Genres > Fiction

Folk Tales

"Folktales" is a general term for different varieties of traditional narrative. ...more

Most Read This Week Tagged "Folk Tales"

Finding Albion: Myth, Folklore and the Quest for a Hidden Britain

The Slightly Spooky Tale of Fox and Mole

Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass

Queer Mythology: Epic Legends from Around the World

The Snow Ghost and Other Tales: Classic Japanese Ghost Stories

More most read this week tagged "folk tales"...

Lists

The Storyteller's Daughter by Cameron Dokey

One Thousand and One Nights Retellings

141 books — 169 voters

Ślad wody by Magdalena Zawadzka-Sołtysek

Mitologia Słowian by Aleksander Gieysztor

In The World Of Slavic Folktales // W Świecie Słowiańskich Opowieści

55 books — 11 voters

Dealing with Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede

Sir Princess Petra's Talent by Diane Mae Robinson

The Two Princesses of Bamarre by Gail Carson Levine

Girl Power Princesses

199 books — 77 voters

Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories by Algernon Blackwood

Amazon Customers Also Bought or Read: Weird Edition I

100 books — 2 voters

Small Town Quilting Blues by Charlie Hudson

Characters Waking Up Alone and Confused in Fiction

115 books — 13 voters

There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly by Simms Taback

Miss Kinders Favorite Folktales

24 books — 4 voters

Related Genres

Fiction
Fables
Ficțion
Fiçtion

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“ Brer Rabbit went into training. He bought a red jogging suit, a green sweatband, and some yellow Adidas sneakers, and he jogged ten miles every day. Then he'd come home and do a whole mess of push-ups, sit-ups, and skip rope to his records. Some folks wondered if he was training for a race or "Soul Train. ...more ”
― Julius Lester, The Tales of Uncle Remus: The Adventures of Brer Rabbit

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“ Fairy tales are about trouble, about getting into and out of it, and trouble seems to be a necessary stage on the route to becoming. All the magic and glass mountains and pearls the size of houses and princesses beautiful as the day and talking birds and part-time serpents are distractions from the core of most of the stories, the struggle to survive against adversaries, to find your place in the world, and to come into your own. Fairy tales are almost always the stories of the powerless, of yo Fairy tales are about trouble, about getting into and out of it, and trouble seems to be a necessary stage on the route to becoming. All the magic and glass mountains and pearls the size of houses and princesses beautiful as the day and talking birds and part-time serpents are distractions from the core of most of the stories, the struggle to survive against adversaries, to find your place in the world, and to come into your own. Fairy tales are almost always the stories of the powerless, of youngest sons, abandoned children, orphans, of humans transformed into birds and beasts or otherwise enchanted away from their own lives and selves. Even princesses are chattels to be disowned by fathers, punished by step-mothers, or claimed by princes, though they often assert themselves in between and are rarely as passive as the cartoon versions. Fairy tales are children's stories not in wh they were made for but in their focus on the early stages of life, when others have power over you and you have power over no one. In them, power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness -- from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sewn among the meek is harvested in crisis... In Hans Christian Andersen's retelling of the old Nordic tale that begins with a stepmother, "The Wild Swans," the banished sister can only disenchant her eleven brothers -- who are swans all day look but turn human at night -- by gathering stinging nettles barehanded from churchyard graves, making them into flax, spinning them and knitting eleven long-sleeved shirts while remaining silent the whole time. If she speaks, they'll remain birds forever. In her silence, she cannot protest the crimes she accused of and nearly burned as a witch. Hauled off to a pyre as she knits the last of the shirts, she is rescued by the swans, who fly in at the last moment. As they swoop down, she throws the nettle shirts over them so that they turn into men again, all but the youngest brother, whose shirt is missing a sleeve so that he's left with one arm and one wing, eternally a swan-man. Why shirts made of graveyard nettles by bleeding fingers and silence should disenchant men turned into birds by their step-mother is a question the story doesn't need to answer. It just needs to give us compelling images of exile, loneliness, affection, and metamorphosis -- and of a heroine who nearly dies of being unable to tell her own story. ...more ”
― Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby

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