How can we parse our curious fascination with fairy tales, which persists while the times change and we change with them? The years between 2010 and 2015 have witnessed a spate of significant new books, including—over two centuries after the fact—the very first translation into English of the Grimm brothers’ original edition of fairy and folk tales, their 1812 Kinder- und Haus-Märchen, a collection far more terse, simple of language, and brutish than later editions, especially the 1857 edition most English readers have previously known. Jack Zipes, its eminent translator, additionally produced in 2015 a volume of new scholarship on their impact and afterlife: Grimm Legacies: The Magic Spell of Grimm’s Folk and Fairy Tales. The previous year, Marina Warner, too, brought forth Once Upon a Time: A Short History of Fairy Tale, in the pages of which breathless readers are swept away as if on a magic carpet and rewarded with intellectual adventures compressed into the tight Oxford series format.

To Warner, who has spent a lifetime pondering them, fairytales are “stories that try to find the truth and give us glimpses of greater things” and, she claims, “this is the principle that underlies their growing presence in writing, art, cinema, dance, song.” Truth in fairy tales matters also to Italo Calvino, another great lover of them, who, as Warner notes, deems them more honest than verismo because they own up to their fictitiousness. Yet others love fairy tales for the apparently opposite reason: novelist A.S. Byatt praises the “untrue” nature of fairy tale, by which I take her to mean its obvious magic, sorcery, and spells, its speaking cats (as in Puss in Boots) and its wish-granting fish (The Fisherman and his Wife), its avenging pigeons and enchanted trees (Cinderella), and its impossible plot twists resolved by uncanny metamorphoses that provide eerie yet satisfying “returns” to something both deeply known and unknown (The Frog King; The Frog Prince; The Summer and the Winter Garden, which is the Grimm brothers’ 1812 version of Beauty and the Beast). All that seems clear. But in that case, wherein precisely lies fairy tale truth?

Zipes might argue that its truth stems from an engagement with its conditions of origin. As he has persuasively shown, both in his most recent book and in many previous ones, the tales reflect the cultures from which they sprang. When primogeniture held sway, for example, the tales gave rise to heroic roles for youngest sons, thereby compensating them in fancy for their poverty and for the devaluation they suffered in daily life. Similarly, under the terms of arranged marriage, fearful girls were soothed by monsters or slimy beasts who transformed at stories’ ends into loving princes and who thereby elevated young brides class-wise as well as gentling any anxieties fueled in them by their gendered destiny. This, in other words, is “truth” as a form of resistance to convention, a reversal of expectations: truth as social protest and as dreams come true.

Yet the core of fairy tales seems to reach deeper—well beyond the delights and shocks caused by improbable events and beyond the tough substrate of socio-political opposition in pre-modern Europe—towards a species of raw, non-contingent honesty and authenticity. It is through the sharply-focused lenses of psychology, particularly those of child development, and with many a debt to Marina Warner’s incomparable erudition and insight, that we can parse some whys and wherefores of our irresistible draw into these enchanted realms.

Phillip Pullman, notable for His Dark Materials trilogy is not alone in believing that fairy tales bear no psychological heft and therefore call for no psychological discussion. “There is no psychology in a fairy tale,” he avers: “The characters have little inner life; their motives are clear and obvious.” And he goes on: “One might almost say that the characters in a fairy tale are not actually conscious.” Novelist A. S. Byatt apparently agrees, for she states that fairy tales “don’t analyse feelings.” Of course, this is superficially right. We are not privy to the inner worlds of Hans, Cinderella, or Little Conrad in the story of The Goose Girl. Indeed most fairy tale characters go unnamed; they perform no Shakespearean soliloquies; they do not ruminate aloud. Rather, they reveal their thoughts in action. But since when is action exempt from psychological scrutiny? And are there not fairy tale characters who do, on occasion, both wish and dream?