Facts

The Grimm brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm, did not invent fairy tales, but instead collected stories from different sources (more than half from upper-class French women) and edited them to promote a strong, unified German culture in a time of French domination.

It isn’t clear who actually coined the term “fairy tale.” Madame d’Aulnoy was particularly influential with her book, Contes des Fées (Tales of Fairies), even though the term had been used by literary critics to describe her previous works. Although it didn’t exist as such by the time Charles Perrault (author of Cinderella and other tales) published his stories, he referred to his own as “contes d’ogres et de fées” (tales of ogres and fairies). “Fairy tale” was thus a gradual linguistic development rather than a sudden invention by a single author.