The author and year of a folktale depend entirely on the specific tale in question, as folktales often have origins in oral traditions and may not have a single identifiable author or exact date of creation.

• Many folktales are ancient and anonymous, passed down orally over generations before being written down. For example, the Indian folktales in the Panchatantra are attributed to Vishnusharma and date back to between 200 BCE and 300 CE

• Some folktales were collected and published by known authors much later. For instance, Charles Perrault, a French writer in the late 1600s, authored literary versions of folk tales such as Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty

• Hans Christian Andersen, a Danish author active in the 1800s, wrote many original fairy tales that have become classics, like The Little Mermaid and The Ugly Duckling

• Folklorists like Stith Thompson (1885–1976) studied and indexed folktales but did not author them; his work focused on classification rather than creation

If you provide the title of a specific folktale, it would be possible to identify its known author (if any) and the approximate year it was written or collected. Without that, folktales generally do not have a single author or a precise year of origin due to their oral and evolving nature