ABSTRACT
“Fairy tale” means so many diverse—and sometimes opposed—things to its varied creators and audiences that a brief reconstruction of the context in which the term first appeared (in its French form, conte de fées) goes far to explain its many-sidedness. The earliest surviving stories known as fairy tales bear traces of both aristocratic salons and peasant huts, of both oral artistry and literary stylization. The dominant historic home media of the fairy tale—speech and writing—have inspired some retellers, analysts, and transformers to view the form primarily as an oral, folk phenomenon and others to see it, conversely, essentially as a stylized, literary creation. With examples drawn largely from the Grimms and Perrault, this chapter considers the spoken and the written word as equal and interactive forces in shaping the canon and core features by which fairy tales are now most often identified, imitated, and parodied. The chapter also presents a sketch of early folktale studies, surveys the scholarly assumptions underlying the Grimms’ collection and the creation of the international folktale indexes, compares the distinguishing and common traits of oral and literary tales, and devotes some attention to a third historic home medium of fairy tales: ritual.
