Fairy Tales

Fairy tales are short narrative stories for children, especially, that feature magic or enchanted characters such as fairies, dwarfs, giants, gnomes or demons and witches. The history of fairy tales is pretty hard to trace because this type of literature is found both in oral and written form. The first accountable fairy tales in the world are the Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella recorded by Charles Perrault. The most significant fairy tales in the world are Grimm’s fairy tales. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were folklorists, linguists, philologists and doctors in law.

The brothers Grimm studied law at the University of Marburg to meet their stepfather’s desire, but this career as a lawyer did not caught. They preferred to wander in the world to find new folk tales in the early years of the nineteenth century. Jacob worked as a librarian at Kasel between 1816 of 1829, and his brother worked as a secretary. Between 1821 and 1822, the brothers have preferred to have a modest income picking three volumes of fairy tales from about 40 people.

The most important sources for their tales were Dorothea Viehmann, an innkeeper's daughter and Marie Hassenpflug, a 20 year old friend of Charlotte, their sister. Marie came from a wealthy family. As she knew French very well she had access to collections of fairy tales from France. The stories collected from her are a mixture of oral tradition and Perrault's stories of 1697. The collection of tales that made them famous include Snow White, Cinderella, Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, Princess and the Pea, Water of Life and many more.

Fairy tales are always catchy whether they are read to children or listened as a teenager. They sometimes seem puerile but the great fairy tales always have something you can learn from, especially when very young. In time, the cinematographic industry has discovered the attraction for this kind of stories and that is how fairy tale movies appeared. Some of the most famous are many versions on Cinderella, and Walt Disney’s productions.