There is a general assumption, certainly among children's writers and also among both classicists and folklorists, that fairy tales should be seen as a relatively recent phenomenon (e.g. Opie 1974 passim; Purkiss 2000 by implication). Certainly one might be tempted to say this of such products as the Harry Potter books written specifically for a children's market by literate adults. But magically escapist plots of stories that could be told to, or adapted for, children are very old indeed (Thompson 1946: 272-82). This is fairly widely known or suspected in a very general way, but seems not to be widely cared about, and there has been hitherto little detailed treatment of specific examples. Just how old are ‘Cinderella’, ‘Snow White’ and ‘Goldilocks and the Three Bears’? If you ask such a question, people might well wonder why you should want to know: have scholars not got better things to do than try to put a timetable on what ‘everybody knows’ is timeless? Either we feel that such information is really unknowable anyway, or we somehow hope it will turn out to be so. Professional folklore scholars have gone at least part of the way to putting some kind of date on some tales: for close on ninety years there was known to be a ‘Cinderella’ story in ninth-century China, though ‘Goldilocks’ has been pushed back no further than 1830, and the very name Goldilocks may be no older than the twentieth century. Many fairy tales seem no older than either eighteenth-century France, or the Renaissance at most.

The way scholarly enquiry has developed over the past two centuries has meant that classicists do not generally study fairy tales, and fairy-tale specialists do not study the ancient world. The result is that, outside a very narrow range of specialisms, there is only token, grudging or misleading information that fairy tales existed in classical antiquity at all. We are told that very popular tales which might have been so described are really either myths or migratory legends, or that they are not really ‘our’ fairy tales, which are so to speak the inviolable preserve of the Renaissance or just before.