Riot Headline Book Riot’s 2024 Read Harder Challenge
Quizzes

What Fairytale Are You? Take This Quiz To Find Out

Margaret Kingsbury

Contributing Editor

Margaret Kingsbury grew up in a house so crammed with books she couldn’t open a closet door without a book stack tumbling, and she’s brought that same decorative energy to her adult life. Margaret has an MA in English with a concentration in writing and has worked as a bookseller and adjunct English professor. She’s currently a freelance writer and editor, and in addition to Book Riot, her pieces have appeared in School Library Journal, BuzzFeed News, The Lily, Parents, StarTrek.com, and more. She particularly loves children’s books, fantasy, science fiction, horror, graphic novels, and any books with disabled characters. You can read more about her bookish and parenting shenanigans in Book Riot’s twice-weekly The Kids Are All Right newsletter. You can also follow her kidlit bookstagram account @BabyLibrarians, or on Twitter @AReaderlyMom.

Flatiron Books, publisher of Tales from the Hinterland by Melissa Albert.

A gorgeously illustrated collection of twelve original stories by the New York Times bestselling author of The Hazel Wood and The Night Country. Journey into the Hinterland, a brutal and beautiful world where a young woman spends a night with Death, brides are wed to a mysterious house in the trees, and an enchantress is killed twice—and still lives. Perfect for new readers and dedicated fans alike, Tales from the Hinterland will include gorgeous illustrations by Jim Tierney, foil stamping, two-color interior printing, and two-color printed endpapers.

Carl Jung and Bruno Bettelheim popularized the application of fairytales to psychology and personality traits. In The Uses of Enchantment, Bettelheim uses Freudian psychology to describe the existential quandaries children are working through based on their favorite fairytales. Children reading “Cinderella,” for example, are working through the Oedipus complex and sibling rivalry. In “Snow White,” children are beginning to notice how they cause parental turmoil and are starting to separate themselves from the parental unit. According to Bettelheim, phallic symbols pervade fairytales, such as the beanstalk in “Jack and the Beanstalk.” It’s since been revealed that Bettelheim abused the children placed under his care and plagiarized much of his work from psychiatrist Julius Heuscher. Despite this, his work remains popular and has influenced both fairytale scholarship and therapy practices.

Carl Jung’s research into archetypal images in myth and fairytales and how they relate to dreams and the subconscious sprouted a field of psychoanalysis and folklore scholarship perhaps best exemplified in Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales by Jungian psychologist and Carl Jung student Marie-Louise von Franz. In Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales, Franz explores the lessons about human behavior and thinking tucked away in fairytales, and how important it is to acknowledge these stories as being part of a person’s core being.

Today, fairytales have successfully been used in therapy sessions, from couples therapy to children’s therapy to narrative therapy. (If you want to read a fictionalized account of how fairytales are used in therapy, check out this beautiful Charles Yu short story published in The New Yorker: “Fable.”) And beyond the scholarly implications of using fairy tales as personality indicators, their universality and familiarity make them both an easy and fun way for anyone to assess their and other people’s personalities.

Whether you prefer dark and twisted fairytales or their Disney counterparts, this quiz will assign you a fairytale and tell you a little bit about your greatest strengths and weaknesses in the process.

Take The Fairytale Quiz Now And Discover Your Fairytale

And if you’re looking for more fairytale content, check out these posts: