We're so used to canonic versions of fairy tales that it's easy to forget (if we ever knew) that fairy tales come in all shapes and sizes, and have always done so. Those canonic versions are different for each one of us -- they may have first appeared in a translation from a collection based on those put together by the Brothers Grimm; we may have been introduced to the bowdlerised retellings published by Andrew Lang between 1889 and 1913; or Disney's animated films may have been our first encounter with them -- but whatever the source these usually serve as our ur-texts for as long as we each live.

So it is nearly always disconcerting to come across variations of our personal ur-texts which may be so unfamiliar as to make us doubt they belong to the same family. Marina Warner introduces nine selections for this slim volume, giving us such standard tales as 'Sleeping Beauty', 'Cinderella', 'Snow White' and 'Little Red Riding Hood' but in early literary forms that may puzzle and confuse.

The nine examples, Warner tells us, "give a sense of the liberty of the genre, its general indifference to seemliness, its 'cunning and high spirits' [. . .] and its inventiveness." The first tale is at once the earliest and one of the longest: it is a version of 'Sleeping Beauty' from Perceforest, with all the seeming waywardness that characterises much medieval romance. This is followed by extracts from Giambattista Basile's Il Pentamerone which treat the 'Cinderella' and 'Snow White' tropes in a truly fantastic fashion. Here is the horrific summary of what happened to Lisa, the Snow White figure, who secretly tells her doll about

… her mother's leap over the rose bush, her eating of the leaf, her giving birth, the spell put on her, the curse of the fairy, and all the rest about the comb on her head, her death, her enclosure in the seven caskets placed in the room, her mother's death, the legacy of the key left to the brother, his departure to the hunt, his wife's jealousy, the opening of the room against his orders, the cutting of her hair, her treatment as a slave and the many, many tortures inflicted on her.

There is a happy ending, as per the familiar 'Snow White' tale, but the details seem barely to match up with the expected 'official' account.

The two versions of what we know as 'Little Red Riding Hood' point up the differences between the literary and oral tellings. Charles Perrault includes the usual ritualised dialogue ("Grandmother, what big ears you have!" etc) though without the rescue by the huntsman; a 19th-century French oral version features instead un bzou or werewolf whom the little girl manages to thwart and elude, again with no assistance from a huntsman, and with no distinguishing clothing.

Perrault's tale of le petit poucet (referred to here as Thumberling) is clearly a variation of the Hansel and Gretel story we know from the Grimms, but introduces us to an ogre instead of a cannibalistic witch. Naturally this puts us in mind of Jack and the Beanstalk but again our expectations are confounded, for in the 18th-century chapbook version included here we encounter an enchantress (who is Jack's grandmother), while all kinds of fantastical transformations occur, Jack interacts with a princess, Prince John and the Giant Gogmagog; and the whole ends up as a metafictional piece of nonsense.

Long Ago and Far Away concludes with two celebrated literary narratives, with an abridgement of Madame de Villeneuve's Beauty and the Beast coming first. This is followed by an abridgement of Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué's Undine: this turns out to be more involved and tragic than Hans Christian Anderson's 'The Little Mermaid'; I remember first reading this in an 1896 translation by Edmund Gosse, in a hardback edition from 1912, and finding its convolutions hard to follow and accept.

Marina Warner warns us that "the folklorists of the nineteenth century laid too much emphasis on a national Geist (spirit) expressed by stories told in a certain language," while their theories of origins and narratives "was starkly schematic and has been superseded." She rightly emphasises that such tales, far from becoming fixed and static, will "undergo irrepressible transformations" despite being committed to print and, we may add, re-presented in media undreamt of by those folklorists. ( )