The Tooth Fairy and American ethnogenesis

The first reference to the Tooth Fairy is from a Chicago area newspaper (from the Old Northwest, site of intense Indian wars across a meta-ethnic frontier), after the Civil War & Reconstruction period (1908).

There was no precedent for this practice in European or other world history. Superstitions relating to children's teeth are too vague -- the Tooth Fairy is specifically a diminutive fantastical creature that visits children when they're asleep, leaving a gift for the baby tooth that the child has already left under / near their pillow.

Grown Viking real-life men paying children, while the children are awake and away from their bed, to wear their baby teeth in a good luck necklace lacks all of these elements except the transactional exchange, so that is clearly not related.

The only correlate is a single short story for children by Spanish writer Luis Coloma, "Raton Perez", which has all the elements (only the fantastical small creature is a mouse, rather than a fairy). It was first published in a collection of stories in 1902 (Nuevas Lecturas), then in standalone form, with illustrations, in 1911.

Only the standalone version has a preface explaining the supposed origin as him being commissioned by the Queen to write a story to memorialize her royal son losing a baby tooth in 1894. Just-so embellishment later on, or true story? Either way, the story came out around the turn of the century.

Coloma's story also has far more narrative action, dialog, and a richer cast of characters than the simple Tooth Fairy folklore.

If we believe that ordinary Americans at the grassroots level somehow were influenced by Coloma's story, it had to have been almost instantaneous, across a major language barrier (few Spanish speakers in America, esp. the Midwest, at that time), and other cultural barriers (we were barely influenced by Spain).

Also, it would require that we not only altered the small detail of the creature being a rat or a fairy, but stripping out all the other richness of the narrative. Coloma's is a proper fairy tale, not just a simple folkloric practice. If American parents were in the mood of telling their children legends or tales, why wouldn't they keep the narrative, at least in part? There's no narrative to the Tooth Fairy, unlike Raton Perez.

So we did not get the Tooth Fairy from Spain. Another possibility is that Coloma independently came up with all the elements of the Tooth Fairy legend, at roughly the same time, and exerted his creative will to come up with this narrative because he was commissioned by the Queen, whose son was losing a tooth at the time.

The stark similarity and close timing rules out an independent origin. If he was commissioned, that would explain his greater narrative detail -- he wasn't just passing on an old wives' tale, but creating a work for his royal patron, deserving greater aesthetic detail.

Another possibility is they share a common ancestor. But there are no other children of this hypothetical ancestor -- only the American Tooth Fairy, and Raton Perez, both born circa 1900. Since Spain and America had been culturally closed off to each other at that point -- not sharing a greater sphere of cultural influence -- then the ancestor would have to go much further back, like Indo-European or something.

But then, it would have produced children in at least some of the other Indo-European cultures that still exist. And yet, no Tooth Fairy in any of them.

By 1900, the Spanish Empire had already been in the collapse stage of its lifespan for nearly a century, whereas the American Empire was ascendant -- both politically, as well as culturally.

As for the ease of acquiring the relevant information, it would be far easier for a single erudite scholar with royal patronage in Europe to learn about American folk customs, than for entire masses of ordinary Americans in the Midwest to learn of one specific recently published story embedded within a larger collection whose title does not indicate anything about it being children's stories, fairy tales, tooth fairy legends, etc.

Therefore, it's far more likely that -- through whatever links of transmission -- the arrow went from America to Spain, not the other way around.

And so, the Tooth Fairy is, like Santa, a uniquely American cultural creation, whose influence has spread around much of the world as the American Empire eclipsed all others, aside from Russia, over the course of the 20th C.