The first fairy stories were never intended for children

Stories are fundamental to humanity and no one can guess how far back they go — long before they were first recorded, no doubt. As Thomas Mann says at the beginning of Joseph and his Brothers:

The further down into the lower world of the past we probe and press, the more do we find that the earliest foundations of humanity, its history and culture, reveal themselves unfathomable.

The existence in different cultures and remote places of tales similar to Cinderella, for instance, suggests ur-stories, common ancestors millennia old.

There is no accessing those original folk tales. All we can say is that they were already very deep-rooted when they first appeared in recorded culture. The routes by which they did so vary in nature and, apparently, in authority. Some have reached us through the sober investigations of anthropologists; some by discreditable means, through imaginative fakers, claiming their work as antique and quickly finding that spurious invention had the capacity for unbudge-able archetype. The story of Ali Baba, which seems to have been passed off as ancient by an 18th-century Syrian adventurer called Hanna Diyab, is one thing; the story of the Sleeping Beauty, already old when it started to make itself apparent in the Volsunga saga around 1000, is another. The only conclusion is that they both stuck, despite very different origins, because they correspond to some deep need in the human condition.

Nicholas Jubber has written an interesting book about seven figures who brought the folk tale, or fairy tale as it is often called, to the attention of a literate public. Behind them lies a long oral history, about which we can only speculate. No one can doubt that each of them was approaching the material in very different ways, nor that they were handling what is basically the same material.