Discover the history of fairytales and why we still tell them

In 1847’s “Jane Eyre,” Charlotte Brontë said fairies “were all gone out of England to some savage country where the woods were wilder and thicker and the population more scant.” This sounds strange to the modern ear because we tend to think of fairytales as being the tamest of all stories. After all, they’re usually the first stories we learn as children and the first we tell children as adults.

Let’s talk about fairytales, their history and why we apparently can’t stop retelling these stories over and over.

Turns out fairytales are very ancient indeed!

In 2016 anthropologists Sara Graça da Silva of Portugal and Jamshid J. Tehrani of the United Kingdom published a study on the age of European fairytales. They tracked common fairytales and traced them back.

For instance, "Jack and the Beanstalk" can be tracked to the oldest time studied by Graça da Silva and Tehrani, the Proto-Indo-European era, which dates to cultures shared in the Bronze Age when cultures now as widely spread as Iceland, Iran and India shared a common language, about 4,500 years ago. So "Jack and the Beanstalk," told to children still today, may well be keeping company with stories from before blacksmithing.

"Cinderella" is dated younger. The study dates it to the Proto-Romance period, shortly after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in Europe, about 500-700 CE.

So if these stories are so old, how do we have them today?

The first written versions of these stories are naturally much younger than their oral counterparts, reflecting that literacy has increased. Giambattista Basile recorded both from 1634-36 during the Italian Renaissance, and his version in the Pentamerone became the basis for later versions like Charles Perrault’s 1667 "Stories or Tales from Past Times with Morals" and Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s 1812 "Children’s and Household Tales."

The time period was part of a flourishing of folk literature. Ironically, these authors frequently wrote these fairytales down, believing they were preserving some “pure” folk wisdom of their particular country alone. On the contrary, as we have seen, these stories are so old they cross boundaries dating to before the Roman Empire — including ethnicity, culture, nation, class and language. These “unique” traditions are, in reality, something that draws us closer together, not pushes us apart.

The second fairytale flourishing is that of the Victorian and Edwardian eras, epitomized by works like Andrew Lang’s "Fairy Book" series, which were published from 1889-1910.

This period also evolved the first steps into children’s fairytales. Lang’s version of "Cinderella" in 1889’s “The Blue Fairy Book” reads like it is for middle-schoolers. These new steps were wildly successful, with “cultural” fairytales very popular with parents of children.

While the lighter and softer tales were aimed at the general public, there was a growing trend of academic study about fairytales in the late Victorian and throughout the Edwardian era. Andrew Lang had produced his “Fairy Book” series for children, but he also produced fairytale analyses for adults.

While the Grimm Brothers and earlier recorders of fairytales had written primarily for adults, their goal was to romanticize what they saw as nationalist traditions. Later academics like Lang were more focused on understanding the true root of the tales, even if they did not yet understand how old we would later find them to be.

The 20th century wasn’t done with fairytales, not when they were about to have the biggest pop cultural breakthrough yet, in 1937. A young man from Chicago named Walt Disney had been obsessed with fairytales for a long time, drawing his first animation for them in 1922. He would return to fairytales time and again. By the time Disney had pioneered the feature-length animated fairytale, “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” feels almost inevitable.

But the sheer scale of fairytales in our culture does tell us something: These millennia-old stories are still important to our society today. Why? What is it about these stories that still resonates with us long after the cultures that originally told them are gone?

The full program on this topic, Tale as Old as Time: A History of Fairytales, will be held at 5:45 p.m. Wednesday, Feb. 25 at the Coshocton County District Library. For more information and to register for the program, stop by the library, visit www.coshoctonlibrary.org or call 740-622-0956.