How did Sleeping Beauty's kingdom go on while she was sleeping, and the castle with her?
Given how often the only son of one kingdom marries the only daughter of another, how is it that the kingdoms stay small enough that you can walk across them? And then you have tales like "Iron Hans" where he's made the heir of a third king to boot. I'm toying with the idea of partible inheritance in the in-between generations, when no fairy tale happens.
And while we are at it, what were the king's subjects doing when his only heir, Snow White, had vanished? The only fairy tales I've seen deal with it are "All Kinds of Fur" types where having only a daughter and the demands of subjects is an excuse for getting her away from it all, and "The Bee and the Orange Tree," where the king writes to his brother, who is also (somehow) a king, and asks for a nephew to be his heir. No, there's also "Gold Tree and Silver Tree" where the widowed king has to remarry, but that's a weird one.
One wonders if Snow White's stepmother bewitched the subjects all to silence. And then there are tales like "The Three Little Birds" when the king doesn't trouble his head about having no heir for long enough for his secret children to grow up.
