In 2011, D.J. McIntosh took the book world by storm with her debut novel, The Witch of Babylon. Of the sequel, The Book of Stolen Tales, New York Times bestselling author Katherine Neville says, "D.J. McIntosh has taken fables and fairy-tales that we thought we knew as children and strung them together to create glittering clues to a dark and terrifying secret hidden at the very heart of modern-day Mesopotamia. A fabulous read!”

Here, D.J. shares a few revelations about the origins of fairy tales she learned while researching The Book of Stolen Tales.

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Summer’s leisurely long weekends and blissful weeks of vacation are a perfect fit for reading. The warm days of our long northern summers and quiet nights give us permission to indulge and call a temporary halt to the deluge of texting, emails, and being all things to all people so we can escape for a little while. It’s a magical time.

The Celts, in fact, believed the magic of midsummer to be one of the few sacred points where the veil between our everyday world and the spiritual sphere becomes transparent. Small wonder the great bard called his famous fairy tale A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Fairy tales captivated me on my own early summers at Lake Couchiching, Ontario. The Zen-like drone of cicadas, the scent of wild roses in the air, the burst of fireflies as evening descended all seemed to simulate the magic and myth of those stories.

This July marks the end of the year celebrating the 200th anniversary of the Grimm Brothers’ first fairy tale anthology. Almost two hundred years before that, The Tale of Tales, the earliest European anthology of fairy tales, was written by poet and courtier Giambattista Basile and published in his beloved city of Naples. An instant bestseller, Basile’s fascinating personal story and dark fables inspired me to write The Book of Stolen Tales.

My research on fairy tales made me aware that as well as magic, there is often more than a small dose of grim (but fascinating!) real-life inspiration for the earliest versions. For example:

• The Pied Piper’s town, Hamelin, really exists in Lower Saxony; a window can still be seen in a German church that recounts the loss of the town’s children.
• A “talking mirror” was actually made at the famous Lohr Mirror Works in the eighteenth century. It hangs today in the Bavaria’s Spessart Museum.
• Giambattista Basile was the first to name “Cinderella” but his heroine connived with her governess to kill her stepmother only to have the tables turned when the governess married her father and forced Cinderella to become a kitchen maid.  

• Snow White might very well have been based on a real-life German beauty named Margareta von Waldeck whose jealous stepmother sent her to the Spanish court at Brussels in the hope she’d gain a prominent marriage. The plan succeeded too brilliantly, for the soon to be Spanish King, Phillip II, fell deeply in love with Margareta. The Spanish court could not tolerate such a liaison. The young woman died at the age of twenty-one and some believe she was poisoned.
• In the first Little Red Riding Hood, the wolf was a werewolf. Terrifying cases of rabies affecting wolves and foxes in the forbidding dark forests of the countryside gave rise to the notion of  people transforming into werewolves after they were bitten.

Learning about the origins of the stories I loved as a child has proved an inspiring experience. Whatever the truth behind the tales, they have a powerful hold on our imagination and a much longer history than the European literate age. All the way back to ancient times when myths and legends were first spun as ways to commemorate and make sense of the world around us.