Where do our favorite fairytales come from? A brief history Part I

 As you may have noticed by now, I have read quite a few fairy tales and something I've noticed is that people will often credit our most beloved and well known fairy tales in western culture solely to the Grimm brothers.  Now Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm certainly did their part in perpetuating our favorite fairy tales in western literature, however many of these same tales that are often credited to the Grimms were actually due to writers before and after the Grimm brothers. Fairy tales started out as oral tales handed down through the generations, often from mothers and nurses.  Although the most well known writers of fairy tales are men, women arguably dominated the fairy tale scene (I plan to devote an entire blog post about this in the near future).  Fairy tales started out as oral tales often told by mothers, nurses and governesses and for a long time these oral tales were seen as a lowly common amusement.

We shall start with Giambattista Basile.  Basile was an Italian poet who collected fairy tales.  He wrote La Pentamerone a collection of five tales told within one longer tale, much like the Arabian Nights, which was published in 1634.  The stories in the pentamerone included the first recorded versions of the stories that we have come to know as Sleeping Beauty (Talia, Sun, and Moon), Rapunzel (Petrosinella) and Cinderella (Cat Cinderella).  Contrary to the belief that fairy tales are solely for children Basile's stories were actually written to entertain adults.  Basile's versions of these tales were much more violent and sexualized than the versions that most people are familiar with today.

Now let us journey to France, where the literary fairy tale took another major leap.  During the 1630s aristocratic women in France, who were not allowed to go to school or university, started having gatherings in their homes known as salons to discuss art, literature and philosophy.  These women, who strove to prove they were the intellectual equals of men "were called Precieuses and worked to develop a precieux manner of thinking, speaking, and writing to reveal and celebrate their innate talents that distinguished them from the vulgar and common elements of society" (Zipes 32).  These women would play parlour games in which each woman (or man, as men also attended the salons) would prove their wit and eloquence by telling a story they made up on the spot (although everyone would have rehearsed their story well in advance).  According to Jack Zipes the Precieuses and their salons made fairytales more popular and "French aristocratic writers for the most part established the conventions and motifs for a genre that is perhaps the most popular in the western world" (31).  So there you have it, French hipsters jump started the fairy tale from a lowly form of entertainment into a fashionable vehicle to make moral and political statements.  One of these hipsters was Charles Perrault who published his own collection of fairy tales called Histoires ou contes du temps passe in 1697which included "Little Red Riding Hood", "Puss in Boots", "Blue Beard" and his own versions of "Sleeping Beauty" and "Cinderella".

To Be Continued...