History of Fairy Tales Timeline

Sometime in the middle of the 17th century, a passion for the conversational parlour game based on the plots of old folk tales swept through the salons, with conversations covering literature, mores, taste, and etiquette.

The fairy tale itself became popular among the précieuses of upper-class France (1690–1710), and among the tales told in that time were the ones of La Fontaine.

Madame d'Aulnoy invented the term Conte de fée, or fairy tale, in the late 17th century; the name was first ascribed to these tales by her, and the term comes from the translation of her Conte de fées.

Image source: Madame d'Aulnoy

Among the tales told in that era were the Contes of Charles Perrault (1697), who fixed the forms of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella.

Image source: Charles Perrault

Many 18th-century folklorists attempted to recover the 'pure' folktale, uncontaminated by literary versions, reflecting changing sociopolitical conditions that Jack Zipes says led to the trivialization of these stories by the upper classes.

Image source: Folklore studies

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.

Considerations over 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 pre-history except when 'contaminated' by literary forms, leading people to tell inauthentic tales.

Image source: Sleeping Beauty

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 Brothers Grimm, collecting German fairy tales; their first edition (1812 and 1815) remains a treasure for folklorists.

Image source: Grimms' Fairy Tales

Although their first edition remains a treasure for folklorists, the Brothers Grimm rewrote the tales in later editions to make them more acceptable, which ensured their sales and the later popularity of their work.

Among those influenced by the Grimm tradition were the Norwegians Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, whose collections were first published in 1845.

Image source: Peter Christen Asbjørnsen

The Russian Alexander Afanasyev, influenced by earlier collectors, first published his collection of Russian folk and fairy tales in 1866.

Image source: Alexander Afanasyev

The Romanian Petre Ispirescu first published his collection of Romanian fairy tales in 1874, part of the wave of national collectors inspired by the Grimms.

Image source: Petre Ispirescu

The English Joseph Jacobs first published his collection of English fairy tales in 1890, joining the international movement of folklore collectors.

Image source: Joseph Jacobs

Jeremiah Curtin, an American who collected Irish tales, first published his work in 1890, extending the collecting tradition across the Atlantic.

Image source: Jeremiah Curtin

Collectors encouraged other collectors of fairy tales, as when Yei Theodora Ozaki created a collection, Japanese Fairy Tales (1908), after encouragement from Lang.

Image source: Yei Theodora Ozaki

Ten volumes of tales (with extensive commentary) were collected by the author during 1959-1962 and 1972-1997 (volumes 1 to 7 in German, volumes 8 to 10 in English), mostly in Namibia.