Such written forms came from oral stories and were influenced by oral stories. The Brothers Grimm refused to include some of the stories in their collection, even though they had been told orally by Germans, claiming that these stories had also been influenced by Berret's work and were therefore French rather than German; Thus the oral version of the Bluebeard story was rejected, as was the story of the Prior Rose. It was very clearly influenced by Berret's Sleeping Beauty story. But it was added because Jacob Grimm's figure of Brynhild suggested that the Sleeping Beauty tale was strictly a Germanic oral tale.

Whether or not Sleeping Beauty should be included reflected a common belief among 19th-century public oral storytellers: that the folk tradition preserved fairy tales in their prehistoric form until such written stories "changed the character" and led people to tell unsavory stories.[41] Rural, illiterate and uneducated lay people, if properly identified, are themselves folk who tell many oral stories. Sometimes they tell parts of stories that were the whole story in ancient times.However, these studies have concluded that fairy tales were not always in one particular form, although they were influenced by other literary forms and were constantly adapted by storytellers to suit their needs.

The work of the Brothers Grimm had an influence on other collectors as well, resulting in their collection of stories and a romantic nationalism that led them to believe in their following. That is, fairy tales of a country are representations of that country to avoid cross-cultural influencespublished),[30] the Romanian Peter Ispresu (first published in 1874), the British by Joseph Jacobs (first published in 1890)[30] and the American Jeremiah Curtin, who collected Irish stories (first published in 1890).[ 45] Ethnologists have collected many fairy tales from around the world and found similar stories in Africa, the Americas, and Australia; In his "colorful" series of fairy tales, Andrew Long drew inspiration for stories from the written stories of Europe and Asia, as well as from the collections of ethnographers.[46] They also inspired other collectors of fairy tales, with Lang's encouragement when Yei Theodora Ozaki created a collection, Japanese Fairy Tales (1908), which originated.At the same time, writers such as Hans Christian Andersen and George MacDonald continued to create written fairy tales. Although Andersen's work was sometimes influenced by older oral tales, the newer stories used fairy tale forms and plot elements.Macdonald used fairy tales both in his novelistic fairy tales, such as The Light Princess, and in works that could be classified as fantasy, such as The Princess and the Goblin or Lilith.