In the 1980s, when I had my little house in the Montanare di Cortona, friends with small children often came to stay. If the nippers hadn't had a rest, the glimmering evenings and long suppers on the terrace were apt to collapse in screaming cacophony. We had no TV and the radio was in Italian, so I had no way of keeping the children still and quiet during the siesta other than to tell them a story. Therefore, after lunch, when the day was at its hottest, I would pile them on to my big bed and, propping myself up with pillows in the middle, I would tell them the story of the most beautiful frog in the world, as, one by one, they fell asleep.

The littlest ones fell asleep first and so missed a good deal of the story. Everybody missed some, because it was hard to tell which of the heap of children was still awake, and I had to keep on with my tale until I was sure everyone was fast asleep. That meant that each time, before I could get going on the next episode, we had to have a synopsis. I would pretend not to remember where we had got to, and bumble and mumble, until the children, desperate to prompt my memory, had retold the story themselves, and the little ones had asked their questions. In this way I learned what they had understood and what misunderstood. What was more, the children's concerns worked their way into the story. Did the beautiful frog enjoy eating live creatures? Did they suffer? Why did the bee have to die after it had stung the stork? Why did the bee beg the frog to eat her before the ants arrived? Why does the spider have such revolting table-manners? Can a frog cry?

What I was doing was as old as the human race, and women have always done it. Even the most refined aristocrat of antiquity would have been told nursery stories by his first attendants, who were illiterate slaves and peasants. When it came to building a fanciful narrative of his own, he would recycle the same elements, changing them fundamentally in the process. The idiom of the original tale had to be standardised, and the events reinterpreted, to make the kind of sense that educated people would recognise, even to the point of ironic subversion of the fantastical elements in the story. Illiterate women went on providing the staple of the repertoire at the same time as educated people were turning their own variants of the tales into literature. As long as neither the women nor the children they told their tales to could read, the two kinds of tale-telling could flourish side by side.

The first collector of popular tales for print is known to us now as Gianfrancesco Straparola, who was connected with the Venetian publisher Comin de Trino. As "Stra-parola" means something like "crazy talk", we may be sure that this was not the real name of the author of the Piacevoli Notti (1550–1556). Following the convention established by Boccaccio's Decamerone (1353), the Straparola tales are set in a framing narrative, a 13-day party at the palace of the Bishop of Lodi on the island of Murano during carnevale; the narrators are 13 ladies. Two of the tales are recounted in dialect, one in Bergamasco and another in Paduan. The Straparola stories are pretty good examples of the kinds of stories old peasant women tell. The fashionable lady who tells the five stories on the second night pretends that the second of her tales is set in Bohemia, but it soon becomes clear that we are dealing with a story about the people living on the shores of the lagoon.

A poor spinner has two daughters, Cassandra and Adamantina. When she dies she has nothing to leave her daughters but a box of tow. Cassandra spins a pound of it into thread and sends Adamantina to market to sell the thread and buy bread with the proceeds. Adamantina meets an old woman who has in her lap a doll, of a kind manufactured in Marghera and Mestre and known as a poavala. Adamantina falls in love with the poavala and persuades its owner to take the thread in exchange for it. When she arrives home with the doll and no bread, Cassandra is so disappointed that she flies into a rage and beats Adamantina so soundly that she can barely move. Adamantina does not retaliate. At bedtime she brings the doll close to the fire, takes off its clothes, lays it on a woollen cloth, and, putting a little olive oil in the palm of her hand, gently massages its belly and lower back. Then she wraps it in the softest cloths she can find and lays it in bed beside her. She has not finished her first sleep when the doll begins to cry, "Mamma, mamma, caca!" (The missing "c" in "cacca" betrays Venetian dialect.) Adamantina gently asks the doll to wait until she has spread her apron under its bottom. The doll bears down and fills the apron with gold coins. This she does night after night, and the orphan girls have all their modest needs supplied.

A jealous neighbour steals the doll and tries the same trick, but this time the doll produces a stinking mess of faeces. Infuriated, the neighbour throws the doll out of the window and on to a heap of rubbish in the street. Peasants collecting the refuse to spread on the fields as manure throw the doll on to their cart and carry it off to the mainland. The king, riding by on his way to the hunt, feels a call of nature, gets down from his horse and voids his bowels. His servant can find nothing better to offer his majesty to wipe his behind on than the rag doll. No sooner has the king thrust the doll between his buttocks than it bites him hard and will not let go. Try as they might, the courtiers cannot detach the doll, which not only sinks its teeth deeper and deeper into the royal rear, but uses its hands to twist and wring the king's sonagli (his hanging bells) until he sees stars. To cut the old wives' story short, Adamantina hears of the king's plight, comes to fetch her beloved doll, ends the king's agony and marries the king, and they live happily ever after.

This is not one of the Straparola stories that his aristocratic successors chose to imitate. It stems directly from rural living conditions, in which the management of human waste is essential, complex and demanding. Where there are no toilets, no nappies and no piped water, babies' attendants simply hold them clear of tables or chairs or other people as they excrete. When they can toddle, little girls are dressed in skirts with no knickers and little boys in split trousers, as they gradually learn how to tell what they need to do and where to squat to do it, but there are many accidents along the way. A story like this keys into the manifold anxieties connected with toilet training and with the management of a small baby, which often fell to an older child, when its mother was needed elsewhere. Rubbing a baby's stomach with warm olive oil is a good way to ease gripes and stimulate a bowel movement. As the context of Straparola's retelling is the entertainment of literate people, his version of the tale is self-consciously rustic, while straightforward ribaldry has become suggestion. The framing narrative follows it with a riddle involving sonagli, to which there is an obvious, obscene answer. When the lady who offers it is scolded, she turns the tables by providing an equally valid non-obscene answer. Such ironic jeux d'esprit are utterly foreign to the old wives' tale.

When the tales collected by Giambattista Basile during his travels in Naples, Crete and Venice were published by his sister, with the title Lo cunto de li cunti overo lo trattenimiento de peccerille ("the story of stories or the entertainment of little people") in 1634, two years after his death, they were found in Neapolitan dialect. The collection was later known as the Pentamerone. Basile provided his successors with the basic plots of the stories of Cinderella, Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty and Hansel and Gretel. As he knew that his readers would all be people of his own class, he elaborated his style with purple passages of description, but in a story such as "La Mortella (The Myrtle)", we can still discern traits typical of its humble beginning as an old wives' tale.

The story begins with a woman wishing for a child, any kind of child, even if it is only a sprig of myrtle. She does give birth – to a sprig of myrtle. She and her husband put the sprig in a pot, set it in the window and love it more than a daughter. The prince riding by sees it and coaxes them to sell it to him. He tends to the plant's every need with his own hands. One night, a woman comes unseen to his bed; in the morning she is gone. She comes again the next and every night thereafter. After seven nights the prince ties her hair to his arm so that she cannot escape, and she has no choice but to confess that by day she is his myrtle bush. She and the prince pledge their love. One day, the prince tells her that he has to go on a boar hunt, and asks her to turn herself back into a myrtle bush for the duration. She tells him to hang a bell on her and ring it when he wants her back in human form. While he is gone seven wicked sisters break into his apartment, see the myrtle and ring the bell. When the bush turns into a beautiful young woman, they tear her to pieces, all except the youngest of them, who does not join in. The prince's chamberlain puts the pieces of her body back into the pot; they sprout and, when the prince returns, his beloved reappears and he gets permission from his father to marry her. At the wedding, he asks the congregation what punishment they think appropriate for anyone who would tear his wife to pieces. The seven sisters suggest live burial, and so are walled up in an underground dungeon, all except the youngest, whom the prince marries to his loyal chamberlain.

Basile elaborates his story in a very adult way: here is his description of the prince's discovery of a woman in his bed:

Instead of the prickles of a hedgehog in his hand, he found a sweet thing finer and softer than barbary wool, more supple and tender than a marten's tail, more delicate than thistledown . . .

The ur-tale as told by women is innocent of such embellishments. It offers no explanations of events and makes no attempt to moralise. The object is to amaze and appal, to stretch the limits of the child's imagination. The story often turns on preoccupations of women – impregnation, pregnancy, childbirth, childloss, rape and domestic violence – in various coded forms. In "La Mortella", we begin with a woman longing for a child, which turns into a variant of monstrous birth, and then into an inversion of the Cupid and Psyche theme, in which it is the female lover who comes unseen by night. The miscreants who enact the sparagmos of the heroine by tearing her into a hundred pieces are also female. The sheer preposterousness of the idea of a woman's giving birth to a sprig of myrtle is typical of the naive tale. If it is to enjoy the tale, the child must not balk at this initial impossibility. The mystic significance of the myrtle is irrelevant to the tale-teller and the tale, however important it may be for academics.

Even a tale with a male hero, such as Jack and the Beanstalk, is centered in the female world. Jack's most important relationship is with his mother, who resorts to violence to discipline him, without success. His climbing the beanstalk can be seen as an attempt to escape to the superior masculine world, which turns out to be the realm of an ogre, whose wife is Jack's only ally. The world at the top of the beanstalk is a mirror image of the world below, except that it is dominated by a destructive male who is eventually made to crash to the ground when Jack cuts down the beanstalk. The old wives who first told the story cast themselves in the story in two familiar roles, the bad mother (Jack's lone parent) and the good mother (the brutal father figure's gentle wife).

It is easy to see how the expression "old wives' tale" could come to mean a superstitious, irrational and untrue statement, which is to be rejected out of hand. Even the Oxford dictionary defines an old wife's fable, story or tale as "a foolish story, such as is told by garrulous old women". I dare say my story of the most beautiful frog in the world was foolish; the frog in question was far too like a human child, but it isn't foolish to tell a story in which the frog heroine is in constant danger of being eaten and keeps making friends with the very animals that are most likely to eat her. Like most tales of its foolish kind, my story was didactic but it did not moralise. The little frog is exposed to terrible dangers but I made no attempt to make it seem her own fault. Meanwhile, the children squealed and cried and clapped and cheered, and fell asleep. If the child's imagination is to work, the story must not be explained away, nor should the child intuit what the grown-up's reason for telling such a tale might be. Cautionary tales emerge from a very different mindset.

Women teach babies and children to speak, which is the same as teaching them to think. An integral part of this activity is waking up their imagination, to see the numinousness of the real world, giving them, to adapt Wordsworth's phrase, glimpses that would make them less forlorn. Wordsworth gives examples of two fables from antiquity, Proteus rising from the sea, and Triton blowing his wreathed horn. The old wife who lives by the sea is more apt to tell the tale of the silkie, or the miraculous catch of the fish with a ring in its mouth, or the little mermaid. The old woman who lives in the woods will tell a tale of bears and pixies. When I lived in Calabria, the peasant children would put out food for the monachicchi, the spirits of children who had died unbaptised, whose cold baby fingers caressed your face as you walked through the olive groves at night. When they gathered up the empty plates in the morning, maybe the children and their mothers felt a little closer to the ones they had lost – not so foolish after all. We knew that the cold fingers were gossamer and not baby fingers; we believed even as we disbelieved.

Most of women's poetry and story-telling has been swallowed up in the maw of time. Because the authors of old wives' tales tales were not literate, because the tales were variants of traditional themes, because the people who told them were women and the people who heard them were children, they were phenomena of no account. From the earliest times, such narratives have been treated with contempt. Educated people were only too happy to forget them, and to embrace the culture associated with the elite. If the old tales were ever remembered by the masculine elite, they were parodied as rustic and absurd. There are a very few exceptions. One of them is George Peele, a university man, who translated Euripides and could turn his hand to almost any kind of writing.

In 1593 or so Peele wrote an odd play called The Old Wives' Tale, which gives us a rare insight into the tales told by old women. It opens with three little pages who have lost their way in the forest, trying to keep up their spirits as they prepare to see out the long, cold night sheltering in a tree. Then Clunch the smith turns up. Though his cottage has only one sleeping place and he is too poor to afford spare bedding, he offers them shelter and takes them home with him. The smith's old wife, Madge, offers them her home-made meat pudding and cheese but the little boys, aware that their hosts can ill afford to give away any of their slender provisions, refuse the over-generous offer. One of them begs her to give them a story instead.

Methinks, Gammer, a merry winter's tale would drive away the time trimly. Come, I am sure you are not without a score.

An old wives' tale is the same thing as a winter's tale. Winter was the season of long, dark evenings, when most peasant families had to huddle together indoors with no light but what came from the fire. When Shakespeare called his play The Winter's Tale, he was deliberately invoking the imaginative realm of the rambling tales told by firelight, of the jealous husband, the rejected child, the princess brought up as a peasant, and the king's son in disguise. The play is an old wives' tale about an old wife, who endures long separation from her husband and the death of her son, and is reunited with her husband at the end. (Any parallel with the career of Ann Shakespeare may not be entirely coincidental.) Because it is an old wives' tale, the play can roam from Bohemia to Sicily and back again, and encompass 16 years.

In Peele's play the pages begin to clamour for just such a tale.

Look you, Gammer, of the giant and the king's daughter, and I know not what. I have seen the day when I was a little one, you might have drawn me a mile after you with such a discourse.

Her story begins as you would expect:

Once upon a time, there was a king, a lord or a duke that had a fair daughter, the fairest that ever was, as white as snow and as red as blood, and once upon a time his daughter was stolen away, and he sent all his men to seek out his daughter, and he sent so long that he sent all his men out of the land.

One of the pages makes a smart remark, and Madge replies: "Nay, either hear my tale or kiss my tail."

The old wife's rather confused narrative is interrupted by the entrance of characters from her repertoire. What follows is a portmanteau fairy tale, which plaits together familiar themes, the shape-changing sorcerer (Sacrapant), the enchanted man at the crossroads who begs from all the other characters and foresees their fates, which he expresses in rhyming riddles – one who turns into a bear at night, the brothers seeking their stolen sister, the wandering knight, the braggart, the grateful dead, the two sisters, one fair and ill-natured, one "black" and sweet-natured, the head in the well. The play could only have worked because Peele's audience recognised the motifs and appreciated his ingenuity in reconciling themes from so many different types of tale and from so many versions of those types.

The French salonnières who began telling highly wrought contes des fées in the 1670s were unlikely to have read Straparola, Basile, Peele or Shakespeare. The story motifs used by all the collectors of tales could be found in parallel versions all over Europe. The challenge was to spin the basic tale into an artifice that displayed enough verve, charm and elegance to impress a coterie of connoisseurs. Even so, the roots of the salon fairy tale in the old wives' tale are fairly easy to trace. The version of the Cinderella story told by Marie-Catherine, Baronne d'Aulnoy, for example, is uncompromisingly sinister.

A king and a queen have three daughters. When they lose their kingdom and fall into poverty, the queen says that she can make nets so that the king can catch birds and fish for the two of them to eat, but they will have to get rid of their daughters. The youngest, Finette, hears her parents talking and resolves to visit her fairy godmother. Her godmother gives her a ball of magic thread to help her find her way back from anywhere her mother might take her. The next day the mother takes the girls to a meadow. When they lie down to sleep, she sneaks off and leaves them there. Finette leads her sisters home again and their mother pretends that she had meant to return for them all along. The next day she takes them further away, and abandons them again, and again Finette leads them home. The third time the mother succeeds in shaking them off, and they are left to fend for themselves. Finette is a courageous and resourceful girl who succeeds in various exploits, including cutting an ogress's head off while she is dressing her hair, but because she offends her fairy godmother by not rejecting her sisters she loses her support. Her sisters, who are as hostile to her as her mother was, rob her and beat her. When her foot fits the slipper and she marries the prince and her adventurous career is over, we are almost disappointed.

In modern versions of ancient tales, the tension that characterises the relationship of mother and daughter is usually encoded. The father's sexual partner is more likely to be presented as a stepmother than a mother, for example, but it is a ruse that should fool no one. In cruder versions of fairy tales, the monstrous mother is a regular presence. Snow-White-Fire-Red, for example, has an ogress for a mother, who wants to eat her young lover. The witches too are mother figures, even when they are cannibals (especially when they are cannibals). Every mother is a giant witch to her small child sometimes.

The elegant female authors of the rococo fairy tale, Madame D'Aulnoy, Madame de Murat and the Mesdemoiselles L'Héritier de Villandon, Bernard, and de la Force would all have been horrified to be called old wives. They were youngish ladies, whose versions of old themes are encrusted with rococo artifice. The spectre of the old wife was still close enough for Charles Perrault to issue Histoires et Contes du Temps Passé, Avec des Moralités or Contes de ma Mere l'Oye in 1697 under his son's name rather than his own.

Though Perrault presents himself as an antiquarian collector, he is no more content simply to record the story as it was told to him than any of his female counterparts. His versions are meant to inculcate in well brought up young women of the urban middle class a clear understanding of the right way to behave; in his version, the story of Little Red Riding Hood displays the folly of talking to strangers. The tale has endured over centuries in oral form because it teases out fears and desires deeply embedded in children's fantasies. The human world of Red Riding Hood is usually entirely female; the only male is an animal. The many versions contain some or all of the following elements. A girl is sent by her mother to visit her sick grandmother. She meets a wolf on the way and tells him exactly where she is going. The wolf gets there first, eats the grandmother and takes her place in the bed. The wolf tells the little girl to eat the blood and meat he has left for her, that is to share his crime by eating her grandmother, to take off her clothes, throw them in the fire, and to get into bed with him. In some versions she outwits him and escapes, and in others the wolf eats her too, and sometimes the wolf is cut open and she and her grandmother are reborn by Caesarean section, while the wolf's belly is filled with stones and it is thrown in the river. All of these themes have to do with being a wombed creature, inside whom other creatures may dwell. Children who regularly witnessed pregnancy and birth, both animal and human, would obviously have puzzled over the bloodiness, the danger and the mystery of both. The person who sat by the fire and retold the old story had every opportunity to tailor her tale to the emotional context, the better to help the child deal with whatever was toward, but her primary aim was to stimulate the child's sense of wonder and its awareness of vulnerability, both essential to survival in the rural world. The explicit moral drawn by Perrault is sexist, urban and bourgeois. The core story is none of those.

When the Brothers Grimm collected the story from German sources, it had already been influenced by Perrault's literary version, which was the first to specify that the heroine's hood was red. Jeanette Hassenpflug is supposed to have told the tale of Little Red Riding Hood to the elder Grimm, and Marie Hassenpflug to the younger. For the first edition of their collection Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812), the brothers used both versions, turning the second story into a sequel to the first and calling it Rotkäppchen. They revised the story several times, using supplementary material, some of it told them by Henriette Dorothea Wild, who married Wilhelm Grimm in 1825. By degrees the monstrous fantasy that underlies the core story was exorcised and it became a mere cautionary tale. The old wife did not need to point her moral; if she wished her hearers to judge the events she was describing in her story and come to specific conclusions, she had only to stress different elements in it. If she wanted children to think that the wolf got to her grandmother because Little Red Riding Hood was indiscreet, she had only to tell the story that way. If, on the other hand, she wanted to make them aware of wolves as a constant danger, she told the story in a different way again.

Little Red Riding Hood is an outgrowth of the motif of the woman coupled with a carnivorous beast, which is what we would expect of a culture in which women married young and husbands were more likely than wives to survive. Every child attending a parish church would have witnessed the burial of women who had died in childbirth, some with their newborns in their arms, others with babies not yet born. The fact that nobody discussed such matters with children would have made the events all the more frightening. Evidence of the terror of virgins marrying men who had buried several wives can be found only rarely, and then in devotional literature. The only other place it could be expressed was in encoded form in fantastic fables. Charles Perrault is credited with the invention of the story of Bluebeard, which is clearly indebted to folk tales. If we consider that a nobleman was more likely to have married very young wives than a peasant (who needed a grown woman with her full complement of skills) and that these women endured their first pregnancies at the ages of 14 and 15, we can see at once that marriage to a nobleman was a high-risk business. Rumours ossify into legends. In some versions of the tale, as in the tale of Conomor the Accursed, the Bluebeard figure kills his wives when they become pregnant.

There are thousands of learned discussions of fairy tales but very few that approach them from the old wives' perspective, with the result that the obvious goes unnoticed. The theme of the father who wants to marry his daughter, for example, can be seen both as a coded version of the daughter's desire for the father and of her anxiety about possible abuse by her father. The fatal mother – aka the witch, aka the ogress – is an aspect of motherhood itself. Fear and loathing and mother love inhabit the same body. The nexus is nowhere more obviously or more profoundly expressed than in the paintings of Paula Rego, which return again and again to the visceral reality behind the fantastic narrative. Rego was told stories from the time she was a child, because she was afraid of the dark. As she explained in a recent interview, "Most of the things I do are based on Portuguese folk tales, which are not folksy. They were jotted down at the turn of the century by anthropologists, who would go into the villages and the mountains and take down these stories, which are brutal and magical as well. And it is those stories that I have adored and revered all my life." Her interlocutors can barely grasp what she is saying, because she is an old wife herself, and old wives neither explain nor moralise. "There is nothing more violent or tender than old Portuguese tales. This is what we must preserve. This is the truth in us all," she says. Every long-gone old wife, who sat by the fire, shelling chestnuts for the littl'uns, and spinning her tale through the long, dark winter evening, would know what Rego means.