The Allies' Fairy Book

[4] Originally intended for adults and children alike, they contained entertaining stories with hidden moral messages.

[4] From the moment they were put in writing, they became a literary genre mainly stemming from passed down oral stories in European cultures.

The tales that arose commented on the conditions of aristocratic life while the decorative language disguised the rebellious subtext.

[citation needed] These salon tales have been preserved in the collection titled Le Cabinet des Fées.

[4][6] While the original stories were full of torture, murder, and rape, they are commonly adopted into nursery tales people of the west.

[8][9] The fairy tales in these books were not originally written as war propaganda but they were brought back to serve new political purposes.

[2] The introduction by Gosse states "It is when the hearts of country folk are hushed and silent that the mysterious voices of goblins are heard calling...".

[11] As he had many established links with European writers, Gosse also acted as literary ambassador between France and England during the war.

[12] It was during this height of influence in 1916 that Gosse published a collection of Fairy Tales from different allied forces together with Heinemann and Lippencott.

The individual fairy tales are presented per country in the following order: Jack and the Giant Killer (English), The Battle of the Birds (Scotch), Lludd and Llevelys (Welsh), Guleesh (Irish), The Sleeping Beauty (French), Cesarino and the Dragon (Italian), What Came of Picking Flowers (Portuguese), The Adventures of Little Peachling (Japanese), The Fox's Wedding (Japanese), The Tongue-cut Sparrow (Japanese), Frost (Russian), The Golden Apple Tree and the Nine Peahens (Serbian), and The Last Adventure of Thyl Ulenspiegel (Belgian).

[5][17] During the post World War II period the book industry surged again with paper back version of fairy tales being widely available.