Princess and Fairy: Free Printable PDF Sheet for Kids

Princesses & Fairies: History & Fun Facts

Quick Facts

• The word “fairy” likely comes from the Old French word faerie, meaning the enchanted land where supernatural beings lived.
• Shakespeare’s Titania and Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595–1600) are among the earliest named fairy royals in English literature.
• The Brothers Grimm collected German fairy tales in 1812; many featured magical helpers similar to fairies.
• Tinker Bell in J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan (1904) helped shape the modern image of a small winged fairy with pixie dust.
• In Japanese folklore, the Yosei are fairy-like beings drawn from Chinese Taoist tradition rather than European sources.

Fairies occupy one of the oldest corners of European folklore. Irish tales from the early medieval period described the Tuatha Dé Danann — a powerful divine race who retreated underground after mortals conquered Ireland, becoming the sídhe, or fairy mounds, people. Scottish Gaelic tradition added the bean sídhe (banshee), a spirit whose wail predicted death in a family. Welsh tales described the Tylwyth Teg, fair-haired fairy people who danced at night and could grant or curse mortals who caught sight of them.

From Feared Spirits to Magical Friends

Fairies were not always the gentle helpful creatures of modern children’s books. Medieval and Renaissance folklore described them as powerful and unpredictable forces who had to be placated with gifts of milk or bread left on the doorstep. Crossing a fairy ring — a circle of mushrooms in a meadow, believed to be a fairy dancing ground — was said to pull an unlucky traveler into the fairy world with no return. The shift toward a kinder, smaller fairy image gathered pace in the 17th century with French literary fairy tales and reached its modern form in Victorian children’s books, where fairies became protectors and helpers rather than threats.

Fairy Wings in Art History

The familiar image of a fairy with insect-like wings was largely invented by 19th-century illustrators. Earlier fairies in written descriptions and paintings were not necessarily winged at all. When Victorian artists like Richard Doyle and Arthur Rackham began illustrating fairy tales for children’s books in the mid-to-late 1800s, they drew fairies with dragonfly or butterfly wings, giving them a visual language that tied them to the natural world. That wing design — large, rounded, translucent, with simple vein lines — became the accepted standard for fairy art and appears directly on the pair of fairy-princess figures in this coloring page.

The Fairy Godmother Tradition

The fairy godmother is a specific variant of the fairy helper that appeared in French literary fairy tales of the late 1600s. In Charles Perrault’s Cendrillon (Cinderella, 1697), an old woman reveals herself as the heroine’s fairy godmother and transforms her world with a magic wand. That wand — a short staff tipped with a glowing star — became the defining symbol of the fairy-princess relationship in story art. Madame d’Aulnoy and other female writers of the same period developed the fairy helper further, often depicting her as wise and kind rather than merely powerful. Their tales traveled across Europe and eventually to the Americas, cementing the princess-and-fairy pairing as one of the most recognizable scenes in the whole fairy-tale tradition.