Fairy Tales, Revisited

The talking animals, witches, clever princesses and questing knights of fairy tales are often our first exposure to literature. These stories we absorb in childhood serve as our entry into the world of the imagination, providing in the process models for our understanding of the human experience: love, ambition, fear, compassion, justice. It's on this theme that some may fault the fairy tale: aren't its heroines too passive and its view of our choices too limiting? Don't fairy tales present too easy a distinction between good and evil? And shouldn't we outgrow fairy tales?

Fairy tales are far more varied in their perspectives than most assume. Certainly domesticated daughters and young men seeking their fortunes abound in early tales, but many young women go journeying into the world, as well. Consider the wife in the German tale "The Nixy" who, in order to save her husband, travels to seek the advice of a wise woman whom she learns of in a dream. In the Norwegian story "East of the Sun, West of the Moon," a young woman journeys to the four corners of the world, asking the help of each of the four winds to find her stolen beloved. And romantic love isn't the only motive for these female quests: consider the heroine of the Grimms' tale "Fitcher's Bird" who endangers herself to save her sisters or Marie-Catherine D'Aulnoy's "Belle-Belle," who dresses as a soldier to fill her father's place in the king's army. Delving into the broader body of fairy tales uncovers a more complex range of potential actions and relationships than is credited in the popular perception.

Aren't fairy tales just for children? J.R.R. Tolkien famously argued against this assumption in his essay "On Fairy Stories" (1947). We link fairy tales with childhood, he argues, because of "an accident of our domestic history" that conflated streamlined forms of narrative with a lack of sophistication, fantasy with frivolity. Instead, Tolkien argues, adults can find in fairy tales a clarity of symbol, the surprise of rediscovering the magic at the core of ordinary things: "It was in fairy stories," he says, "that I first divined the potency of the words, and the wonder of the things, such as stone and wood and iron; tree and grass; house and fire; bread and wine."* And the more we understand these early forms of story, the more we recognize the way fairy tales persist, both directly and subtly, in the contemporary imagination. For instance, a key element of a tale type known as "The Magic Flight" depicts a hero (or heroine) fleeing from a powerful enemy and evading capture by throwing down magical objects -- a comb that turns into a forest, salt that transforms into a mountain; these objects delay and eventually defeat the pursuer. Remember this model the next time you watch a movie with a car chase sequence: that formula of a pursuit punctuated by escalating obstacles has its roots in a much older thrill ride.

All of the material on this site was generated by University of West Georgia English majors enrolled in English 4384, a senior capstone course in which students explore and conduct research related to a particular course theme -- in this case, the evolution of fairy tale models from the first collectors of tales in their written forms to contemporary reinterpretations of traditional motifs. Our discussions began by exploring the motives that drove early collectors like Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm: what purpose did they think fairy tales served as part of moral education or as indicators of national character? How did they choose which tales to preserve or revise, and how did later generations of collectors further adapt it's not stories to fit then-current social standards and perceptions of childhood? Differences across collectors and cultures point to conscious choices made for specific audiences. In the Grimms' first version of "Hansel and Gretel," for instance, it is the children’s mother, not an evil stepmother, who wants to get rid of them. Yet the "evil stepmother" is such a central element of our understanding of “fairy tale” that it may come as a surprise that the Grimms consciously altered their initial version to make the tale less frightening for children: it's not Mama who wants to kill you. Class discussions combined elements of folklore studies -- identifying motifs and engaging in cross-cultural analysis of particular tale forms -- with literary research and interpretation as students moved into their own projects. Students discussed theoretical questions raised by a variety of contemporary scholars of the fairy tale including Jack Zipes, Maria Tatar and Marina Warner, and they made use of significant digital repositories including D.L. Ashliman's Folklore and Mythology Electronic Texts and Heidi Heiner's Sur La Lune Fairy Tales. This site contains selected work from students who took the course in Spring 2025 and Spring 2026 and will be expanded as I work with future classes. 

Fairy Tales, Revisited is divided into two main segments. The first focuses on specific tale types as defined by the ATU classification system. The work in this section explains the key characteristics of specific story types by comparing traditional versions primarily from Europe, but with examples from Asia, South America and Africa, as well. The second section of the site provides introductions to students' independent research projects, whose subjects range from popular and literary fiction to film, television, music and anime. This work both unearths the complexity of earlier traditions and reveals the continued resonances of these early literary forms in the present moment.

--Maria Doyle, Ph. D.

*Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy Stories.” The Monster and the Critics and Other Essays, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1984, 130, 147.