Culture Street

Fairy tales have been popular for longer than any of us can remember. They are having a resurgence with the success of the live action retellings for film. Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella drew the crowds, paving the way for the next fairy tale live action films, which include Beauty and Beast starring Emma Watson and The Little Mermaid starring Chloe Grace Moretz.

Authors the Brothers Grimm believed many of the fairy tales they made popular, including Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, and Snow White, dated back to the birth of the Indo-European language family.

Dr Jamie Tehrani, who worked with folklorist Sara Graca Da Silva, from the New University of Lisbon said: "We can come firmly down on the side of Wilhelm Grimm. Some of these stories go back much further than the earliest literary record and indeed further back than Classical mythology - some versions of these stories appear in Latin and Greek texts - but our findings suggest they are much older than that."

After so many years, adults and children still adore the characters made famous by these fairy tales. A new series, Happily Ever After, retells many of the best-known fairy tales for a pre school audience. From Little Red Riding Hood to The Princess and the Pea, these are books to be treasured and enjoyed. The female heroines in these stories are unforgettable.

Buy the books here.