Many times the question, "What is a fairy tale?" has been asked. One has said: "The fairy tale is a poetic presentation of a spiritual truth." George MacDonald has answered: "Undine is a fairy tale." Mr. G. K. Chesterton has said: "A fairy tale is a tale told in a morbid age to the only remaining sane person, a child. A legend is a fairy tale told to men when men were sane." Some, scorning to reply, have treated the question as one similar to, "What poem do you consider best in the English language?" As there are many tales included here which do not contain a fairy, fairy tales here are taken to include tales which contain something fairy or extraordinary, the magic or the marvelous—fairies, elves, or trolls, speaking animals, trees, or a talkative Tin Soldier. The Myth proper and the Fable are both excluded here, while the pourquois tale, a myth development, and the Beast tale, a short-story fable development, are both included.
The origin of the word "fairy," as given by Thomas Keightley in his Fairy Mythology, and later in the Appendix of his Tales and Popular Fictions, is the Latin fatum, "to enchant." The word was derived directly from the French form of the root. The various forms of the root were:—
| Latin | fatum, "to enchant." | |
| French | fee, feeriee, "illusion." | |
| Italian | fata. | |
| Provençal | fada. |
