Fairy Tellers: A Journey into the Secret History of Fairy Tales

by Nicholas Jubber

"The general reader is unlikely to have met Mr. Jubber’s other subjects and may be amazed to learn the degree to which these unsung men and women have shaped the fairy-tale canon, an enthusiastic and enjoyable book—The Wall Street Journal

‘A carnival of a book, rigorously researched and jostling with life’
—Amy Jeffs, author of Storyland

Who were the Fairy Tellers?

In this far-ranging quest, award-winning author Nicholas Jubber unearths the lives of the dreamers who made our most beloved fairy tales: inventors, thieves, rebels and forgotten geniuses who gave us classic tales such as ‘Cinderella’, ‘Hansel and Gretel’, ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and ‘Baba Yaga’.

From the Middle Ages to the birth of modern children’s literature, they include a German apothecary’s daughter, a Syrian youth running away from a career in the souk and a Russian dissident embroiled in a plot to kill the tsar.

Following these and other unlikely protagonists, we travel from the steaming cities of Italy and the Levant, under the dark branches of the Black Forest, deep into the tundra of Siberia and across the snowy fells of Lapland. In the process, we discover a fresh perspective on some of our most frequently told stories. Filled with adventure, tragedy and real-world magic, this bewitching book uncovers the stranger lives behind the strangest of tales.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Folklore, Fairy Tales, Books About Books, Mythology, Biography

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 20, 2022

About the author

I'm a writer and traveller, with a passion for history and a pair of itchy feet. I'm fascinated by storytelling, nomadism, exploration and the connections (or misconnections!) between past and present.

I've written four books so far. My latest is Epic Continent, about some of Europe's iconic tales and my adventures amongst them.

Before that was The Timbuktu School for Nomads, about my experiences amongst nomads in North Africa.

The Prester Quest, my first book, sets out from the canals of Venice to the highlands of Ethiopia, following the mission of a medieval physician sent in search of a mythical priest-king. It won the Dolman Travel Book Award.

My second book, Drinking Arak off an Ayatollah's Beard, explores the Persian-speaking world through the lens of an 11th century epic poem, travelling from Tehran to the tomb of a medieval Sultan in Afghanistan.

I have written for The Guardian, The Observer, the TLS, the Globe and Mail and BBC Online, amongst other publications; spoken on BBC Radio 4 and NPR in the US; and have written plays performed at the Edinburgh Festival, the Finborough Theatre and the Actors' Centre.

Reviews

[Marquise · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are many books analysing fairy tales, but not many about the people who tell them. Not simply those that collect and classify them like the Grimms or Perrault, but the tellers of original tales, who as the title signals, are the subject of this book.

The "fairy tellers" that travel writer Nicholas Jubber chose to showcase are, with the exception of Hans Christian Andersen, either little known save by fairy tale enthusiasts or completely unknown. Which can be surprising given how immensely popular the tales they told are. Everyone knows "Beauty and the Beast," and if asked they'll probably refer to Disney as the creators, an equivocal impression the company itself promotes by omitting the name of the original teller from the credits, but how many can tell the real creator's name? Probably fans of the tale, and even amongst them, not everyone guesses it right because the "reteller" that abridged it is more famous than the actual first teller: Madame de Villeneuve.

To remedy this omission as well as shed light on the circumstances and cultural as well as historical context that led to the creation of famous fairy tales whose authors are generally left in the shadows, Jubber chose six examples, some more interesting than others, some of which had themselves a fairy tale-like life and others not so much; some of the tellers' lives are tragic, and others are rather ordinary, but none of them suffered from a dulled imagination. The first teller is Giambattista Basile, a Neapolitan soldier-for-hire that could've walked out of a Dumas novel and that wrote "The Tale of Tales," one of the very first collections of literary fairy tales (as opposed to folktales) to exist and that contains predecessors to tales that Perrault and the Grimms would make famous, such as Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty. Basile left his life as an adventurer and set down to writing, but although he wasn't successful in his lifetime, his tales are still popular and still published, although most readers likely don't know they are his.

The second teller is a name that will be completely unknown to readers: Hanna Dyab, a Syrian Christian of the Maronite persuasion, who is behind Aladdin and Ali Baba & the Forty Thieves. This was probably the most surprising biography for me, because I had always assumed the tales he authored were from "The Thousand and One Nights." Being rather trusting, poor Dyab was manipulated by self-serving French scholars that lured him to Louis XIV's court with promises of fame and social position, where he ultimately ended up like an exotic pet for the court nobles. His is one of the most infuriating stories here, for how he was taken advantage of and robbed of his due as creator of now famous tales, but his life itself was fortunately not tragic despite these setbacks.

The third teller is Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, the inventor of "Beauty and the Beast." What, did you think it was Beaumont? No, not at all. Beaumont merely abridged it and made it popular when it got translated into English just in time for the fairy tale craze that took place at the time. In the process, Beaumont also altered the tale, sanitised it for young girls, and slapped a moralistic veneer into it that is the reason so many nowadays think, mistakenly I should add, that the tale is about accepting arranged marriages and that there's Stockholm Syndrome undertones. The original author, however, never intended it as such, and once you learn about her own life, her miserable marriage, and her enterprising career as a writer at a time women's writing was still sneered at and attacked in spite of the valiant efforts of the salonnières. She was successful during her life, too, perhaps not as wildly so as her male contemporaries, but successful enough that her fairy tale was both criticised and beloved by contemporary readers. It sure struck a chord, and keeps doing so.

Fourth comes Dortchen Wild, known in history only as the wife of Wilhelm, the younger Grimm. But she was more than just a loving wife and caring sister-in-law to the Grimms: she was also one of their sources, arguably the most important one as it's speculated up to twenty of their tales came from her. Dortchen's is one of those ordinary village lives, somewhat spiced up with the Napoleonic Wars, and very little is known about her personally, which has led to much speculation that Jubber picks up rather uncritically at times. Anyway, if you're a fan of Hänsel & Gretel, you have Frau Grimm to thank for it, as this tale is one that has the strongest support for her as the author, although some of the reasons why made me smile: the house made of sweets and cake. So very German!

The fifth teller reads like a Dostoevsky stereotype so much that I had to check other sources to make sure Ivan Khudiakov wasn't a character from old Fyodor Mikhailovich's classics. No, Khudiakov was 100% real, poor chap, but you can't be blamed for thinking otherwise. His is the most tragic, but also amusing at times, of all the lives of fairy storytellers accounted for here, and for me personally the most interesting alongside Villeneuve's. Everyone has heard from Baba Yaga these days thanks to the Alexander Afanasyev anthology of Russian tales and other Russophile folklorists that brought them to the West, but the man responsible for many of the popular Baba Yaga tales has been tossed into the dustbin of history, a totally undeserved fate. I think that, of all the tellers, Khudiakov is the one that deserves to be rescued the most from oblivion by having his tales reprinted under his own name. His own life could make for a good novel, too.

The penultimate teller is a Brahmin named Somadeva, from Kashmir, who beat the rest of the tellers here in number of tales to his name, all of which he published in a collection entitled "The Ocean of Story." He is another with an interesting life, him having to become a sort of male Scheherezade for his neurotic queen, sans the threat of beheading by the end of the night, thank goodness. Unfortunately, very little to nothing is known about him, so again this section crams in mostly cultural context plus a sprinkling of speculation.

The last teller doesn't even need an introduction: Danish author Hans Christian Andersen, the world's most famous fairy teller. Of them all, he's the most psychologically open and easier to grasp thanks to the diaries and letters he left. But also the most curiously elusive, as it's very easy to project all sorts of pop psychodiagnoses onto him, from being asexual to being gay to autistic. His tales are also quite easy to misinterpret, by adults most of all because children do get them easily. As they should, because Andersen was a pioneer of telling tales to children, speaking to them directly, which other tellers before and after couldn't achieve.

Some will probably object to the selection of these seven storytellers and come up with names to include instead, but not me. I think it's a fine selection that meets its goals. This isn't about who had the most interesting life, because there are other tellers that had soap opera lives (d'Aulnoy and de La Force come to mind) and yet other tellers have such dull lives they'd send you to sleep. This is about contributions of original fairy tales that made an impact and are still told and retold today, and as such this is a great resource for fairy tale lovers. Of course, it does have some burps, like that Napoleon was diminutive (he wasn't) or that Marina Warner dismissed Villeneuve (she didn't, what she said isn't what the author interprets it as), and taking a novelist's discredited speculation at face value. I'm speaking here of Kate Forsyth's novel on Dortchen Wild, which is pure fiction coming from someone who is neither a folklorist nor a fairy tale academic, and calling it "beautiful" without taking its errors into account as well as diminishing the seriousness of Forsyth's premise as merely parental abuse (it was more than that when you read it closely), is a notable mistake.

I received an ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[K.J. Charles]

A very interesting look at seven authors of fairy tales, and where the stories come from. Some of them go back, basically, to the roots of human language (I wish we'd had more on this); very many are rooted in an eleventh century Indian collection which crept across the world. We know a smidge about that author; a great deal more about more recent authors (Dortchen Wild, who was married to one of the Grimms, Hans Christian Anderson, a French lady who wrote Beauty and the Beast, a Syrian adventurer who came up with Aladdin and got ruthlessly shanked by his European "mentors"). Very interesting to consider which stories go back forever and which can be traced to a relatively recent author. There's also a look at people who collected tales, including the Russian who more or less founded the academic study of them and ended up in Siberia.

Very interesting read, which reminds us once again that Hans Christian Anderson was absolutely unbearable.

[Krista · Rating 4 out of 5]

All of the storytellers in this book had enormous challenges to face, from poverty to political turmoil, from psychological afflictions to the horrors of war. Some succeeded in overcoming these challenges, but not all of them did. As we’ll discover, ‘happy ever after’ is a cliché often spurned by the tales themselves. Many of our most beloved stories end sadly, and so, unfortunately, did many of our fairy tellers. But all of them lived, and most of them loved; several of them travelled, experiencing many different shades of the world, and a couple of them succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

Making the point early in The Fairy Tellers that many of the tales best known to us in the West can trace their roots back to the Bronze Age, travel writer Nicholas Jubber endeavoured to discover why so many of those tales seem to now be “time-locked inside a bubble of medieval Europe”. As Jubber travelled through France and Germany, India and Syria, Russia and Denmark — seeking out the former homes of both famous and lesser known fairy tellers and interviewing local literary experts — he was surprised to learn how many fairy tale themes and details seemed to repeat across time and cultures, and perhaps less surprised to discover that each teller would imprint the old stories with details from their own lives. As it turns out, these fairy tales, in the forms we know them today, have been “time-locked” thanks to those who had access to publication (generally: white European men), but they weren’t always the tellers of the tales, and Jubber does a genuine service to bring the uncredited fairy tellers themselves (generally: women and non-Europeans) out of the shadows. This book contains many shortened versions of fairy tales, the biographies of their tellers and collectors, and vivid geographical writing from Jubber’s travels; and while that’s a lot to pack into one volume, I found it all very interesting — perhaps lacking in insight and analysis, but Jubber has collected so much of interest here that I’m rounding up to four stars. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)

From the global to the local: the most popular fairy tales are astonishingly agile at aping each other’s structures while transplanting themselves to new locales. As we’ll discover with some of the other tellers in this book, there’s an eerie parallel between the trajectories of disease and the pathways of stories: virulently contagious and cunningly adaptable.

From an early Cinderella-type story found in China (I suppose the impossibly tiny shoe does make the most sense in a foot-binding culture) to the long history of women telling stories about princesses being tricked into marrying beasts, Jubber learned that every time he found the “first” version of a fairy tale, he would later discover an earlier version of it in some other culture’s tradition. And because of that, the popular fairy tales that we know (like those attributed to the Brothers Grimm or Charles Perrault) can only properly be said to have been “collected” by them — except for those written by Hans Christian Andersen, which Jubber considers original creations (and the last true “fairy tales”). I picked out quite a few interesting tidbits about the fairy tellers behind the well known tales, and I’m putting it all here behind spoiler tags because it’s just. so. much.

The young woman forced to labour for her horrible stepsisters, whisked by magic to the ball, who simply can’t hold on to her shoe — for European readers, Giambattista got there first. The princess in the tower, whose hair becomes a ladder so her handsome lover can climb up to meet her — that’s one of Giambattista’s. He provided one of the earliest known versions of the comatose princess in the forgotten castle; and of the brother and sister, abandoned in the woods by their woodcutter father, who can’t make their way home because their trail’s been eaten.

Born around 1575 in Naples, a contemporary of Shakespeare and Cervantes, Giambattista Basile wrote The Tale of Tales: the first written collection of many familiar fairy tales. Giambattista wrote in the Neapolitan dialect, knew people who knew Galileo and the feminist painter Artemisia Gentileschi, and died from an air-poisoning eruption of Mt Vesuvius in 1631, catching the “fatal infection” at age fifty-six.

Genies and treasure caves, cities of sumptuous palaces and bustling markets, sorcerers disguised as wandering dervishes, cunning slavegirls outwitting thieves and cross-dressing princesses defeating viziers at chess: these were the tales pouring out of Europe’s fledgling bookshops. So it was perfect timing for a traveller from Syria to arrive in Paris with a heap of tales in his head. His name was ‘Abd al-Qari Antoun Youssef Youhenna Dyab — or Hanna for short — and he landed in the West like a rusty old oil lamp: modest on the surface, but harbouring magic.

By 1708, The Thousand and One Nights had already become “the literary phenomenon of the age”, but Hanna would be the one to add “Aladdin” and “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves” to the canon (and despite French translator Antoine Galland becoming famous for his version of 1001 Nights that included Aladdin and Ali Baba, Hanna was not credited in the book and was only rediscovered in 2015).

Which brings us to the scandalous life of the Baroness d’Aulnoy — salonnière, spy and spinner of tales — and the mischievously imaginative members of her circle: a countess accused of lesbianism, a lady-in-waiting who disguised herself as a bear, the pipe -smoking princess to whom they dedicated their works, and the court secretary who outsold them all.

Before Hanna Dyab made it to Paris, fairy telling in France had already gone viral. Around ninety tales from the 1690s have survived, two-thirds of which were written by high society women. “Beauty and the Beast” was written by Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve: an impoverished aristocrat, widowed young, who became the housekeeper and mistress of Crébillon (the age’s most famous playwright and the official Censor), but despite helping Crébillon with his official duties, she was unable to get a licence to publish much of her own work. Writing about the Disney version of “Beauty and the Beast”, Jubber notes “the credits listed more than thirty writers for the storyline, script development and dialogue, but there wasn’t a single mention of the original author. It was as if the animators had invented the tale from scratch.”

It was no sugary idyll, with its fair share of family tragedies, including the early deaths of several siblings as well as of her first-born, and the loss of both her parents by the age of twenty-one. But Dortchen did live a kind of fairy tale. Not only did she narrate some of the tales that would count among the world’s most beloved (including ‘Rumpelstiltskin’,‘The Elves and the Shoemaker’ and — probably — ‘Hansel and Gretel’), she ended up marrying the man who jotted down her tales, and lived with the brothers as the closest witness of their success. Long rendered voiceless like the nameless heroine of ‘The Six Swans ’, she is able, increasingly, to speak to us. And if we turn our ears towards her, we might just hear what she’s saying.

The Grimms might be the most recognisable name in fairy tales, but they didn’t invent stories — they collected them; particularly from the young women of their neighbourhood. The Wilds lived across the street, and not only would Dortchen Wild eventually marry Wilhelm Grimm, but she recited for him between 12 and 20 tales of his collection. The three Hassenpflug sisters — Marie, Jeanette and Amalie — who between them provided twenty-eight stories for the first edition (including “Little Red Riding Hood”, “Sleeping Beauty” and “Snow-White”), were Huguenots whose ancestors had fled France; it’s ironic that in an effort to preserve German folklore in the presence of the Napoleonic occupation, the Brothers Grimm would include so many stories that the Hassenpflugs adapted from their own French background. In a stark example of how fairy tellers’ personal circumstances coloured their tales, Jubber contrasts the type of stories told by Dortchen (whose homelife was one of drudgery and likely abuse) and those told by the more well-off Hassenpflugs:

In more than half of the tales attributed to Dortchen, the heroine’s hard work is key to the narrative — from Gretel preparing the witch’s oven to the bed-making drudge of ‘Mother Hölle’, from the uncomplaining travellers in ‘Sweetheart Roland’ and ‘The Singing, Springing Lark’ to the miller’s daughter’s hopeless spinning in ‘Rumpelstiltskin’. In this respect, Dortchen’s tales are strikingly different from those of the storyteller who on the surface appears most similar to her: Marie Hassenpflug. The latter gives relatively little attention to work (Snow White, famous these days for keeping house for the dwarves, isn’t described in the original version carrying out any of her chores). Which is just as you’d expect from the well-off daughter of a government official.

Further afield, Jubber tells the story of a Brahmin called Somadeva Bhatta — a court poet in the valley of Kashmir around the year 1070 — who wrote a collection of tales (as long as the entire Lord of the Rings series) that would include the precursors to many of our most recognisable fairy tales: “To read these tales in Somadeva’s collection is to experience the free-wheeling vitality of stories younger than other versions we know, and older than we could possibly imagine.” And turning our attention further to the north and east, Jubber shares traditional stories of Baba Yaga in her hut perched on chicken legs, deep in a snow-covered birch forest:

It’s a cliché of nineteenth-century Russia: the young idealistic intellectual, trampled by the cruelty of the tsarist system, spat out to Siberia to die a gibbering wreck in a mental ward. But Ivan Khudiakov was more than that. He was a teenage prodigy who published, in 1860, his first and most significant collection, Great Russian Fairy Tales, at the age of just eighteen. As an example of the collision between fairy telling and tawdry political reality, Ivan is one of the most fascinating fairy tellers who ever lived. He was far from the only collector to gather tales from oral sources in the wake of the Grimms, but none lived as tempestuous a life. And none would connect their fairy telling as actively to the siren call of revolution.

And I feel like I should note something of Hans Christian Andersen but what most sticks with me is his self-made rise from crushing poverty and the underwhelming reactions he got from other writers: the Grimm Brothers having no idea of who he was when he knocked on their door, unannounced, in Berlin and the sign that Charles Dickens famously placed in the guest room where Andersen had stayed, “Hans Christian Andersen slept in this room which seemed to the family AGES”. Again, I wish there had been more of an analytical focus in this book because I’m not entirely certain why Jubber states that Andersen wrote the last of the “true” fairy tales, but it’s argued for, somewhat, in this:

He had been perfectly situated between the old world of preindustrial Odense and the commercial opportunities of prosperous Copenhagen. No later fairy teller would be able to harness that perfectly calibrated alignment of traditionalism and originality that made Hans so unique.

Obviously, fairy tales have something vital to relate or else our ancestors would not have been spinning the same basic tales for the past five thousand years. Based on his research for this book, Jubber concludes that to be considered “fairy tales” stories must include magic, appeal to children, and have an element of orality (even if printed). Ultimately, what makes fairy tales, and their tellers, so essential to the human experience is the journey they take us on “to the enlightenment at the heart of the forest”:

Some people come back with jewels pouring out of their mouths, some are covered in pitch or charred with fire. Whatever their experience, everybody returns from the forest knowing more about themselves than when they set out. Tales and trails intertwine, and every one of them is a magic mirror. Like the tellers, we can look into this mirror to see the world — in its splendour and madness and brutality — and if we look carefully enough, we see ourselves peering back.

[Stace · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have you ever wondered where some of the most famous fairy tales came from? If the answer is yes then, The Fairy Tellers is the book for you. Most of us were probably read a fairy tale of two as a child and will know stories such as Beauty and the Beast, Cinderella, and Hansel and Gretel but most won’t know the origins of these stories. Written by travel-writer Nicholas Jubber he has scoured some far-reaching places to bring you the stories of how these tales came to be classics and so well-known across the world.

The book covers the origins behind these stories including their authors and we begin with a map that shows you where in the world the seven storytellers he has chosen were from, though there are plenty more mentioned within the pages.

Essentially the book is like miniature biographies of these writers and includes some of their stories too, opening with ‘The Tale of the Laughing Princess’ and Giambattista Basile. The author has done plenty of in-depth research to find the true and original tale behind the ones we know today as many have been retold and altered over the years.

What I loved about The Fairy Tellers is how much work the author has put into finding the true meaning. He has travelled far and wide and spoken to numerous people, done meticulous research to put this book together and that comes across strongly on every page. He certainly has plenty of passion for the subject.

Whilst this is an interesting and intriguing read I can’t say it was particularly easy to read given how much information is shared, including about the author’s life too. I did have to have long breaks in between sections just to try to soak some of the facts in, but then I’m not a massive non-fiction reader, so if you are you may just fly through this book, especially if you are a fairy tale lover. It is, however, fascinating and enlightening.

[Rhian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Okay I’m not going to deduct a whole star just because the author and I disagree on which of the fairy-tellers has the most interesting story. I did have to slog through the first chapter but it was very definitely worth it. This book fired my imagination so much! I have probably talked at least two people to death over it and several more to boredom, I have got strange looks for laughing at it whilst reading in public, and I can truly say that it is a thoroughly fascinating book for anyone with even a passing interest in fairy tales, although it’s definitely more on the academic side.

[Bandit · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are the names you know. Brothers Grimm. Andersen. And then so many you don’t. So many that have been lost amid the sands of time. And yet their work – the stories that brought into the world – live on, have done so for centuries, one reiteration after another, one adaptation after the next. They are some of our most beloved stories of all – the fairy tales.
We know the modern versions, mostly Disneyfied, cleaned-up for the public at large. And yet, fairy tales are meant to be dark. Tragic. Sad. They were written as cautionary tales. Morality instructionals. But made entertaining, with witches and magic.
Those are the fairy tales I know and love. And their origins go back centuries ago, when across the globe, the intrepid creators and collectors created (original material) and collected (and adapted existing folklore) to produce books of stories that would beguile the world’s collective imagination.
And so, from Italy to Siberia, from India to Scandinavia, this book will take you on an adventure to track down those unfairly forgotten fairy tellers and honor their talents, for those writers deserve to be known. For their perseverance, for their passion, for their creativity, imagination, for the way they saw the world and the legacy they left behind.
These might not have been the happiest of individuals, who faced great many challenges in their personal and professional lives, but they were never deterred. They intended to tell fairy tales and they did. And the readers of the following centuries have enjoyed them since. Everywhere a written word has reached.
Now that’s legacy.
So yes, a resounding yes, this book is great. Written by a fairy tale lover for fairy tale lovers, the author’s passion for these stories really comes through. The writing is fun and engaging. This book is a travelogue, a biography collection, a literary study all in one. It draws fascinating parallels between different stories from different cultures and times and shows their meaning within the sociocultural context of their day. And more importantly, it shines the spotlight on the people who so very much deserve it, so that their names may live on along with their magical stories. A great read. Recommended. Thanks Netgalley.

This and more at https://advancetheplot.weebly.com/

[Britt · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thanks to NetGalley & Nicholas Brealey Publishing for an eARC of this book. The following review is my honest reflection on the text provided.

If you've ever wondered about the people behind popular fairy tales, this is definitely the book for you.

"Over the course of my trail, I tried to work out what makes a 'fairy tale'. An eventyr, 'adventure', a Märchen, a 'little tale', hikayah al-khayaliyeh, a 'story of the imagination'."

It's been a while since I read non-fiction, so it took a few chapters for my brain to readjust to facts over fiction. It helped that there are summaries of fairy tales interspersed between chapters, and, to be honest, these were probably my favourite parts.

"The reason these stories still speak to us is because they were set down by people who knew poverty and wealth, love and hate, fear and excitement, just as we do today; people who shared in the humus of human life."

Jubber is unafraid and thankfully unwilling to shy away from the misogyny, racism, and prejudice in many of these original stories. It's interesting to see how these collectors and writers of fairy tales come from a wide range of backgrounds. I went into The Fairy Tellers aware of the obvious - Giambattista Basile, the Brothers Grimm, and Hans Christian Anderson, but I was very excited to learn about some female fairy tellers. Namely, Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve, for who 'Beauty and the Beast' could almost be considered autobiographical, Baroness d'Aulnoy, who had a circle of ladies competing in fairy telling competitions when she wasn't busy being a spy, and Dortchen Wild who provided the Brothers Grimm with at least a dozen of their collected fairy tales and ended up married to Wilhelm Grimm. Of course, it's never surprising when men in history overshadow women, but it's nice to have the record set straight.

"One of the less palatable lessons of traditional fairy tales is that curiosity (especially in young women) is often answered with punishment rather than reward. But if you've got the itch, you're going to find it awfully hard to stop scratching."

"Giambattista builds his stories around women fighting with all the resources at their disposal. For all their flaws, and for all the platitudes of conventional misogyny sprinkled throughout the book, they are rarely silent or inactive."

It was also nice to move to different, somewhat unexpected parts of the world to learn more about the men behind some famous fairy tales. Hanna Dyab, a Syrian writer, brings us Aladdin and Ali Baba, Ivan Khudiakov is considered a Russian revolutionary who popularised Baba Yaga, and Somadeva, a prolific poet from India whose book was "twice as long as the Odyssey and the Iliad combined - roughly the length of The Lord of the Rings."

"Sure, there are princes and princesses, but only occasionally: Hanna shows that anybody can drive a story. The way is led by rope makers and robbers, slaves and street kids, tea sellers and tree fellers."

It was interesting to see how fairy tales moved in and out of fashion throughout time and to be able to follow their journey and evolution to the stories we know so well today.

"Stories flowed along the routes of caravans and ships, burrowing into their new host societies, adapting to local conditions, reshaped by new storytellers who added their own spin on them and made them their own."

Besides, where else can you read about someone being "murdered by a volcano" ?

Review originally posted here on Britt's Book Blurbs.

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[Rosie Amber · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Fairy Tellers: A Journey Into The Secret History Of Fairy Tales is an in-depth study of the subject. Most fairy stories that we know today have been passed down through hundreds and thousands of years. They have been retold, re-invented and re-worded, but where did they originate from?


Nicholas Jubber undertook an enormous task, choosing to focus on just seven writers, although many more are mentioned within the pages. Jubber searched through history, followed trails and investigated who the original story tellers were. The book is broken into seven main parts and takes the reader first to 16th century Venice and Giambattista Basile with his stories that led to Cinderella, Rapunzel and Sleeping Beauty. Next are the stories from Hanna Dyab, who brought his tales, one of which was Aladdin, with him from Syria to Paris in the 1700s.

Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve introduced Beauty and The Beast around 1756, while in Germany the Grimm brothers were collecting stories; Rumpelstiltskin, Hansel and Gretel and The Elves And The Shoemaker were told to the brothers by a young girl called Dortchen Wild.

Part five heads to Russia and Ivan Khudiakov’s role in the Baba Yaga retellings. In part six, Jubber travels back to the year 1070 in Kashmir where court poet Somadeva wrote Ocean Of The Streams Of Story, an epic tale. Jubber picks out plots from all of these stories and shows us how the themes became repeated in later accounts as they filter down through history.

Part seven is dedicated to the famous Hans Christian Anderson; his stories reflected what he saw around him and were often his way of escaping a lonely life. We remember him for The Little Mermaid, The Snow Queen and numerous other tales about animals and children.


Sprinkled throughout the book are short versions of lots of fairy stories, and diagrams which guide the reader along routes that the retellings took and how we have come to know them today. It is a fascinating book and at around 300 pages there is a lot of material to read through. Jubber has presented a very interesting analysis of the history of the fairy tale. I recommend this to anyone who is interested in fairy tales. Just as story tellers all through the ages have done so, authors today continue to rewrite such tales using their own slant. Who knows what new versions of these old favourites future generations will be reading?

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

It has been a long time since I have read any fairy tales to my children, or even to myself even. I even remember reading the classic stories way way back in my childhood too. These stories are still heard and seen regularly today, they can be seen in the pantos that follow the Christmas season and the plethora of animated movies (that I must admit I haven’t seen hardly any of)

These modern retellings of the fairy tales are often a more sanitised version of these are sometimes brutal stories. Probably the most famous names associated with these tales are the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen, But some of the other famous stories were collected by people whose names are not as well known. I didn’t know the authors of the famous tales Hansell and Gretel and all of the Arabian Nights stories. Tracing the origins of them will take Jubber across the northern climes and then heading through the Black Forest, onto Southern Europe before arriving in the Middle East.

Each of the chapters begins with the story which we are going to learn about. Most of them I knew, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid, but there are others in here that I had not come across before, such as The Tale of All Kinds of Fur and The Tale of the Firebird. We are taken through the known history behind them and how they came to be known to a wilder world.

I thought that Jubber has written a fascinating book, his prose is engaging and you can tell that he is obviously still captivated by the stories even today. He even manages to persuade his teenage friends to go to an animated film at the Bournemouth cinema one day rather than watch an action film. He tells captivating stories on how these came to be wider known in global culture and the little know background about the people that found these stories. If you have a thing for fairy tales and have always wondered where they came from this is a good book to start with. It has also made me want to reread the fairy tales of my childhood too.

[آية · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love learning about the lives of historical figures. This book did not disappoint.

Ever wonder what the roots of your favorite stories are? Cinderella, Aladdin, Snow White, The Little Mermaid, Little Red Riding Hood, Beauty and the Beast, Puss in Boots...they all followed unique yet similar trajectories. This book focuses more on the people who passed them on rather than the trajectories in and of themselves.

Some were retellings the the fairytellers included in their collections, with a bit of edits based on the storyteller who spread it. Others were original tales by the storytellers themselves.

Some of the most fascinating parts were about the ways stories traveled through time and place, from one storyteller to the other, often following paths of disease and trade. These tales are obviously universal--but Jubber accurately points out that they are also uniquely local, as the details about them changed from one locale, one time period, one storyteller to the next.

The author tried to be diverse and included an Arab and Indian storyteller, but the rest were European so it was still Eurocentric. Not necessarily a bad thing in this case, as the goal was just to explore some of the lives of the fairy tellers, and it made no attempt to describe the collection as comprehensive. But it's just something to take note of.

It's not an academic history book, it's a popular one aimed at general adult readers, so it's not a study attempting to make serious arguments or answer analytical questions. The prose was smooth and read more like a narrative. That's honestly probably the cause behind my biggest critique of the book: the author often sounded so whimsical to the point that I felt that he may have exaggerated or romanticized some of the fairy tellers' lives, coming to conclusions that I wasn't entirely convinced by. He tried so hard to find parallels/connections between the storytellers and their fairytales, and often the evidence he gave for such connections didn't convince me, no matter how poetic they appeared on the surface.

But besides that, it was an interesting, informative read, and Jubber did a good job contextualizing the storytellers in their settings (I often felt like I was roaming the streets of Italy or touring the Grimm's German village) and showing their unique quirks, personalities, tragedies, and successes.

[Rebecca · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hugely enjoyable meander through the backgrounds of seven significant figures that contributed to bringing us the fairy tales that we know and love today. It looks at the extremely varied backgrounds of each if its subjects (from a would-be revolutionary to a failed monk-cum-souk vendor) analysing how their experiences and times influenced how they told or adapted their tales whilst also giving credit back to some of those whose names have since been forgotten (surprise, surprise mainly the women). At the same time there are beautiful little glimpses of the physical places where they lived and wrote that will have you pining for the snow covered streets of Copenhagen and the deserts of Syria (amongst other places!).

I briefly studied the background to fairy tales at A levels (my introduction to Angela Carter) and this was an excellent prompt to what I learned then. I have no idea how it would come across to someone who has better subject knowledge but it felt well researched to me - my biggest issue being that I would have happily have read more. Certainly feels like a good book to read as the weather turns.

[Mandy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderfully compelling exploration of fairy tales, their origins, the cultures that gave birth to them, the collectors who collected them, their spread around the world and their continuing appeal. Meticulously researched, comprehensive and detailed, wide-ranging in time and place, it all makes for some compelling reading. The inclusion of a few of the most well-known tales adds to what is already a very pleasurable reading experience. The style is accessible – even humorous a times - and never gets bogged down in scholarship, although the scholarship is obviously there. Highly recommended.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5– I loved the concept of trying to pinpoint the origin of the fairytales as we know them today. While I was definitely impressed with the author’s research, I found some of the historical information a little drawn out in certain parts. The fact that we can see that many of our favourite tales come from the lower class to challenge political structures/ social norms or as an means to gain acceptance as an outsider makes me love these stories even more. Out of all the individuals described, Villeneuve and Andersen were the most interesting to read. Definitely recommend this for all Disney fans especially.

[Catinca Badulescu · Rating 5 out of 5]

"we can look in this mirror to see the world - in its splendour and madness and brutality - and if we look carefully enough, we see ourselves peering back"

[Csenge · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I start a professional storytelling school, this will be on the mandatory reading list. It is a book storytellers and fairy tale enthusiasts alike should definitely own. It puts "old stories" in a whole new perspective, illustrating the many ways their collectors and/or authors left their personal mark on texts that romantics like to label "universal." I have been deeply immersed in storytelling for almost two decades now, but this book could introduce me to new literary figures, and even told me a whole lot of fun new details about the lives of some whom I've read whole books about. The entire volume is rich in delicious detail. You can tell the author dug deep into history, literature, primary sources, contemporary authors, modern experts, and even personal travel experience. The result is a book that gets the facts right, but presents them with the lively humor and twinkle-eyed excitement of personal telling. "You'll never guess what I just found out about Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve!" And I am ready to listen, every time. Thanks to the extended bibliography, I now have a much longer TBR, too.

[Ira Therebel · Rating 4 out of 5]

We all had a lot of fairy tales in our childhood. Some of them are known all around the world. But in many cases we don't know where they came from. I knew the names of Hans Christian Andersen and Brothers Grimm but even though I heard a lot about Baba Yaga and Ivan the Fool as a kid I never heard about Ivan Khudyakov and never even thought of where these tales came from

In this book Nicholas Jubbar tells us more about those fairy tellers and collectors who were forgotten even though their work is still alive and known by many people. And it was a very great read. It was interesting to know more about Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen who brought us some of my favorite fairy tales as a kid. And it was especially interesting to find out more about where suck stories as Beauty and the Beast or Aladdin came from.

It might be my own bias but I found the story of Russian tales and Iva Khudyakov especially interesting. His life and how he ended up in Siberia were were very interesting to read about

[KatieT · Rating 3 out of 5]

For any fan of Fairy tale .. This is a must! A really intresting historical analysis into the history of our best loved fairy tales! It was such a fascinating read! Definitely reccomed to anyone who is interested in fairy tales!!

[Claire Johnson · Rating 2 out of 5]

I REALLY wanted something less textbooky, but alas, it was a textbook. Such a pretty cover wasted on something not fun to read. I am really disappointed about this, fairytale history could have been FUN.

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is an incredibly thoughtful examination of the history of fairy tales, focusing on the people who wrote them and what compelled them to do so. The book, while somewhat interesting and enjoyable at first, becomes more compelling as it progresses, since each chapter seems to exist in conversation with the others. The book provides information on non-Western stories and female authors, which I expected after reading the introduction; what was a pleasant surprise, however, was how these figures and their contributions continue to reemerge as more famous Western fairy tellers are discussed, reminding us how authors like the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen were indebted to those who came before them.

The writing style is friendly and conversational, which seems like a fitting approach considering the emphasis on oral storytelling and the accessibility of these tales. There has been a lot of discussion in recent years about how dark original fairy tales can be - like how the Little Mermaid dies at the end of Andersen's version, or how the Grimm stories often feature people losing body parts. I feel like this is the first book I have read that has given a comprehensive explanation as to why that was the case, highlighting how children's literature can be a nuanced representation of historical context. I'm kind of sad that this book is over because it was so fun to read?

Thank you NetGalley and Nicholas Brealey Publishing for giving me an early copy in exchange for my review!

[Arsnoctis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inserito tra i non completati solo perché non è stato terminato nel tempo di un prestito bibliotecario - è stata più una consultazione a capitoli che una lettura.
Il testo si presenta come qualcosa di molto diverso da quello che potrebbe suggerire la copertina, lo definirei un testo denso molto più che il solo "viaggio" menzionato nel frontespizio. Consigliato agli amanti delle fiabe e della filologia sul tema.

[Naomi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a captivating, well-researched read. One of my favourite non-fiction reads of recent years.

[Karen Mace · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a truly wonderful book about the origins and storytellers behind the most magical fairy tales that we all take for granted! It's only when I picked this book up that I realised I knew very little, if anything at all, about how they came to be, and about the people that wrote them! So this book has enlightened me in so many ways, and has just made me want to pick up all the old fairy tales I have to enjoy them once more, and see beyond the 'Disney' magic and get a bit more of an understanding and deeper sense of the story behind the story! so to speak!

This is a book that covers geography as it takes you all over the world, history as it looks at the goings on around the writers at the time they wrote them, and all the folk tales that inspired the storytellers to put pen to paper and create these wonderful stories that we all know and love so much.

As well as the well known writers who receive all the plaudits for the fairy tales - Hans Christian Andersen and The Brothers Grimm - it also does a wonderful job of introducing the many other brilliant storytellers such as Hanna Diyab (Aladdin and Ali Baba), Dortchen Wild and Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve (Beauty and the Beast) to name but a few, and gives you a real insight into their stories and what inspired or prompted them to write.

You really get a great sense of the extensive research that this author has put into this piece of work. He travels across the globe to find out more about these authors and their backgrounds and showing how often the messages behind these stories are often a lot darker and deeper than they appear on the surface. And I think that is why they work on so many levels to different readers. To a child the stories appear full of magic and wonder, to an adult we see the hidden depths to each tale and notice a lot more going on. Many of the writers had such fascinating and often tragic life stories themselves so you can see the correlation between fact and fiction.

This was a book that has reignited my passion for fairy tales and I'm eager to start picking them up all over again now that I know more about the past of the writers and what led them to create the characters and situations in each tale. A truly fascinating and absorbing piece of writing!

[Hana · Rating 4 out of 5]

So interesting! I really liked the variety of tellers chosen (a few I'd heard of, most I hadn't), and the way Jubber brings each historical and cultural context to life so vividly. The connections between similar stories that show up in different cultures and eras were fascinating, and I love how explict he is about how fairytales have been used as a tool of resistance in so many different contexts.

[xx · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely brilliant! Beautifully written and enchanting! It was so good, that I had to write a message to the author and express my admiration. I got a message back and I couldn’t be any happier :)

[Noemi Top · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe a 3,5.
This book was a rollercoaster of me liking it or being very bored of it. Some of the chapters were good and very interesting to read. For example I read H.C.Andersen’s chapter in a single, very quick sitting, because it was really good. Somadeva’s chapter, on the other hand, might have made me skip a few paragraphs.
Overall it’s a nice book containing some interesting life stories, but the style in which it is written is not for me.

[Nicki Markus · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Fairy Tellers was an interesting and enjoyable read. I had heard of most of the writers mentioned, but I didn't know a lot about the background of some of them, so it was fascinating to discover a bit about their lives and how they came to write/collect their stories. The tales of these authors are told in an engaging manner, with summaries of some of their key stories interspersed between the chapters. There is also a useful bibliography if you wish to read on. This is a book sure to appeal to fans of fairytales. It gets a solid 4 stars from me.

I received this book as a free eBook ARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

[SonataReader · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is fantastic and beautiful.

The sheer details involved in this novel are marvelous and something I would like to share with others. Learning more about the origin and the story of the people behind the stories we all cherish is riveting and enthralling. I truly cannot wait for a copy of this book.

Thank you so much to NetGalley for a copy of this book!

[Juli Rahel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fairy tales are beloved all over the world, by children and adults alike. They continue to be turned into blockbuster films, but they also continued to be told in the dark. I have adored fairy tales since I was a child but, being me, I always wanted to know more about them and their origin. And this is how I encountered The Fairy Tellers, a book full of tales that celebrates the act of telling. Thanks to Nicholas Brealey and NetGalley, for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Fairy tales were my bread and butter as a child. My mother had a collection of books with fairy tales from all over the world. The German fairy tales, as written down by the Grimm Brothers formed the backbone of my education, but it was enriched by fairy tales from Africa, Asia, and North America. It started a life-long obsession with the stories, which did much to inspire my love for medieval literature. But where do these stories come from? Why are they immediately recognisable and yet so hard to define? Where did fairy tales begin? These are the driving questions behind Nicholas Jubber's journey in The Fairy Tellers as well and I truly couldn't have asked for a better guide.

The Fairy Tellers tells the tale of six of the most influential people in the history of fairy tales, some well-known, others shamefully forgotten or actively hushed away. While not chronological, the journey through The Fairy Tales feels natural. First is Giambattista Basile, known for The Tale of Tales, or Lo Cunto de li Cunti. Nicholas Jubber brings to live the Neapolitan culture in the way Basile did himself in his tales. Basile wrote the first known version of tales which came to echo throughout countless childhoods, from Cinderella to Sleeping Beauty, yet also beautiful oddities like The Flea with its spunky princess. Next is the tale of Youhenna (or Hanna) Diab, a man from the souks of Aleppo who, through countless adventures, finds himself in Paris during its obsession with A Thousand and One Nights, telling the tales of Ali Babba and the Forty Thieves and Aladdin to Antione Galland, who promptly took credit. His tales, specifically Aladdin, are so well known, and yet the man himself is a cypher. His autobiography was discovered in the Vatican Library, resurrecting him from history, and Jubber does his tale justice in The Fairy Tellers. The third teller is also from Paris, namely Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve, whose fall from nobility to poverty inspired her many heroines, but specifically Belle in Beauty and the Beast. While the "beast-groom" story was already popular amongst the story-tellers of Paris, de Villeneuve wrote the tale which introduced the key elements we still know today, from the rose to the singing wardrobe. And she got exactly no credit for it for a very long time.

Rather than focus on the Brothers Grimm entirely, Jubber dedicates his fourth part to Dortchen Wild, one of the young women who told them tales, most famously Hans and Gretel and Rumpelstilskin. Tracking her influence on the brothers, from the stories she told them to her marriage to Wilhelm, Jubber shines a light on a forgotten woman. From here we move further afield, to Ivan Khudiakov's rollercoaster of a life. Brilliant from childhood, he published his first collection of Russian fairy tales before the age of 22, but that's only where the rollercoaster starts. Khudiakov actually, unlike the Brothers Grimm, traveled through the land collecting and transcribing tales from "the common folk" and for him these tales were a crucial part of a potential revolution. This drive did not end well for him. From revolutionary Russia part 6 hops to medieval India and Somadeva's The Ocean of the Stream of Stories, or Kathasaritsagara. A beautiful collection that combines storytelling with mythology and religion, it is a major work by a mostly mysterious man. Not much is known about Somadeva, but Jubber brilliantly evokes Kashmir for the reader, allowing us to appreciate what an impact storytelling could have had. The Fairy Tellers ends with perhaps the most famous teller, Hans Christian Andersen. While he does not need to be rescued from obscurity, his life does demonstrate the saving grace of story telling like no other. Constantly searching for recognition and love, Andersen's stories create an entire world in which many of us have found a home.

The Fairy Tellers ends with a rousing ode to fairy tales, with a strong emphasis on their beauty but also their grace. While fairy tales are hard to define, they share the trait of having to be told. A written fairy tale is different to one that is told, whether actively by a parent to a child or passively through a framing device. They must somehow forge a connection between two people, through the shared intimacy of a shared story. Nicholas Jubber shares his journey with us, showing us what he saw in Aleppo before it was bombed, how he commisserated with the abused statue of the Little Mermaid in Copenhagen, and how Naples impressed him. The reader gets to travel with him and share in the stories he finds. The Fairy Tellers is almost like a fairy tale in that sense itself, full with a sense of magic and timelessness, and yet just odd enough here and there that you can't help but cock your head. His research and skill saves some of the above tellers from obscurity, at least for me, and made them as dear to me as the fairy tales they told themselves. And that is truly what a good story is meant to do, create a connection.

The Fairy Tellers is a beautiful journey into the history of the telling of tales. Told with a genuine personal touch, Jubber's book is a must-read for any fairy tale lover like myself!

URL: https://universeinwords.blogspot.com/...

[Jaffareadstoo · Rating 5 out of 5]

For me, there is something endlessly fascinating about fairy tales. I've loved them since I was old enough to listen and still enjoy reading tales from enchanted forests, of witches and princesses, princes and demons. That the stories span history and continents, folklore and legend, is what makes each fairy tale so unique.

In The Fairy Tellers the author takes us a comprehensive journey into this magical world of landscape and culture, explaining the history behind the stories, the inspiration and the beguiling nature of tales from storytellers which have been handed down generation by generation until they have become as intrinsic a part of our collective culture as the air we breathe.

Reading like a travelogue and breaking down the book into seven distinct parts we get to learn more about the origins and connections of some of our well known fairy tales. I especially enjoyed the fairy story which heads each chapter and which whisk us away to a magical world. The quirky line drawings which are interspersed within the text also add a lovely sense of atmosphere.

Beautifully written, extensively researched, and as descriptive as a history book, I found The Fairy Tellers completely absorbing. Dipping into and out of the book, at whim, I discovered things I didn't know about the origins of the long lost fairy-tellers, those shadowy people, whose bright imagination once brought all our classic fairy tales to vibrant life.

[Nick Eibler · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was really interested in the concept of this book, however it ended up being historical overload. I found some sections quite fascinating and a good exploration of the actual teller (Dorchen and Hans Christian), and some just got out let’s tell you everything going on in this country at the time. It was still an interesting read on the importance and wide-spread appeal of the telling of fairytales.