Into the Woods is based on familiar folktales or fairy tales. The tales of Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, and Rapunzel are derived from the Brothers Grimm’s “Ashputtle”, “Little Red Cap”, and “Rapunzel”, respectively. The Brothers Grimm—Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786-1859)—were German folklorists and linguists who compiled folklore into their famous volume, Kinder-und Hausmärchen (1812–22), also known as Grimm’s Fairy Tales. (Into the Woods also makes reference to the tales of “Snow White” and “Sleeping Beauty”.)

Nina Mankin, who collected the document for the Performing Arts Journal’s casebook for Into the Woods summarizes the function of the Grimms’ story in their own context: 

Even the Brothers Grimm, living in a Germany whose pride had been sapped by the sweep of the Napoleonic Empire, saw their vocation as part of a movement to bolster the German nationalist spirit. Nineteenth-century Romanticism, pitting itself against the stalwart rationalist spirit of the Enlightenment, turned to myth and the folktale as expressions of the pure and naive spirit of humanity.

The tale of “Jack and the Beanstalk” comes not from the Brothers Grimm but is instead native to the British Isles. (Included in V. Fairytale: History, Analysis,& Adaptation are the texts of these four main fairytales: Grimms’ versions of “Cinderella”, “Little Red Riding Hood”, and “Rapunzel”, and Flora Annie Steel’s version of “Jack and the Beanstalk”, chosen because it is a popular version of the “Beanstalk” story.)