'F' is for Fables and Fairy Tales

Castles are often a part of fairy tales, such as in Cinderella

I believe our first introduction into Fantasy is via the fables and fairy tale stories of our youth.  Three groups come to mind:  Aesop's Fables, HansChristian Andersen, and the brothers Grimm Fairy Tales.  From the lessons learned in The Tortoise and the Hare (Aesops), to the sad tale of The Little Mermaid (Hans Andersen), and then the romantic story of Sleeping Beauty and the scary Little Red Riding Hood from the Grimm brothers.

Many of these stories have been Disney-washed for the movie industry, but in their original form, were quite frightening or very sad.

Wikipedia Definitions:
A fable is a brief, succinct story, in prose or verse, featuring  animals, plants, inanimate objects, or forces of nature which are anthropomorphized (given human qualities), and that illustrates a moral lesson, which may at the end be expressed explicitly in a pithy maxim.

Fairy tale is a type of short narrative that typically features such folkloric characters, such as fairies, goblins, elves, trolls, dwarves, giants or gnomes, and usually magic or enchantments. However, only a small number of the stories refer to fairies. The stories may nonetheless be distinguished from other folk narratives such as legends (which generally involve belief in the veracity of the events described) and explicitly moral tales, including beast fables.

Here is where we find talking trees in dark forests, dwarves, giants, hares that run races against tortoises, scary wolves that talk to little girls and gobble up their grandmothers, witches with candy houses, frogs that turn into princes when kissed, princesses awakened with a kiss, princesses turned into swans, girls falling into tunnels that lead to great adventures, journey to places with little people, or to a giant at the top of a magic bean pole, cats with boots, a wizard called Merlin, fairies in the garden, mermaids, elves, and a myriad of other weird and magical creatures.

I remember my father reading us the story of Peter Pan.  You couldn't get more magical then that, and it had a fairy in the story too.  I loved reading all those wonderful stories when I got older to read them for myself.  I particularly like the stories by C.S. Lewis which has now become so popular in the young generation of today, no doubt because of the movie, The Chronicals of Narnia.