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Fairy tale

A fairy tale is a story,either told to children or as if told to children, concerning the adventures of mythical characters such as: fairies, goblins, elves, trolls, giants and others. These stories often involve princes and princesses and modern versions normally have a happy ending. Often, fairy tales are disguised morality tales. This is true for the Brothers Grimm Fairy Tale Collection, and many of the drily witty, dead-pan social criticism beneath the surface of Hans Christian Andersen's tales, which influence Roald Dahl. The fairy tale has ancient roots, older than the "Arabian Nights" collection in antiquity: Cup and Psyche, Bel and the Dragon. Fairy tales resurfaced in literature in the Contes of Charles Perrault, who fixed the form of Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella. An extensive collection of European fairy tales were published by Andrew Lang in a series of books: The Red Fairy Book, The Orange Fairy Book, and so forth. These provide some excellent examples of the genre. Some have also classed the Middle Eastern tales from 1001 Arabian Nights as fairy tales. According to a 2004 poll of 1,200 childen by UCI Cinemas, the most popular fairy tales are:\n# Cinderella\n# Sleeping Beauty\n# Hansel and Gretel\n# Rapunzel\n# Little Red Riding Hood The fairy tale is a sub-class of the more general folktale.
Fairy tales are more than true -\n:not because they tell us dragons exist,\n:but because they tell us dragons can be beaten.
G. K. Chesterton

Table of contents
1 See also
2 External links and references
3 Reference

See also

\n* List of fairy tales\n* Vladimir Propp\n* fantasy

External links and references

\n* Fairy Book collections edited by Andrew Lang, from
Project Gutenberg\n**Blue Fairy Book\n**Orange Fairy Book\n**Red Fairy Book\n**Brown Fairy Book\n**Crimson Fairy Book\n**Violet Fairy Book\n**Yellow Fairy Book\n**Lilac Fairy Book\n*Grimm's Fairy Tales from Project Gutenberg\n*Andersen's Fairy Tales from Project Gutenberg\n*D.L. Ashliman's Grimm Brothers website

Reference

\n* Antti Aarne and Stith Thompson: The Types of the Folktale: A Classification and Bibliography (Helsinki, 1961) \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

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