Once Upon a Time

This fascinating book, as the title might suggest, is a short history of the fairy tale. The author begins by defining its various characteristics before embarking on their history and the relationship of the genre to oral and popular traditions. She evokes the various scenarios and processes embodied in the fairy tale and its relationship to real life. The publication of Grimm's collection in 1812 was a landmark event consisting of 86 stories and published in an edition of 600 with a huge apparatus of notes running to hundreds of pages. It was designed to affirm emerging German identity, which meant that some stories from other origins had to be removed by the time the final Standard Edition appeared in 1857 with 210 tales. Interestingly, it is the most widely translated work in the world after the Bible and the Koran, rendered into more than 160 languages. One interesting chapter considers the views of Bruno Bettelheim with his psychoanalytic interpretation of these tales that have since appeared as cinema and even dance. In the epilogue, the author quotes Paula Fox as asking her grandmother about the difference between a story and a lie, to which her reply is that a lie hides the truth, a story tries to find it - a fitting epitaph to the power of fairy tales.