ABSTRACT
This chapter examines difficult entry of fairy tales and folktales into the canon of children’s literature in the Dutch-speaking countries. It highlights their presumed educational value and adaptation as crucial factors. The popularity of fairy tales with young Dutch readers is undisputed. Beets’ fictional narrator Crito stresses the didactic value of the Grimms’ fairy tales, in so doing challenging the conventional opposition between reason and fantasy. Children’s eagerness to hear the same tales time and again, he argues, helps to convey their moral lessons the entire better. The inclusion of internationally renowned fairy tales in children’s literature continued to provoke debate after the nineteenth century. While Disney and the Efteling helped to maintain the position of fairy-tale classics as part of children’s literature, the Dutch fairy-tale tradition received new impulses in the postwar period in the form of parodies and new literary tales.
