Fairy tales are a curious genre of literature. Their origins float around in an unfathomable past ravelled up in one another like the tangled roots of water vegetation. Their contents are equally inextricable: ‘There was and there was not a time’, Angela Carter tells us, is the invariable opening of Armenian fairy tales – only marginally more equivocal than our own version – and indeed, both the history and the contents of fairy tales thrive on the mystique of their own elusiveness.

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