It appears that some fairy tales set in the Middle Ages or the Renaissance in contemporary picture book illustrations. Princesses would commonly wear the tall pointy hat called a hennin, and men wear these short and long tunics and brown pointy shoes. Sometimes, men would wear round and square hats on top of their heads.
There is also the possibility that fairy tales are set in the time period they are first recorded. Charles Perrault (12 January 1628 – 16 May 1703) is known for his fairy-tale contributions, and I think this may be why in popular imagination fairy tales are set in the 17th century, or the 18th-19th century with the Grimm Brothers. At the time, there would be lots of fairy-tale cottages, but really they are houses with thatched roofs. I think this would be BEFORE the time Benjamin Franklin made the lightning rods on top of everybody’s houses to avoid housefires on thatched roofs caused by lightning.
So, which one is it? The Middle Ages, the Renaissance, or the Early Modern Period?
And what do you call those poofy things on top of women’s petticoats?
I think you are going to have to specify which fairy tales you mean. Many of them are very old stories that were passed down orally until they were written down in compilations like the Grimm Brothers and later Disney had their way with them to kidify them even more in the modern sense. The original stories tended to be pretty brutal and gruesome in general and not what any sensible parent would read at night to put their kids to bed these days.
The basic answer is that they are set in the 1600’s - 1800’s according to the compilations like the Grimm Brothers but the stories themselves are much older than that. The Disney versions are usually based on an idealized and amalgamated view of Europe that never existed in any one time or place…a fairy tale.
No I mean which version and which stories specifically? My point is that all major fairy tales are very old stories that predate when they were first recorded. They take on elements of the time period when they were recorded when you look at compilations like Grimm but then Disney has their way with them so there usually isn’t any specific setting.
That is the best answer you can get without asking specifically about Cinderella for example and even that is long historical exercise that many scholars have spent significant time on.
It is an important part of the whole ethos of fairy tales that they are not given any clear historic, or come to that, geographical location. As Cub Mistress rightly said, they are set in the long ago and far away, or “once upon a time,” if you prefer. That is not a joke or an evasion, it is the right answer. This historical indefiniteness is a large part of what gives fairy tales their mythic resonance. (It also explains why George Lucas set Star Wars “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away…” He was reaching for the same kind of mythic, fairytale-type resonance, and it is no coincidence that he includes princesses and eschews moral ambiguities and psychological complexities.)
In this respect, Disney, by setting its fairy tales in “an idealized and amalgamated view of Europe that never existed in any one time or place” actually gets things right (though it tends to screw them up in other respects). Historical specificity and accuracy would totally kill the fairy-tale mood.
You need to be really specific about what you mean by “fairy tales.”
Folktales in oral tradition are generally set in the contemporary or near-contemporary world. It just so happens that most of the great folktale collections from Europe were collected from people who lived a pre-industrial lifestyle, so it’s hard to date the action too specifically between the beginning of the Iron Age and the coming of the Industrial Revolution. If you know where to look, however, (folklore journals) there are plenty of folktales that have been collected that include guns and automobiles and other accoutrements of the modern world.
Fairy tales that are self-consciously created by a single author BASED ON material from oral tradition are another category altogether: Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, virtually every fairy tale published for children. It’s not really possible to make a general statement about their settings.
ETA: I disagree that they are set in the “long ago and far away.” Long ago, sure, but your average narrator’s view of the past was a world much like the present, so there’s no practical difference. As for “far away,” some are generic, but many contain quite specific references to local geography.
I remember that in one of the stories in the Grimm collection, it actually says it was about two thousand years earlier, if I’m reading it correctly–it’s in a Low German (Plattdeutsch) dialect that I’m not terribly fluent in. But I agree that sometime around the 17th Century would reflect the way people imagined these stories taking place, at the time when the Grimms were compiling them.
it also depends on where they’re set. A tiny village in rural Switzerland is going to look different to a large town in Russia, even during the same era, so something like this, or this, or this, could conceivably represent any era.
There isn’t really any doubt that the core plot of many folktales goes back several thousand years (fairy tales don’t predate writing), but that’s based on the geographical diffusion and references in Homer etc. I’m not aware of any post-Bronze Age folktales with a bronze age setting, though.
That actually was attempted once. The film Ever After is a rewrite of the Cinderella story tied to a specific time and place: France in the 16th century. You’re probably right; the mythic and supernatural elements were removed, replaced by political and economic themes from the mundane world of history, such as the impact of Renaissance ideas on the feudal order.
It apparently didn’t “totally kill the fairy-tale mood” tho - that film is running at a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, and even when released the critics were pretty happy with it.
Modern takes on fairy tales abound - just like modern-day or historically specific remakes of Shakespearean plays (which were often quite fairy-tale-like themselves to original audiences due to their “long ago and far away” exotic settings.
I do think it’s considered much “safer” to just pick that generic high-middle-ages-ish “fantasy time period” for filming, at the very least because it gives your costume and set designers more leeway for creating interesting designs that aren’t limited by period fashion, much of which we would think of as quite silly these days.
I would imagine that especially the fairy tales that are devoid of any trappings of hierarchical social organization could, conceivably, go back to the Stone Age. As part of an ongoing effort to improve my listening comprehension in German, I recently listened to the Frau Holle story (Mother Hulda in English, I think). The story is essentially about two sisters, one beautiful and hardworking, the other ugly and lazy, who, one after the other, agree to spend time working for the titular figure. They get rewarded according to their performance as you might expect. Meanwhile, Frau Holle herself seems to be some sort of primeval weather spirit, because one of the assigned tasks is to shake the feather bed to make it snow on Earth. The girls get into Frau Holle’s world by falling down a well, but paradoxically that world seems to be in the sky somewhere. IIRC the word for “well”, “fountain”, and “spring” are all the same in German, so I can’t be sure. In the context it might suggest a stage in technological development when we didn’t know how to dig wells or build fountains. If I heard aright, the first sister loses a spindle in this spring and has to dive in to look for it, but I don’t recall her actually falling the way it would happen in a well.
After listening to the story it struck me that there are no kings, queens, princes, or princesses, nor any elaborate balls, castles, palaces, or clothing, possibly suggesting a time before such stratification of human society existed.
