Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: The Medieval Latin Past of Wonderful Lies

This book explores the links between tales preserved in Latin from the Middle Ages and ‘classic’ fairy tales from the collections of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen. When did fairy tales begin? What qualifies as a fairy tale? Is a true fairy tale oral or literary? Or is a fairy tale determined not by style but by content? To answer these and other questions, Jan M. Ziolkowski provides a comprehensive overview of the theoretical debates about fairy tale origins and includes an extensive discussion of the relationship of the fairy tale to both the written and oral sources. Ziolkowski offers interpretations of a sampling of the tales in order to sketch the complex connections that existed in the Middle Ages between oral folktales and their written equivalents, the variety of uses to which the writers applied the stories, and the diverse relationships between the medieval texts and the expressions of the same tales in the ‘classic’ fairy tale collections of the 19th century. In so doing, Ziolkowski explores stories that survive in versions associated with, on the one hand, such standards of the 19th-century fairy tale as the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen, and Carlo Collodi and, on the other, medieval Latin, demonstrating that the literary fairy tale owes a great debt to the Latin literature of the medieval period.