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Most Read This Week In Folk Tales

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

Most Read This Week Tagged "Folk Tales"

The Slightly Spooky Tale of Fox and Mole

The Snow Ghost and Other Tales: Classic Japanese Ghost Stories

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

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

Endlessly Ever After: Pick Your Path to Countless Fairy Tale Endings!

The Sea-Ringed World: Sacred Stories of the Americas

Paul Bunyan: The Invention of an American Legend : A TOON Graphic

Into the Forest: Tales of the Baba Yaga (A Women in Horror Anthology)

The Woman in the Woods and Other North American Stories

Treasury of Folklore, Seas and Rivers: Sirens, Selkies And Ghost Ships

Jump at the Sun: The True Life Tale of Unstoppable Storycatcher Zora Neale Hurston

Old Songs: Stories of Love and Death from Traditional Ballads

Queer Mythology: Epic Legends from Around the World

Theo Tan and the Fox Spirit (Theo Tan, #1)

Folk Tales for Fearless Girls (Inspiring Heroines)

Two Sagas of Mythical Heroes: Hervor and Heidrek, Hrólf Kraki and His Champions

Too Many Pigs and One Big Bad Wolf: A Counting Story

Russian Tales: Traditional Stories of Quests and Enchantments

Kuan Yin: The Princess Who Became the Goddess of Compassion

Blancaflor, The Hero with Secret Powers: A Folktale from Latin America (TOON Latin American Folktales)

The Little Blue Bridge (Little Ruby’s Big Ideas)

Looking for a Jumbie: A Funny Creepy Picture Book About Caribbean Monsters for Kids (Ages 4-8)

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Fiction
Fables
Ficțion
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“ Brer Bear said he was going to fish for mud-cats. Brer Wolf said he was going to fish for horneyheads. Brer Fox wanted to catch some perch for the ladies. Brer Turtle said he'd fish for minnows, and Brer Rabbit looked at Brer Turtle and said he was going to fish for suckers. ...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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