MarytaleA folk tale is a story that came down by word of mouth. Nobody wrote it; people told it, each teller changing it a little, until at some point somebody printed a version and that version got called the story.
The word describes where a tale came from, not what shape it is. Fables are usually folk tales. Most fairy tales are folk tales. Legends are folk tales tied to a place.
How you can tell
**There is no author, and the versions disagree.** If you can find three printed versions of a story that end differently, you are almost certainly looking at a folk tale. Nobody owns it, so nobody can be wrong about it.
**It repeats.** Things happen three times: three pigs, three bears, three billy goats. Repetition is how a story survives being carried in somebody's head — the pattern holds it together.
**The characters have jobs, not personalities.** The woodcutter, the youngest son, the old woman at the crossroads. Nobody is described, because description is the first thing a teller drops.
**Nothing is explained.** Why does the house belong to three bears? The story does not know and does not care.
Who wrote them down, and why that matters
The famous collectors were doing something new when they did it. The Brothers Grimm went round Hesse in the early eighteen-hundreds writing down what people told them, and published in 1812. In England, Joseph Jacobs did the same thing at the end of that century, which is where the printed Three Little Pigs and Jack and the Beanstalk come from.
Every collector changed things, and they said so. The Grimms smoothed the language and softened some endings between editions; Red Riding Hood is rescued in their version and is not rescued in Perrault's, which was written a hundred years earlier.
So when somebody says «the original version», they mean the oldest one that got printed — not the first one anybody told. For a folk tale there is no first telling to go back to, and that is not a gap in the record. It is what the word means.
Folk tale, fairy tale, legend, myth: what is the difference?
**Folk tale** is the widest word. It says the story was carried by word of mouth and has no author. Everything below can also be a folk tale.
**Fairy tale** describes the shape: magic is ordinary, the setting is nowhere in particular, and the story does not explain itself. Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel are fairy tales.
**Legend** is tied to a real place or a real person and is told as though it happened. The dragon lived under that hill, and the hill is still there. That claim to truth is what makes it a legend rather than a fairy tale.
**Myth** explains how something came to be — the world, the seasons, why the crow is black — and belongs to a system of belief rather than to an evening's entertainment.
The categories overlap, and arguing about which box a story goes in is less useful than noticing what the story is trying to do.
Why the same story turns up in twenty countries
Cinderella has been found in ninth-century China, in Egypt, and across Europe. The Three Little Pigs has relatives with goats and with geese. This is not coincidence and it is not mostly copying.
Part of it is travel: stories moved with traders, soldiers and servants, and a good one was worth carrying. Part of it is that a small number of shapes simply work — a weak character beats a strong one by being patient, a promise is broken and costs something, the youngest of three succeeds where the elders failed.
Folklorists gave the shapes numbers. The Aarne–Thompson–Uther index catalogues thousands of them, so that a Norwegian tale and a Korean one can be shown to be the same story wearing different clothes.
Reading folk tales to a child
Two things are worth knowing before you start. First, the endings are often harder than the ones you remember — wolves are cut open, stepsisters are punished, and the tellers saw no reason to protect anyone. Second, the versions differ, so a child who has met a story at nursery may firmly correct you, and both of you can be right.
That second point is worth using rather than smoothing over. «This teller ended it differently» is a true and interesting sentence, and it teaches something no fairy tale teaches directly: that a story can belong to everybody.
Our versions are retold from the public-domain printed sources, and where a well-known tale has two endings, the story page says which one we followed and why.