Why is a fairy tale always ending with “they lived happily ever after.”?
It’s a fairly contemporary addition to fairy tales. Nowadays if you want to define what makes a fairy tale a fairy tale you’d say it involves magic and ends happily ever after. Or it has a “fairy tale” ending. Two centuries ago, they were stories with magic in them. Several centuries before they were just consider folklore. Most of the stories that we think of as fairy tales weren’t originally a separate genre. During the time of the Renaissance fairy tales started to become fairy tales not just folklore or tales. Madame d’Aulnoy coined the term “contes de fees” for her stories. This was eventually translated into fairy tales. Around the same time Charles Perrault was writing down, for the first time, traditional folktales. They would become the earliest recorded versions of some of the most popular fairy tales. A few centuries, give or take later, the Brothers Grimm started publishing collections of folklore, even rewriting a few of Perrualt’s. Add in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy t
