France
France(17th century to present) has a long, rich, and diverse tradition of literary fairy tales.
Although the ‘conte de fées’ (fairy tale) first appeared so named at the end of the 17th century, what we would now call fairy‐tale motifs are evident from the very beginnings of a written literature in French. Wonder tales and their elements are found throughout the fables and exempla used by the medieval Church. The ‘marvellous’ is also very much in evidence in medieval secular literature such as the Lais of Marie de France, numerous chansons de geste (e.g. ‘Huon de Bordeaux’), chivalric romances (e.g. those by Chrétien de Troyes), and plays, as well as in Renaissance prose fiction (e.g. Rabelais, du Fail, des Périers, Cent nouvelles nouvelles). Like the later literary fairy tales, almost all these precursors adapt motifs found in oral traditions. Yet, if the fairy tales that began to...
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