Folk Tales

Ok, so what makes a good folk tale? This is a topic I'm sort of tentative with writing about because it seems to general and abstract. So let's use some concrete examples.
Cinderella: ok I could give a general summary of this, but it would problably be more towards the summary part (like Girl Marries Prince Charming) rather than helping me get to where I would like to go.
Thing about Cinderella is that it's a classic. I can say Pretty common girl marries charming Prince and you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. Well, at least you'll get the gist of things. Some about Cinderella just sticks. The instant you hear the story you can start comparing everything to it by its classic viewpoint: "Life is happy if you're good."
But some folk tales (mostly foreign) seem much different that this. I don't have any right off the top of my head, but they seem more to be along the lines of "We are all subject to the power of the Gods/nature/whatever else and therefore we must do our best within our small limitations".
This is a more interesting viewpoint, and exists more withing the Greek way of thinking. We are threads on a tapestry...that sort of style.
So I could go into more different types of folk tales, but those are the ones that seem most obvious to me now. So what is so great about these folk tales.
I think the main thing is that they give us a zeitgeist that can say more about a certain cultures than almost anything else. Just telling a story that didn't even likely happen to a historical person in the civilization gives us the kind of idea for how they thought.