The Strange Origins of the Tooth Fairy

The Tooth Fairy is a familiar figure to millions of children around the world. The mythical character is most popular in English-speaking countries, with kids knowing that if they put a lost baby tooth under their pillow at night, the elusive Tooth Fairy will sneak in and replace it with money. Although not as big of a deal as a visit from the other two major fictional gift-givers—Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny—a visit from the Tooth Fairy is still highly anticipated. 

But compared to jolly St. Nick and the egg-bearing bunny, both of whom have roots that date back hundreds of years, the Tooth Fairy is a relatively modern invention. Here’s the strange—and surprisingly rodent-filled—origin story of the winged figure. 

1. The Tooth Fairy Takes Flight
2. It All Started with a Mouse

The Tooth Fairy Takes Flight

The Tooth Fairy has been swapping milk teeth for money for generations. But it wasn’t until the 1970s that the history behind the folklore started being uncovered. In 1972, Rosemary Wells, a professor at Chicago’s Northwestern University Dental School, was asked by a student about the history of the Tooth Fairy. “I thought I’d simply go to the library, get the information and bring it back,” she explained in a 1992 interview.

But Wells couldn’t find anything about the mythological fairy and so decided to conduct her own investigation. After years of research, she became the foremost Tooth Fairy expert—her business card even identified her as the “Tooth Fairy consultant.”

While the myth of the Tooth Fairy may seem like a tale as old as time, the story’s first mention in print is surprisingly recent. In a September 1908 issue of the Chicago Daily Tribune, the Household Hints column featured a tip from reader Lillian Brown: “Many a refractory child will allow a loose tooth to be removed if he knows about the tooth fairy. If he takes his little tooth and puts it under the pillow when he goes to bed the tooth fairy will come in the night and take it away, and in its place will leave some little gift.”

Tales of the Tooth Fairy were likely being shared orally around the time Brown wrote in with her tip, but the figure doesn’t pop up again in print until 1927, in Esther Watkins Arnold’s short children’s play The Tooth Fairy. The myth then continued to spread its wings throughout the 20th century—particularly after World War II. 

Folklorist Tad Tuleja suggests three reasons for the Tooth Fairy’s rise in popularity during the mid-20th century. Firstly, people experienced greater prosperity after the war, which meant many parents could now afford to give their kids a little bit of money. It was also around this time that the traditional family set up became more child-orientated; this led to parents being more likely to soothe their children’s small anxieties (for instance, over losing a tooth). Finally, there was the popularity and influence of fairy-filled Disney films—from the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella (1950) to Tinkerbelle in Peter Pan (1953). 

There’s usually a general consensus about what mythical characters look like—for instance, Santa is typically bearded, rotund, and red-suited—but the lines are a little more blurred with the Tooth Fairy. In 1984, Wells conducted a survey and found that 74 percent of participants believed the Tooth Fairy was female, while 12 percent thought the figure was male (the remaining 8 percent thought they could be either gender). Some children don’t even picture the Tooth Fairy as a humanoid being at all: Wells documented one kid who imagined a Tooth Fairy Dragon. In today’s culture, the Tooth Fairy is most often depicted as a small female fairy, but there are also some more creative modern interpretations, such as half-hummingbird Toothiana from Rise of the Guardians (2012).

It All Started with a Mouse

Although the Tooth Fairy is typically anthropomorphic, the myth may have originated from older Continental European stories of a Tooth Mouse. To this day, in many counties, the tooth-for-money swap is said to be performed by a small rodent rather than a winged fairy. It’s thought this mouse-based myth may have been blended together with the numerous children’s tales about fairies to produce the Tooth Fairy that we know today.

In France, baby teeth are collected by La Petite Souris (The Little Mouse), who can be traced back to Madame d’Aulnoy’s 1697 fairy tale La bonne petite souris (The Little Good Mouse). The story features a fairy who can turn into a mouse and who knocks out an evil king’s teeth (but doesn’t exchange them for money). This tale was translated into English in 1890—less than two decades before the Tooth Fairy first appeared in print.

In Spain, the tooth-collecting mouse is El Ratoncito Pérez (Pérez the Little Mouse), who first appeared in Fernán Caballero’s Cuentos, oraciones, adivinanzas y refranes populares (1877). But Pérez didn’t become the Tooth Mouse until 1894, when Luis Coloma was asked to write a story for Alfonso XIII, the child King of Spain who had just lost his first milk tooth. Rather than cash, Pérez left a present fit for a king—the Order of the Golden Fleece—under the fictional monarch’s pillow. The story was first published in English in 1914, when tales of the Tooth Fairy were starting to take root.

Stories of a Tooth Mouse weren’t the first time that myths and rituals had been created around childhood tooth loss, though. In the Old Norse poem Grímnismál, it’s said that Álfheimr—the Land of the Elves—was a “tooth gift” for the god Freyr. In New Guinea and Senegal, it was tradition to bury baby teeth, while in South Korea kids would throw their pearly whites onto the roof.

But the ritual of offering teeth to a mouse is the most prevalent and enduring practice (although it’s now rivaled by the Tooth Fairy), having been documented in cultures around the world. Along with various countries in Europe, folklore about a Tooth Mouse ranges from Ukraine and South Africa to numerous Latin American countries. Children don’t always receive money; in some countries the tooth is offered in a sympathetic magic exchange, with the belief being that it’ll make their adult gnashers grow in as strongly as a rodent’s teeth.

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