The fairy tale was part of an oral tradition; tales were told, rather than written down, and handed down from generation to generation. Because of this, the history of their development is necessarily obscure. Illiterate peoples, in particular, may have long told tales without there being any records of them. Fairy tales appear, now and again, in written literature throughout literate cultures, as in The Golden Ass or Panchatantra, but it is unknown to what extent these reflect the actual folk tales even of their own time. What they do show is that the fairy tale has ancient roots, older than the "Arabian Nights" collection of magical tales, in antiquity: Cupid and Psyche, Bel and the Dragon. Fairy tales resurfaced in literature in the 17th century, with the Neapolitan tales of Giambattista Basile and the later Contes of Charles Perrault, who fixed the forms of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella.

Such literary forms did not merely draw from the folktale, but fed back into it. The Brothers Grimm rejected several tales for their collection, though told orally to them, because the tales derived from Perrault. The rediscovery of a manuscript of Cupid and Psyche quickly produced variants of that tale in regions where the tale had been unknown before.

It was widely believed among folklorists of the nineteenth century that the folk tradition preserved fairy tales in forms from pre-history except when "contaminated" by such literary forms, leading people to tell inauthentic tales. However, further research has concluded that fairy tales never had a fixed form, and regardless of literary influence, the tellers constantly altered them for their own purposes.

Although in the nineteenth and twentieth century the fairy tale came to be associated with children's literature, adults were originally as likely as children to be the audience of the fairy tale.

Despite the name, there never appears to have been a time where "fairy tales" depicted solely tales of encounters with fairies. Fairy tales were about princes and princesses, combat, adventure, society, and romance. Fairies had a secondary role.

In later versions, moral lessons and happy endings were more common, and the villain was usually punished. In the modern era, fairy tales were altered, usually with violence removed, so they could be read to children (who, according to a common modern sentiment, should not hear about violence).

Sometimes fairy tales are simply miraculous entertainments, but often they are disguised morality tales -- or undisguised ones, as when Madame d'Aulnoy concluded her fairy tale The Ram with the observations that even princesses must keep their word. Other works contain social criticism, including the drily witty, dead-pan, social criticism beneath the surface of Hans Christian Andersen's tales, which influenced Roald Dahl.



An extensive collection of European fairy tales were published by Andrew Lang in a series of books: The Red Fairy Book, The Orange Fairy Book, and so forth. These provide some excellent examples of the genre.

According to a 2004 poll of 1,200 children by UCI Cinemas, the most popular fairy tales (in the USA) are:

Cinderella

Sleeping Beauty

Hansel and Gretel

Rapunzel

Little Red Riding Hood

Town Musicians