Are Fairy Tales Really of a Different Time?

No one tells stories, people always say. We watch the TV, we go the cinema, we scour the internet. One of the things we don't do is tell stories.
Let's look back on the works of the Brothers Grimm, the castles, the palaces, the peasants, nothing to do with people today. Wallowing in nostalgia, you could say, the nostalgia of a different age.
But if you look more closely at Grimm's Fairy Tales, you see there are connections with stories we do tell now. Take the Lying Tale, which is a short story made completely of outrageous lies such as "I saw a roast hen flying". The Fisherman and his wife resembles the Four Yorkshire man sketch done by Monty Python in the fact that the wife just wants more and more. Everything she is given she rebuffs it and wants something grander.
There are puzzles here too-a girl is transformed into a flower but can spend one night with her boyfriend. The next day comes and she returns to being a flower. The boy is told that they will be reunited if he locates which flower she has become. He is shown three flowers. He chooses the right one. Why?
Answer: Because she has been with the boyfriend all night, she as a flower is not have the morning dew.
There is also slapstick violence- someone gets killed by a large stone and the teller comments "He must have been a bad man, then," and people's heads fall off with reason. Rather at odds with the pleasant nonentity Snow White.
But now the brothers are stuck in a world with Princesses and Fairy Godmothers (actually their version of Cinderella left this part out) where people can sleep for a hundred years and dwarfs are real. Walt Disney could be partly to blame on this shift in meaning, although there are some dark parts in his fairy tale films. Note that his Sleeping Beauty contains a dragon, which though we nowadays don't connect with fairy tales, appear many times in their stories.
Maybe the problem with Grimm is we associate it too much for childhood, this 'Once Upon A Time' idea when all the Grimm brothers were doing were trying to put together an archive, the nearest thing they could get to a spoken archive in a time before recording equipment, of tales people told. If they were doing it now, they would look at sayings, rhymes, jokes and maybe half remembered references. Stories might have evolved to films and tv programmes, but the tellers live on.

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