By Rita Nicholson

It’s common in popular fairy tales for characters to resolve their troubles and find a happy ending. More often than not, that’s a lie. Many original versions of fairy tales have features that are darker and lesser known.

But what exactly is a fairy tale? In a translation of the Brothers Grimm story collection, Ken Mondschein writes that “a fairy tale is a form of folk tale—a traditional story that doesn’t have a definite author but belongs to everyone equally.” Fairy tales often, but not always, have a magical element, like characters such as witches, dwarves or actual fairies.

The Kennedy Center states that many fairy tales “were passed along by word-of-mouth.” The Grimm brothers were some of the first people to collect such stories into a literary form. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were born in Germany in respectively 1785 and 1786. Mondschein says that “before the brothers were out of their early teens, they had begun collecting notebooks of Märchen.” The Grimm brothers called their collection Märchen, which meant tales, or Kinder- und Hausmärchen (Children’s and House-Tales).