What are Fairy Tales ?

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At some point in our lives, most of us have heard about the ''real fairy tales.'' We know the Disney movie version, but we have been told that, somewhere, there is a book with the original Cinderella or Beauty and the Beast in it.

Usually, whoever tells us this is saying that Disney messed up the stories, or perhaps that fairy tales used to be very violent to scare children into obedience. However, the real tale about the ''real fairy tales'' is a little more complex than that.

The father of the fairy tale is the folk story. A folk story tells a tale created by a community over many generations and passed down orally.

A fairy tale is a folk story that has been written down and includes a wondrous element. Writing it down makes a big difference; when one person writes the story, he or she changes details to tell the tale his or her own way. Basically, folk tales don't have specific authors, but fairy tales do.

However, since folk tales spread across countries, a folk story might have been written down by any number of people in very different ways.

So, many versions of ''Cinderella'' were written all over Europe. Next time people tell you that Disney messed up the real fairy tale, you can let them know that there is no such thing as the original version of a fairy tale.

Plenty of folk tales don't become fairy tales when written. Some give birth to fables, and others become myths or epics. For a folk tale to become a fairy tale, it must have a wondrous element.

According to scholars like Vladimir Propp and Jack Zipes, the wondrous element is something supernatural that brings about transformation in a character's life.

More than 700 versions of Cinderella have been collected from around the world and it has appeared in almost every language. It is also the most popular pantomime on the British stage.

Early versions of the Goldilocks And The Three Bears story had three good-natured and trusting male bears, but over the years these have changed to a father bear, a mother bear and a baby bear.

The best-known version of Three Little Pigs is a 1933 Silly Symphony cartoon (above) produced by Walt Disney, starring Fifer Pig, Fiddler Pig and Practical Pig. The first two pigs get their houses blown down but escape from the wolf.

In some versions of Little Red Riding Hood the heroine is bringing grape juice and banana bread to her grandmother – in other words she is carrying wine and cake.

Folk tales about runaway food have been found in Germany, the UK and Russia, but the first version of The Gingerbread Man appeared in the American St Nicholas Magazine, with a childless old woman who bakes a gingerbread man.

He leaps from her oven and outruns all the farm workers and farm animals before being devoured by a fox.

In pantomime versions of Cinderella the ugly sisters started off being called Clorinda and Thisbe, but their names have constantly changed down the years to reflect the fashions of time, including Buttercup and Daisy, Euthanasia and Asphyxia, Alexis and Krystle and even Posh and Scary.

One of the earliest versions of Goldilocks And The Three Bears features a foul-mouthed old woman rather than a golden-haired young girl. In another, she ends up impaled on the steeple of St Paul's Cathedral.

Older versions of Jack The Giant Killer didn't feature the beanstalk, reflecting the medieval belief that giants were real and lived among men on Earth.

The version of Little Red Riding Hood by the Brothers Grimm has the wolf devouring the heroine and her grandmother. The huntsman rescues them by disembowelling the wolf and then sews rocks into its belly.

The Goldilocks Zone is the habitable region round a star where orbiting planets similar to the Earth can support liquid water – neither too hot, nor too cold. In 2010 astronomers found a 'Goldilocks planet' (Gliese 581g), which is about three times the size of Earth and lies in the habitable zone of its star.

Some early versions of Cinderella have one of the Ugly Sisters hacking her toes off to make the glass slipper fit her foot.

A wolf was not always the villain in early versions of Little Red Riding Hood – sometimes it was an ogre or werewolf.

The world's biggest gingerbread man was made in 2006 by the Smithville Area Chamber of Commerce in Texas at the town's annual Festival of Lights celebration. It weighed in at 1,308lb 8oz and stood at over 20ft in height.

Charles Dickens mentions a similar story to Goldilocks And The Three Bears in Our Mutual Friend published in 1865, but the house belongs to three hobgoblins rather than three bears.

In 2012 The Guardian ran an ad relating the tale of The Three Little Pigs in the style of modern news coverage, revealing that pigs had falsely accused the asthmatic wolf of blowing the house down when they were actually attempting insurance fraud.