Finding the earliest version of any given common fairy tale is an almost impossible endeavor.Before the Grimm Brothers gathered their collection of well-known German folk fairy tales,these stories followed an oral tradition,being passed on from grandmother to mother to children.What you may not know is that these earliest oral versions of our most popular fairy tales,and in some instances the earliest print version, are far from the clean-cut good guy always wins tales we utilize to lull our children to sleep at night.The earlier versions of our classic fairy tales included stories of murder, cannibalism, rape,etc.Early collections of tales often bore some semblance to our modern fairy tales but it was not until 1634 that we find our first recorded fairy tales.Giambattista Basile wrote Il Pentamerone (the Tale of Tales).Due to its obscure and difficult to translate Neapolitan dialect,the collection was not first published in Italian until 1747,German in 1846,and English in 1848.