‘Bluebeard’, ‘Puss-in-Boots’, ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’, ‘Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’, ‘The Frog Prince’, ‘Hansel and Gretel’, to take only a handful of the Opies’ excellent 1974 collection, The Classic Fairy Tales. The general characteristics of fairy tales are clear. Whether oral or printed they are not invented by any particular individual. They have the anonymity of authorship characteristic of traditional stories, described by Calvino as having that ‘ininite variety and ininite repetition’ common to folktale in general, for fairy tales are unquestionably part of the great worldwide body of folktale (Calvino 1982: XVIII; Jackson 1961: 5 etc.). These stories have stereotyped characters and a certain predictability of event. They embody the social wisdom of their communities and an implicit morality or didacticism. In traditional versions, that is those not retold in elaborate nineteenth-century or twentieth-century novel-like style, there is little physical description. In many tales the protagonist commits some kind of transgression, but recovers through a central ‘magical’ event on which the plot turns, often a form of wish-fulilment; the hero inds his beloved, the heroine hers; or there is an unexpected escape - occasionally the ending is sad, but more often happy. The implied setting, until very recently, and in all traditional forms, is a small-scale agrarian society, unlimited wishes and limited horizons. These characteristics imply an oral origin, which has important implications for method and structure.

These apparently simple tales have been of enduring interest in many cultures over many centuries. In consequence they exist in many versions which both are and are not the same story.