The top 10 fairytales

Consolatory fantasies or wise counsel? Materialist lies or emancipatory dreams? Popular trash or the fundamental structure of imaginative literature? Fairytales still provoke vigorous argument. Advocates point to the way they ignite the imagination and spark hopes of liberty. Detractors attack their suspect artistic quality and their damaging social and moral effects. Both take up their positions on ethical grounds, because fairytales continue to dominate family entertainment in books and other media. They matter because young minds and the shaping of values are at stake. Yet what they mean and what effects they have remain open questions.

When I first began working on fairytales, they weren’t really considered a proper subject of study, and I felt inhibited about my enjoyment of them: was I betraying my feminist loyalties? Was I letting down the cause of high art and serious literature? But fairytales had grown up in the 70s: Anne Sexton’s savage poems and Angela Carter’s celebrated revisionings took them out of the nursery. Since then, they have been growing ever darker and more disturbing, especially as the Grimm brothers’ violent, deadpan ways of telling now dominate definitions of the genre. On the one hand, they are merging with gothic macabre and comic menace and, on the other, are gradually becoming intertwined with deep psychological explorations of tragedy and myth. Parents are rightly puzzled as to whether they should be reading them to their children, though children relish the gore and vengeance.

The most lingering and powerful tales don’t always have an original written text, but shapeshift through time, bobbing about on the streams of story. I’ve tried to choose 10 of the most inspiring, and include some of the great collectors; but as in any exercise of this kind, there are so many that I have had to leave out.

1. The Juniper Tree by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

A ferocious tale of family strife, cannibalism, magic and restoration, it crystallises the stark character of the Grimms’ collection (interestingly, it was collected and written down by the great romantic dreamer-artist of spooky children, Philipp Otto Runge).

2. The Snow Queen by Hans Christian Andersen

Andersen can be mawkish and morally mean, but this story is as near-perfect a fairytale as can be: the boy Kai, in frozen thrall to a cruel, enchanting mother figure, is saved by the loyalty and courage of Gerda.

3. The Golden Ass or the Transformation of Lucius by Apuleius

It includes The Tale of Cupid and Psyche, the forerunner of so many enchantments and central fairytale motifs: invisible spirits serving delicious banquets, scheming jealous sisters, a mysterious, threatening bridegroom who turns out to be Love himself … The book gave Shakespeare the idea for Bottom’s dream, in the most magical of his fairy plays. I like the Robert Graves translation partly because it is a bit old-fashioned in its wit and ornament.

4. The Tiger’s Bride (from The Bloody Chamber) by Angela Carter

Carter wanted “to put new wine into old bottles and watch them explode”; this is Beauty and the Beast transformed with one of the most delicious closing love scenes from the cognoscente of such delights. A firework display of style, transgressive erotics, elegance, and pleasure.

5. The Tale of Camar al-Zaman and Princess Badoura

It’s hard to pick a single story from Arabian Nights, but this surpasses Aladdin or Ali Baba in wonders and invention: rivalrous jinn, horrific ordeals surmounted, a cross-dressing heroine, and a splendid erotic scene of mistaken identity when the lovers find each other again. Wen-chin Ouyang, in her wonderfully useful recent selection from the 1001 Nights (Everyman, edited with Paulo Horta), includes it in a luscious fin-de-siècle translation.

6. Cinderella

I’m picking two variations from the thousands of possibilities: Giambattista Basile’s The Cinderella Cat, which adds anarchic mischief , madcap metaphors and some surprises to the familiar story; and Charles Perrault’s Donkeyskin, the incestuous version of the Cinderella story, told with courtly irony and humour by the author of the classic Mother Goose tales.

7. Possession by AS Byatt

Byatt dazzlingly folds many stories of enchantments, one inside the other, and embroiders on the medieval figure of Melusine, the precursor of several other watery fairies, such as Andersen’s The Little Mermaid and Undine by La Motte Fouqué.

8. Dear As Salt by Italo Calvino

This is just one of the hundreds of stories in the Italian novelist’s wonderfully rich collection from 1956 – a succinct, touching fable about the limits of love that lies behind the bleak opening scene of King Lear.

9. Mr Fox, from Joseph Jacobs’ English Folk Tales

The most spirited and satisfying Bluebeard: a trickster heroine, a perfect revenge, and the thrilling refrain “Be bold but not too bold/ Lest that your heart’s blood should run cold.” Helen Oyeyemi reworks it compellingly in her recent novel, also called Mr Fox.

10. Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie

A fabulous comic quest story starring a child hero, this novella was written in hiding after the fatwa. Like many fairytales over their long tradition, its works as a happy adventure story and as a pointed political allegory about the silencing of dissent, the horrors of despotism and the joylessness that follows them. It epitomises the capacity of fairytales to “cross over”, and speaks to the times more vividly and more necessarily than ever.

Buy Marina Warner’s Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tales at the Guardian bookshop