MarytaleThe three names on almost every shelf of fairy tales did three different things, and none of them was quite what people assume.
The Brothers Grimm collected
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were scholars of language. They did not invent a single one of the tales in their book: they went round Hesse and Westphalia from about 1806 writing down what people told them, and published the first volume in 1812 as a work of research.
They also kept editing it. Between the first edition and the seventh, the language got smoother, the mothers in several tales became stepmothers, and some endings softened. So even «the Grimm version» is a moving target — and the earliest editions are noticeably harder than the ones most people have read.
Their names are on Snow White, Rapunzel, Hansel and Gretel, Rumpelstiltskin, the Bremen town musicians and about two hundred more.
Hans Christian Andersen wrote
Andersen is the odd one out. He was a Danish author who sat down and wrote his tales, in the eighteen-thirties and forties, and they are his the way a novel is somebody's.
You can tell from the endings. Folk tales end with the pattern completed; Andersen's end with a decision. The little mermaid throws the knife into the sea and lets the prince be happy, and the story is about her choice rather than about him. The little match girl is not rescued.
He also never gave the little mermaid a name, which is worth knowing before a child asks.
Charles Perrault rewrote for a court
Perrault published in Paris in 1697, a hundred years before the Grimms, and he was not collecting — he was taking tales that were already circulating and turning them into polished pieces for the reading public of Louis XIV's France.
That is where the fairy godmother, the pumpkin coach and the midnight rule come from; the Grimm Cinderella has none of them. Perrault also added rhymed morals at the end of each tale, which reads today like a man explaining a joke.
His are Cinderella as most people know her, Puss in Boots, Sleeping Beauty and Little Red Riding Hood — the last of which he ends with the wolf winning.
And the ones with no author at all
Jack and the Beanstalk, The Three Little Pigs, Goldilocks and the Three Bears and the Gingerbread Man have no author in any useful sense. They were English and American folk tales, printed in the eighteen hundreds by collectors like Joseph Jacobs, and the printed versions are simply the tellings that happened to get written down.
We have written all of these again in our own words, following the written-down plots rather than the film versions. Where the famous version and the recorded version disagree, we have gone with the recorded one — which is why our Cinderella has a hazel tree and no fairy godmother.
Tale by tale: who wrote what
**Cinderella** — Perrault, 1697, and the Grimms, 1812. Two different stories. Perrault gives her the fairy godmother, the pumpkin and midnight; the Grimms give her a hazel tree on her mother's grave and no deadline at all. Older relatives of the story have been found in ninth-century China.
**Snow White** — the Brothers Grimm, 1812, collected rather than written. The queen's death in the earliest edition is worse than in the later ones, and it was Snow White's own mother before the Grimms changed her to a stepmother.
**Little Red Riding Hood** — Perrault first, in 1697, and he ends it with the wolf winning and nobody rescued. The huntsman arrives only a century later, with the Grimms.
**Sleeping Beauty** — Perrault, though he took it from Basile's Italian version of 1634, which is considerably darker and does not involve a kiss.
**The Little Mermaid** and **The Ugly Duckling** — Hans Christian Andersen, 1837 and 1843. His own, invented, not collected.
**Rapunzel**, **Hansel and Gretel**, **Rumpelstiltskin**, **The Bremen Town Musicians** — the Grimms, collected in Hesse and Westphalia.
**Pinocchio** — Carlo Collodi, serialised in Italy from 1881. A novel, not a fairy tale, and the puppet is far less likeable than the film suggests.
**Jack and the Beanstalk**, **The Three Little Pigs**, **Goldilocks** — no author. English folk tales, printed by Joseph Jacobs in the 1890s.
Why the answer is so often «two people»
Almost every famous tale was told before it was written, and then written more than once. So «who wrote it» has the shape of a trick question: somebody wrote the version you know, and somebody else wrote an older one that reads differently.
This matters for reading aloud. A child who has met Cinderella through a film and then hears the tree and the pigeons will object, and the honest answer is that both are real — one was written in France in 1697 and one in Germany in 1812, and neither is the first telling, because there is no first telling to find.