Tell a Fairy Tale Day

What the day is

Tell a Fairy Tale Day is observed on February 26. The instruction is to tell one aloud, which is how the form existed for most of its life.

Origin and background

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm did not write their tales. They were philologists collecting oral material in the early nineteenth century, and their interest was partly linguistic and partly nationalist, gathering what they took to be the authentic voice of German-speaking people. Their sources were not peasants in cottages, as the romantic version has it, but largely educated middle-class acquaintances, several of them women of French Huguenot descent whose repertoire included material circulating across Europe.

The more revealing fact is what happened across editions. The Grimms revised the collection repeatedly over decades, and the direction of travel was consistently toward the nursery: sexual content removed, cruel mothers reassigned as stepmothers, religious sentiment added, prose smoothed into a literary register. The first edition of 1812 is markedly harsher than the familiar later ones. The stories most people think of as timeless are the product of sustained editorial softening, and Disney later applied another layer of the same process.

Folklorists studying the tales have found families of them spread across enormous distances, with recognizable versions of the same plot appearing from Europe to Asia. Attempts to trace their age using techniques borrowed from evolutionary biology have suggested some may be thousands of years old, far older than any written record of them, though those methods remain debated.

Telling rather than reading changes the thing itself. A told story adjusts to its listener, which is what kept these tales alive and is exactly what printing froze.

How to take part

• Tell one from memory rather than reading it, and let it come out wrong.
• Read a first-edition Grimm version and compare it with the one you know.
• Find the version of a familiar tale from another culture.
• Ask an older relative for a story they were told as a child.
• Let a child retell it back to you, changed.