I have read examples of folktales that do reach into more "modern times" - with expressions of (usually crude) firearms, for example – but in general, the genre was cast into a romanticized past. This sometimes did include "the Emperor" – a generic reference to the Holy Roman Emperor. In Russia, one reads folktales that refer to the Czar.

It is important to understand what is being referred to by the term “European fairy tales.” Europeans generally told two types of narratives (besides jokes, riddles, and ballads, among other things). These two larger genres were legends (stories told generally to be believed) and folktales (stories told as fiction, for entertainment).

Legends were usually brief by comparison. Some were set in an ancient setting to explain the origin of things (etiological legends); others were set in a more recent past and often featured prominent people (historical legends). Most were in a contemporary setting, describing “real” events, often featuring encounters with the supernatural but always describing something extraordinary that was worth the effort of the story. Today, many of these can be grouped under the term “urban legends.”

Folktales were often long, sometimes taking several nights in the telling. They were the novels of the folk, and they were often violent and had sexual content, so children were often excused from the room before such stories were told. We think of these stories as briefer, innocent little stories because Perrault and the Brothers Grimm (and then those who followed) abridged and sanitized the stories, publishing them as “fairy tales” for children, usually the offspring of an emerging, literate, urban middle class.

The genre of the folktale was set in a vague past. The classic situation of the nineteenth-century collector working with an illiterate rural storyteller established the context for the classic published “fairy tale.” These storytellers sought to bring their audience into a former period – “Once upon a time” – and that usually meant a nebulous idea of a late medieval world.

Typically, the stories do not mention any specific ruler by name. A story describing a specific ruler would more likely be a historical legend. Instead, folktales featured generic rulers, and if the rural storyteller thought of that world as being ruled by a king – any king – then that character would appear in the story as such. In some places, there was an understanding of an emperor or in Russia a czar, so that would determine the vocabulary used.