Tell a Fairy Tale Day: The Stories Everybody Edited

Tell a Fairy Tale Day falls on February 26. It’s one of those calendar observances with no known founder. The idea is simple enough. Tell somebody a fairy tale, preferably out loud, preferably to a child.

The stories themselves have a much better documented history, and it’s mostly a history of editing. The versions most people know are several removes from what anybody first wrote down. Perrault polished folk tales for the French court. The Grimms collected German tales as scholarship and then spent forty-five years revising them for families. Andersen wrote new ones and got scolded by critics for his chatty style. Disney came later and changed them again. A writer can learn as much from the edits as from the tales.

Where does Tell a Fairy Tale Day come from?

Nobody seems to know. It appears on American holiday calendars on February 26 with no founder, no organization and no origin story attached. National Day Calendar tracks these observances for a living, and even it says it couldn’t find who created this one.

That’s fitting for a holiday about folk tales. Most of the stories it celebrates have no known author either. Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty existed in spoken versions long before anybody printed them, and the people who wrote them down were collectors and editors, adapting what they heard. A day nobody invented, for stories nobody invented, celebrated by telling them again in your own words. The format suits the material.

What did Charles Perrault publish in 1697?

The first great collection. In 1697 Perrault published Histoires ou contes du temps passé, known in English as Tales of Mother Goose. It contained Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, Bluebeard, Puss in Boots, The Fairies, Cinderella, Ricky of the Tuft and Little Thumb.

Perrault wasn’t a folklorist. He was a court official and a member of the French literary establishment, and he wrote for sophisticated, aristocratic readers. Each tale ends with a moral in verse, witty and a little sly.

His Little Red Riding Hood is the version that shocks modern readers. The wolf eats the grandmother, then eats the girl, and the story ends. There’s no woodcutter and no rescue. The moral that follows warns young women about charming wolves who follow them home. That’s a cautionary tale for adult readers, and it’s blunt about it. The rescue most people remember came later, from the Grimms.

What did the Brothers Grimm publish in 1812?

A scholarly book that turned into a children’s classic. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published the first volume of Kinder- und Hausmärchen, Children’s and Household Tales, on December 20, 1812. It had 86 stories. A second volume followed in 1815 with 70 more.

The brothers were philologists collecting German folk culture, and the first edition reads that way.

It came with scholarly notes, and the tales kept a lot of the violence and sex of their sources. Reviewers complained that a book called Children’s Tales was unsuitable for children. The stories came from friends, neighbors and acquaintances, including Dortchen Wild and her family, who supplied versions of Hansel and Gretel and Sleeping Beauty. Wilhelm married Dortchen in 1825.

Over the next forty-five years the book went through seven editions. The last in the brothers’ lifetime, in 1857, had 200 tales and 10 children’s legends. They also published a Small Edition in 1825, fifty tales chosen for children and illustrated by their brother Ludwig Emil Grimm. The Small Edition went through ten editions of its own by 1858.

Two books, then. One for scholars and one for the nursery, from the same two men.

How did the Grimms edit fairy tales between editions?

Heavily, and mostly in one direction. Wilhelm in particular reworked the stories for a family audience, and each edition moved further from the raw source material and closer to the book parents wanted to buy.

Sex went first. In the first edition, Rapunzel innocently asks why her dress has grown tight around her belly. Any adult reader knows at once what the prince has been doing up in the tower.

Later editions cut it.

Mothers became stepmothers. In the first edition of Snow White and of Hansel and Gretel, the villain is the child’s own mother. Later editions turned her into a stepmother. The folklorist Jack Zipes has argued the brothers made the change because they held motherhood sacred.

The violence mostly stayed, and some of it got more pointed. In the Grimms’ Cinderella, the stepsisters cut off parts of their feet to fit the slipper, and at the wedding doves peck out their eyes. Punishment for the wicked was something the brothers were comfortable keeping. Cinderella herself got kinder edition by edition, and by 1857 she reads like a model of middle-class virtue.

That’s an editor reshaping a book for its market, edition after edition, and it worked. The Grimms’ tales became household books across Europe because Wilhelm made them into something a household would keep. The cost was distance from the sources the brothers had set out to preserve.

Why did Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales feel different?

Because he wrote most of them himself. Andersen was born in Odense, Denmark, on April 2, 1805, and published his first booklet of fairy tales in 1835. It had four stories: The Tinderbox, Little Claus and Big Claus, The Princess and the Pea, and Little Ida’s Flowers. The first three drew on folk tales he’d heard as a child. The fourth was his own.

Danish critics didn’t like them.

Reviews of the first two booklets in 1836 objected to the chatty, informal style and to tales that didn’t seem to teach anything proper. He kept writing in that style anyway.

The third booklet, in 1837, included The Emperor’s New Clothes and The Little Mermaid. The mermaid made his international name. It’s also a tale most people know only in the softened version. In Andersen’s original she doesn’t get the prince. He marries someone else, and she gives up her chance to save herself instead of killing him, dissolves into sea foam, and rises as a spirit of the air.

Andersen’s tales are sadder, stranger and more personal than the Grimms’ because they come from one writer’s head. That’s the difference between collecting and authoring. His birthday, April 2, is now International Children’s Book Day, marked since 1967.

What structure do fairy tales share?

A surprisingly fixed one. In 1928 the Russian scholar Vladimir Propp published Morphology of the Folktale, an analysis of Russian fairy tales that broke them into 31 recurring plot functions. A hero leaves home. A villain causes harm or a lack. The hero is tested, gets help from a magical donor, faces the villain, wins, and returns. Not every tale uses every function, but the ones they use come in the same order.

Writers have been borrowing that skeleton ever since, plenty of them without knowing it.

The other structural habits are easy to spot once you look.

Things happen in threes: three sons, three tasks, three visits to the ball. Characters are types instead of people, with a name and one trait. Description is minimal. The tale tells you the forest is dark and moves on. Good and bad are rewarded and punished in kind, with no ambiguity. And the opening wastes no time. “Once upon a time” clears the ground in four words, and the inciting problem arrives in the first paragraph.

I open almost all my novels with action and then flash back, and fairy tales are the oldest argument for doing it. A tale that started with three pages of the miller’s family history would have lost its audience at the fireside. Get to the trouble. Fill in the background once the listener cares.

Why do fairy tales keep getting rewritten?

Because they have no owner. A tale without a single author belongs to whoever tells it next, and every teller adjusts it for the room. Perrault adjusted for the court, the Grimms for the family, Andersen for himself. Then came the film studios, and they changed the tales more in a few decades than the Grimms did in forty-five years. My reviews of Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and The Little Mermaid (1989) cover two of the biggest rewrites in the form’s history.

The form also bends to other purposes. George Orwell gave Animal Farm the subtitle A Fairy Story, and I loved that book in high school when I hated most of what I was assigned. It borrows the fairy-tale shape, talking animals and a simple moral world, and turns it on politics. The structure is strong enough to carry almost anything. More on Orwell is on the George Orwell Day page.

What can writers learn from fairy tales?

Start with the trouble. The inciting problem in a fairy tale shows up almost at once. Plenty of manuscripts take three chapters to get there.

Use threes.

Two attempts set a pattern and the third breaks it. Readers feel the rhythm even when they can’t name it.

Make the stakes physical. A fairy tale doesn’t describe fear. It puts the child in the oven or the girl in the tower and lets the situation do the frightening. Concrete danger reads faster than any description of an emotion. Hansel and Gretel never tells you the children are terrified. It tells you their parents walked them into the forest and left them there, twice, and the reader supplies the terror without being asked. That’s a lesson most adult fiction could use.

Know your audience, and edit for it. Perrault, the Grimms and Andersen all changed their tales to suit the readers in front of them. That’s the most useful lesson in the whole history. A story isn’t finished until it’s been shaped for the person who’s going to hear it.

And respect the bones. The structure has survived three centuries of print and thousands of years of telling before that. Writers who want to break it should know it well first. My longer piece on writing fairy tales goes into the techniques.

How should you mark Tell a Fairy Tale Day?

Tell one out loud, from memory, without the book. You’ll find out which parts of the story you remember and which ones the listener can’t do without.

Read a first-edition Grimm tale next to the version you grew up with. Rapunzel and Snow White are the best places to start. The differences show you what an editor does in a way no textbook can.

Read Andersen’s Little Mermaid in a faithful translation and compare the ending to the film. One of them is a tragedy.

If you write, take a tale everybody knows and retell it from the villain’s side, or move it to the place you live. The skeleton will hold. If you’ve got a story built on those bones and want help shaping it, book coaching is where I’d start. The rest of the calendar is on the literary holidays page.

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