Fairy Tales | Gentle Reading For Sleep

Drift off with this calm bedtime reading as Benjamin explores the fascinating origins of fairy tales to help you relax and ease insomnia. Discover how these timeless stories evolved from ancient folklore into the beloved tales we know today. With a gentle, unhurried pace, Benjamin’s soothing voice transforms this educational journey into a peaceful sleep companion. There’s no whispering or hypnosis—just calm, fact-filled storytelling to quiet your thoughts and relieve stress, anxiety, and sleeplessness. Settle in, listen, and let your mind wander through the history of imagination. Happy sleeping!

Transcript

Welcome to the I Can't Sleep Podcast,

Where I help you drift off one fact at a time.

I'm your host,

Benjamin Boster,

And today's episode is about fairy tales.

A fairy tale,

Alternative names include fairy story,

Household tale,

Magic tale,

Or wonder tale,

Is a short story that belongs to the folklore genre.

Such stories typically feature magic,

Enchantments,

And mythical or fanciful beings.

In most cultures,

There's no clear line separating myth from folk or fairy tale.

All these together form the literature of pre-literate societies.

Fairy tales may be distinguished from other folk narratives,

Such as legends,

Which generally involve belief in the veracity of the events described,

And explicit moral tales,

Including beast fables.

Prevalent elements include dragons,

Dwarfs,

Elves,

Fairies,

Giants,

Gnomes,

Goblins,

Griffins,

Merfolk,

Monsters,

Monarchy,

Pixies,

Talking animals,

Trolls,

Unicorns,

Witches,

Wizards,

Magic,

And enchantments.

In less technical contexts,

The term is also used to describe something blessed with unusual happiness,

As in fairy tale ending,

A happy ending,

Or fairy tale romance.

Colloquially,

The term fairy tale or fairy story can also mean any far-fetched story or tall tale.

It is used especially to describe any story that not only is not true,

But also could not possibly be true.

Legends are perceived as real within their culture.

Fairy tales may merge into legends,

Where the narrative is perceived both by teller and hearers as being grounded in historical truth.

However,

Unlike legends and epics,

Fairy tales usually do not contain more than superficial references to religion,

And to actual places,

People,

And events.

They take place once upon a time,

Rather than in actual times.

Fairy tales occur both in oral and in literary form,

Literary fairy tale.

The name fairy tale,

Con de fée in French,

Was first described to them by Madame Delmois in the late 17th century.

Many of today's fairy tales have evolved from centuries-old stories that have appeared with variations in multiple cultures around the world.

The history of the fairy tale is particularly difficult to trace,

Because often only the literary forms survive.

Still,

According to the researchers at universities in Durham and Lisbon,

Such stories may date back thousands of years,

Some to the Bronze Age.

Fairy tales and works derived from fairy tales are still written today.

Folklorists have classified fairy tales in various ways.

The Arne-Thomson-Usser index and the morphological analysis of Vladimir Propp are among the most notable.

Other folklorists have interpreted the tales' significance,

But no school has been definitively established for the meaning of the tales.

Some folklorists prefer to use the German term Märchen or Wondertale to refer to the genre rather than fairy tale,

A practice given weight by the definition of Thomson in his 1977 edition of The Folktale.

A tale of some length involving a succession of motifs or episodes.

It moves in an unreal world,

Without definite locality or definite creatures,

And is filled with the marvelous.

In his Never-Neverland,

Humble heroes kill adversaries,

Succeed to kingdoms,

And marry princesses.

The characters and motifs of fairy tales are simple and archetypal.

Princesses and goose girls,

Youngest sons and gallant princes,

Ogres,

Giants,

Dragons,

And trolls,

Wicked stepmothers and false heroes,

Fairy godmothers and other magical helpers,

Often talking horses or foxes or birds,

Glass mountains,

And prohibitions and breaking of prohibitions.

Although the fairy tale is a distinct genre within the larger category of folktale,

The definition that marks a work as a fairy tale is a source of considerable dispute.

The term itself comes from the translation of Madame Donois' Conde Fée,

First used in her collection in 1697.

Common parlance conflates fairy tales with beast fables and other folktales,

And scholars differ on the degree to which the presence of fairies and or similar mythical beings,

E.

G.

Elves,

Goblins,

Trolls,

Giants,

Huge monsters,

Or mermaids,

Should be taken as a differentiator.

Vladimir Propp,

In his Morphology of the Folktale,

Criticized the common distinction between fairy tales and animal tales,

On the grounds that many tales contained both fantastic elements and animals.

Nevertheless,

To select works for his analysis,

Propp used all Russian folktales classified as a folklore Arne-Thompson-Uther Index 300-749,

In a cataloging system that made such a distinction to gain a clear set of tales.

His own analysis identified fairy tales by their plot elements,

But that in itself has been criticized,

As the analysis does not lend itself easily to tales that do not involve a quest.

And furthermore,

The same plot elements are found in non-fairy tale works.

Where I asked,

What is a fairy tale?

I should reply,

Read Undine.

That is a fairy tale.

Of all fairy tales I know,

I think Undine the most beautiful.

George MacDonald,

The Fantastic Imagination As Stith-Thompson points out,

Talking animals and the presence of magic seem to be more common to the fairy tales than fairies themselves.

However,

The mere presence of animals that talk does not make a tale a fairy tale,

Especially when the animal is clearly a mask on a human face,

As in fables.

In his essay on fairy stories,

J.

R.

R.

Tolkien agreed with the exclusion of fairies from the definition,

Defining fairy tales as stories about the adventures of men and fairy,

The land of fairies,

Fairy tale princes and princesses,

Dwarves,

Elves,

And not only other magical species,

But many other marvels.

However,

The same essay excludes tales that are often considered fairy tales,

Citing as an example,

The Monkey's Heart,

Which Andrew Lang included in The Lilac Fairy Book.

Stephen Swan Jones identified the presence of magic as the feature by which fairy tales can be distinguished from other sorts of folk tales.

David Zinn and Chowdhury identified transformation as a key feature of the genre.

From a psychological point of view,

Jean Chiriac argued for the necessity of the fantastic in these narratives.

In terms of aesthetic values,

Italo Calvino cited the fairy tale as a prime example of quickness in literature.

Because of the economy and concision of the tales.

Originally,

Stories that would contemporarily be considered fairy tales were not marked out as a separate genre.

The German term Märchen stems from the old German word Mär,

Which means news or tale.

The word Märchen is the diminutive of the word Mär.

Therefore,

It means a little story.

Together with the common beginning,

Once upon a time,

This tells us that a fairy tale or a Märchen was originally a little story from a long time ago,

When the world was still magic.

Indeed,

One less regular German opening is,

In the old times when wishing was still effective.

The French writers and adapters of the Cône de Faye genre often included fairies in their stories.

The genre name became fairy tale in English translation,

And gradually eclipsed the more general term folk tale that covered a wide variety of oral tales.

Jack Zipes also attributes this shift to challenging socio-political conditions in the 17th and 18th centuries that led to the trivialization of these stories by the upper classes.

Roots of the genre come from different oral stories passed down in European cultures.

The genre was first marked out by writers of the Renaissance,

Such as Giovanni Francesco Straparola and Giambattista Bessile,

And stabilized through the works of later collectors such as Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm.

In this evolution,

The name was coined when the prescios took up writing literary stories.

Adam Donoy invented the term Cône de Faye,

Or fairy tale,

In the late 17th century.

Before the addition of the genre fantasy,

Many works that would now be classified as fantasy were termed fairy tales,

Including Tolkien's The Hobbit,

George Orwell's Animal Farm,

And L.

Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.

Indeed,

Tolkien's On Fairy Stories includes discussions of world building and is considered a vital part of fantasy criticism.

Although fantasy,

Particularly the sub-genre of fairy tale fantasy,

Draws heavily on fairy tale motifs,

The genres are now regarded as distinct.

The fairy tale told orally is a subclass of the folktale.

Many writers have written in the form of the fairy tale.

These are the literary fairy tales,

Or kunschmerken.

The oldest forms,

From Panchatantra to the Pentamerone,

Show considerable reworking from the oral form.

The Grimm Brothers were among the first to try to preserve the features of oral tales.

Yet the stories printed under the Grimm name have been considerably reworked to fit the written form.

Literary fairy tales and oral fairy tales freely exchanged plots,

Motifs,

And elements with one another,

And with the tales of foreign lands.

The literary fairy tale came into fashion during the 17th century,

Developed by aristocratic women as a parlor game.

This,

In turn,

Helped to maintain the oral tradition.

According to Jack Zipes,

The subject matter of the conversations consisted of literature,

Mores,

Taste,

And etiquette,

Whereby the speakers all endeavored to portray ideal situations in the most effective oratorical style that would gradually have a major effect on literary forms.

Many 18th century folklorists attempted to recover the pure folktale,

Uncontaminated by literary versions.

Yet,

While oral fairy tales likely existed for thousands of years before the literary forms,

There is no pure folktale,

And each literary fairy tale draws on folk traditions,

If only in parody.

This makes it impossible to trace forms of transmission of a fairy tale.

Oral storytellers have been known to read literary fairy tales to increase their own stock of stories and treatments.

The oral tradition of the fairy tale came long before the written page.

Tales were told or enacted dramatically,

Rather than written down,

And handed down from generation to generation.

Because of this,

The history of their development is necessarily obscure and blurred.

Fairy tales appear now and again in written literature throughout literate cultures,

But it is unknown to what extent these reflect the actual folktales,

Even of their own time.

The stylistic evidence indicates that these,

In many later collections,

Reworked folktales into literary forms.

What they do show is that the fairy tale has ancient roots,

Older than the Arabian Nights collection of magical tales compiled circa 1500 AD,

Such as Vikram and the Vampire,

And Belle and the Dragon.

Besides such collections and individual tales,

In China Taoist philosophers,

Such as Liezhu and Zhuangzhu,

Recounted fairy tales in their philosophical works.

In the broader definition of the genre,

The first famous western fairy tales are those of Aesop,

6th century BC,

In ancient Greece.

Scholarship points out that medieval literature contains early versions,

Or predecessors of later known tales and motifs,

Such as The Grateful Dead,

The Bird Lover,

Or The Quest of the Lost Wife.

Recognizable folktales have also been reworked as the plot of folk literature and oral epics.

Jack Zipes writes in When Dreams Came True,

There are fairy tale elements in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales,

Edmund Spenser's The Fairy Queen,

And in many William Shakespeare plays.

King Lear can be considered a literary variant of fairy tales,

Such as Water and Salt,

And Cap O'Rush's.

The tale itself resurfaced in western literature in the 16th and 17th centuries,

The Facetious Nights of Sraparola by Giovanni Francesco Sraparola,

Italy,

1550 and 1553,

Which contains many fairy tales in its inset tales,

And the Neapolitan tales of Giambattista Basile,

Naples,

1634-36,

Which are all fairy tales.

Carlo Gozzi made use of many fairy tale motifs among his Comedia dell'arte scenarios,

Including among them one based on The Love for Three Oranges,

1761.

Simultaneously,

Pu Sung Ling,

In China,

Included many fairy tales in his collection,

Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio,

Published posthumously,

1766,

Which has been described by Yukon Fujita of Keio University as having a reputation as the most outstanding short story collection.

The fairy tale itself became popular among the presciuses of the upper class of France,

1690-1710,

And among the tales told in that time were the ones of Le Faultin and the Conte of Charles Perrault,

1697,

Who fixed the forms of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella.

Although Sraparola's,

Basile's,

And Perrault's collections contain the oldest known forms of various fairy tales,

On the stylistic evidence,

All the writers rewrote the tales for literary effect.

In the mid-17th century,

A vogue for magical tales emerged among the intellectuals who frequented the salons of Paris.

These salons were regular gatherings hosted by prominent aristocratic women,

Where women and men could gather together to discuss the issues of the day.

In the 1630s,

Aristocratic women began to gather in their own living rooms,

Salons,

To discuss the topics of their choice,

Arts and letters,

Politics,

And social matters of immediate concern to the women of their class.

Marriage,

Love,

Financial and physical independence,

And access to education.

This was a time when women were barred from receiving a formal education.

Some of the most gifted women writers of the period came out of these early salons,

Such as Madeleine de Scuderi and Madame de Lafayette,

Which encouraged women's independence and pushed against the gender barriers that defined their lives.

The salonnières argued particularly for love and intellectual compatibility between the sexes,

Opposing the system of arranged marriages.

Sometime in the middle of the 17th century,

A passion for the conversational parlor game based on the plots of old folktales swept through the salons.

Each salonnière was called upon to retell an old tale or rework an old theme,

Spinning clever new stories that not only showcased verbal agility and imagination,

But also slyly commented on the conditions of aristocratic life.

Great emphasis was placed on a mode of delivery that seemed natural and spontaneous.

The decorative language of the fairy tales served an important function,

Disguising and rebellious subtext of the stories and sliding them past the court censors.

Critiques of court life,

And even of the king,

Were embedded in extravagant tales and in dark,

Sharply dystopian ones.

Not surprisingly,

The tales by women often featured young but clever aristocratic girls,

Whose lives were controlled by the arbitrary whims of fathers,

Kings,

And elderly wicked fairies,

As well as tales in which groups of wise fairies,

I.

E.

Intelligent,

Independent women,

Stepped in and put all to rights.

The Salon Tales,

As they were originally written and published,

Have been preserved in a monumental work called Le Cabinet des Fées,

An enormous collection of stories from the 17th and 18th centuries.

The first collectors to attempt to preserve not only the plot and characters of the tale,

But also the style in which they were told,

Was the French artist,

The Brothers Grimm,

Collecting German fairy tales.

Ironically,

This meant,

Although their first edition,

1812 and 1815,

Remains a treasure for folklorists,

They rewrote the tales in later editions to make them more acceptable,

Which ensured their sales and the popularity of their work.

Such literary forms did not merely draw from the folktale,

But also influence folktales in turn.

The Brothers Grimm rejected several tales for their collection,

Though told orally to them by Germans,

Because the tales derived from Perrault,

And they concluded they were thereby French and not German tales.

An oral version of Bluebeard was thus rejected.

And the tale of Little Briar Rose,

Clearly related to Perrault's Sleeping Beauty,

Was included only because Jacob Grimm convinced his brothers that the figure of Brinhilde,

From much earlier Norse mythology,

Proved that the Sleeping Princess was authentically Germanic folklore.

This consideration of whether to keep Sleeping Beauty reflected a belief common among folklorists of the 19th century,

That the folk tradition preserved fairy tales in forms from prehistory,

Except when contaminated by such literary forms,

Leading people to tell inauthentic tales.

The rural,

Illiterate,

And uneducated peasants,

If suitably isolated,

Were the folk and would tell pure folktales.

Sometimes they regarded fairy tales as a form of fossil,

The remnants of a once-perfect tale.

However,

Further research was concluded that fairy tales never had a fixed form,

And regardless of literary influence,

The tellers constantly altered them for their own purposes.

The work of the brothers Grimm influenced other collectors,

Both inspiring them to collect tales and leading them to similarly believe in a spirit of romantic nationalism,

That the fairy tales of a country were particularly representative of it,

To the neglect of cross-cultural influence.

Among those influenced were the Russian Alexander Afanasov,

First published in 1866,

The Norwegians Petter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jürgen Møe,

First published in 1845,

The Romanian Petra Ispirescu,

First published in 1874,

The English Joseph Jacobs,

First published in 1890,

And Jeremiah Curtin,

An American who collected Irish tales,

First published in 1890.

Ethnographers collected fairy tales throughout the world,

Finding similar tales in Africa,

The Americas,

And Australia.

Andrew Lang was able to draw on not only the written tales of Europe and Asia,

But those collected by ethnographers,

To fill his Colored Fairy Books series.

They also encouraged other collectors of fairy tales,

As when Yeh Theodora Ozaki created a collection,

Japanese Fairy Tales 1908,

After encouragement from Lang.

Simultaneously,

Writers such as Hans Christian Andersen and George MacDonald,

Continued the tradition of literary fairy tales.

Andersen's work sometimes drew on old folk tales,

But more often deployed fairy tale motifs and plots in new tales.

MacDonald incorporated fairy tale motifs both in new literary fairy tales,

Such as The Light Princess,

And in works of the genre that would become fantasy,

As in The Princess and the Goblin or Lilith.

Originally,

Adults were the audience of a fairy tale,

Just as often as children.

Literary fairy tales appeared in works intended for adults,

But in the 19th and 20th centuries,

The fairy tale became associated with children's literature.

The prescius,

Including Madame de Moix,

Intended their works for adults,

But regarded their source as the tales that servants or other women of lower class would tell to children.

Indeed,

A novel of that time,

Depicting a countess's suitor offering to tell such a tale,

Has the countess exclaiming that she loves fairy tales,

As if she were still a child.

Among the late presciuses,

Jean-Maurice Le Prince de Beaumont redacted a version of Beauty and the Beast for children,

And it is her tale that is best known today.

The Brothers Grimm titled their collection Children's and Household Tales,

And rewrote their tales after complaints that they were not suitable for children.

In the modern era,

Fairy tales were altered so that they could be read to children.

The moralizing strain in the Victorian era altered the classical tales to teach lessons,

As when George Cruikshank rewrote Cinderella in 1854 to contain temperance themes.

His acquaintance,

Charles Dickens,

Protested,

In an utilitarian age,

Of all other times,

It is a matter of grave importance that fairy tales should be respected.

Psychoanalysts such as Bruno Bettelheim,

Who regarded the cruelty of older fairy tales as indicative of psychological conflicts,

Strongly criticized this expurgation,

Because it weakened their usefulness to both children and adults as ways of symbolically resolving issues.

Fairy tales do teach children how to deal with difficult times.

To quote Rebecca Walters,

Fairy tales and folktales are part of the cultural conserve that can be used to address children's fears,

And give them some role training in an approach that honors a children's window of tolerance.

These fairy tales teach children how to deal with certain social situations,

And helps them define their place in society.

Fairy tales teach children other important lessons too.

For example,

Zinzani et al.

Carried out a study on children to determine the benefits of fairy tales.

Parents of the children who took part in the study found that fairy tales,

Especially the color in them,

Triggered their child's imagination as they read them.

Jungian analyst and fairy tale scholar,

Marie-Louise von Franz,

Interprets fairy tales based on Jung's view of fairy tales as a spontaneous and naive product of soul,

Which can only express what soul is.

That means she looks at fairy tales as images of different phases of experiencing the reality of the soul.

They are the purest and simplest expression of collective unconscious psychic processes,

And they represent the archetypes in their simplest,

Barest,

And most concise form,

Because they are less overlaid with conscious material than myths and legends.

In this pure form,

The archetypal images afford us the best clues to the understanding of the processes going on in the collective psyche.

The fairy tale itself is its own best explanation.

That is,

Its meaning is contained in the totality of its motifs connected by the threads of the story.

Every fairy tale is a relatively closed system compounding one essential psychological meaning which is expressed in a series of symbolical pictures and events and is discoverable in these.

I have come to the conclusion that all fairy tales endeavor to describe one and the same psychic fact,

But a fact so complex and far-reaching and so difficult for us to realize in all its different aspects,

That hundreds of tales and thousands of repetitions with a musician's variation are needed until this unknown fact is delivered into consciousness,

And even then the theme is not exhausted.

This unknown fact is what Jung calls the self,

Which is the psychic reality of the collective unconscious.

Every archetype is in its essence only one aspect of the collective unconscious,

As well as always representing also the whole collective unconscious.

Other famous people commented on the importance of fairy tales,

Especially for children.

For example,

G.

K.

Chesterton argued that fairy tales then are not responsible for producing in children fear or any of the shapes of fear.

Fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly.

That is in the child already,

Because it is in the world already.

Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey,

But fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey.

The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination.

What the fairy tale provides for him is a Saint George to kill the dragon.

Albert Einstein once showed how important he believed fairy tales were for children's intelligence in the quote,

If you want your children to be intelligent,

Read them fairy tales.

If you want them to be more intelligent,

Read them more fairy tales.

The adaptation of fairy tales for children continues.

While Disney's influential Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was largely,

Although certainly not solely,

Intended for the children's market,

The anime magical princess Minky Momo draws on the fairy tale Momotaro.

Jack Zipes has spent many years working to make the older traditional stories accessible to modern readers and their children.

Reviews

Thank you, Benjamin! It was nice to drift off listening to this. 😻😻

I thought that this podcast would be very boring, but it was fascinating! However, I didn't hear much, thank you! 💤💤💤

Delightfully boring. I didn’t last long so I’ll be listening again.