Introduction
Most traditional histories of fairy tales begin with an unlettered country folk that invents fairy tales and then passes them along by word of mouth from generation to generation. Somewhat less frequently, fairy tales have been presented as disintegrations of ancient myth, as the remains of paleolithic beliefs, as fictionalized remnants of elementary planetary observations, or as evidence of universal archetypes. Such explanations have resulted in a sense that fairy tales’ origins are elusive, a sense of elusiveness that has shaped grand narratives of the genre as well as references to fairy tales in books about history, literature (including children’s literature), psychology, and folklore. It has been said so often that the folk invented and disseminated fairy tales that this assumption has become an unquestioned proposition. It may therefore surprise readers that folk invention and transmission of fairy tales has no basis in verifiable fact. Literary analysis undermines it, literary history rejects it,
social history repudiates it, and publishing history (whether of manuscripts or of books) contradicts it.

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