Fairy Tales
Myths, legends, tall tales, fables, and folktales sometimes mistakenly receive the appellation of fairy tale. Fables point to a moral or lesson, something fairy tales rarely do. Legends and myths often have a strong connection to specific places and religions, while fairy tales take place in the land of once upon a time. Tall tales feature prodigious acts by humans, but no supernatural force is implied.
Fairy tales, on the other hand, contain enchantment, most often deriving from either the explicit or at least implied presence of magical beings. These magical beings may include talking animals, witches, elves, trolls or gnomes, and on occasion actual fairies. Older fairy tales, unlike the modern Disney versions, do not necessarily end happily. The notion of a fairy godmother or a good fairy who makes things come out alright often hides an original, darker tale.
In some early versions of the Cinderella story, it is not a fairy godmother who aids the heroine, but the ghost of the girl’s dead mother who was killed by the evil stepmother. In some versions of the tale, Cinderella kills the stepmother. Another famous fairy tale featuring a benevolent fairy is Sleeping Beauty. In the best known modern versions of this tale, a good fairy offers a way of twisting the bad fairy’s curse of the pinpricked finger and hundred years of sleep into a happy ending with true love’s kiss awakening the sleeping princess. In some earlier telling, Sleeping Beauty is awakened not by a prince’s kiss but by her twin infants—she has been impregnated by the prince while under the sleeping spell and subsequently given birth. The prince who fathered the children already has a wife who tries to kill Sleeping Beauty. The somewhat questionable happy ending of this version of the story has Sleeping Beauty triumphing over the first wife to marry the real prince responsible for her conceiving while in a coma.
In both instances, the good fairy figure in a later version of a story masks an original plot containing sadness and/or violence in an earlier incarnation of the same tale. The use of fairies to prettify harsher tales carries a strong note of irony. Real fairy lore, stories passed down through generations about actual people interacting with fairies, shows fairies in a very different light. Rather than existing to gratify human wishes and right wrongs, fairies tend to have their own entirely separate agenda from humans.
