Where to Read Fairy Tales Free Online — Grimm, Andersen and Lang's Colour Fairy Books
Almost every fairy tale you can name is in the public domain, and most of them have been for over a century. The Grimms published in 1812, Andersen from 1835, and Andrew Lang's colour Fairy Books — the Blue, the Red, the Green and nine more — came out between 1889 and 1910. All of it is free, legally, in full, and you do not need to download anything to read it.
What follows is where to start, and what the differences between the big collections actually are, because "fairy tales" covers three quite different kinds of book.
Start here: Grimm's Fairy Tales
Grimm's Fairy Tales is the collection everything else is measured against. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were not writing for children — they were philologists collecting German oral tradition, and the early editions are correspondingly harsh. Cinderella's stepsisters cut off parts of their feet. The queen in Snow White dances to death in hot iron shoes.
That harshness is the point, and it is why the tales still work. There is also Grimm's Fairy Stories, a separate softened selection made for younger readers, if you want the versions closer to the ones you remember.
Hans Christian Andersen: the ones that were written, not collected
Andersen is the other name people mean by "fairy tale", and he is doing something completely different. The Grimms wrote down stories that already existed; Andersen invented his — The Little Mermaid, The Ugly Duckling, The Emperor's New Clothes, The Little Match Girl are all his, and they are literary short stories that happen to have talking animals in them.
Three collections in the library, and the difference between them is selection, not translation quality:
- Andersen's Fairy Tales — the standard selection, and the best single starting point.
- Fairy Tales of Hans Christian Andersen — a fuller gathering, worth it once you know you like him.
- Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales, First Series and the Second Series — the Victorian two-volume arrangement.
Andersen is sadder than the Grimms and knows it. The Little Match Girl has no happy ending and was never given one.
Andrew Lang's colour Fairy Books: twelve volumes, the whole world
Lang's series is the most underrated thing in children's publishing. Between 1889 and 1910 he and his wife Leonora gathered fairy tales from everywhere — Norse, Japanese, Arabic, Native American, Russian, Scottish — and published them in twelve volumes named after colours. If you have only ever read European tales, this is the set that fixes that.
- The Blue Fairy Book — the first, and still the best. Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, Puss in Boots, and Perrault's Cinderella.
- The Pink Fairy Book — Scandinavian, Sicilian and Japanese tales, and much stranger than the Blue.
- The Yellow Fairy Book — Russian, Polish and American, including several nobody anthologises any more.
- The Violet Fairy Book — Serbian, Romanian and Portuguese; the most consistently odd of the twelve.
- The Crimson Fairy Book — largely Hungarian, and the funniest.
- The Brown Fairy Book — Australian, African and Native American, and the least European volume of the set.
- The Orange Fairy Book — Jutish, Rhodesian and Ugandan tales.
- The Lilac Fairy Book — the last, mostly Irish and Portuguese, with Lang's own farewell preface.
Lang also wrote his own fairy tale, and it is very good: Prince Prigio, a comic story about a prince cursed with being too clever, which reads like Terry Pratchett eighty years early.
National collections, if you want to go deeper
Once you have read the big three, the interesting move is sideways rather than onward — the same story shapes recur across countries with completely different furniture. English Fairy Tales and Europa's Fairy Book are both Joseph Jacobs, who was the closest thing Britain had to a Grimm. Irish Fairy Tales is James Stephens and is genuinely beautiful prose. Japanese Fairy Tales collected by Yei Theodora Ozaki is the best-known English gathering of its tradition, and Czechoslovak Fairy Tales, Canadian Fairy Tales, Korean Fairy Tales and Icelandic Fairy Tales each hold stories that never made it into the standard anthologies.
Reading them aloud
Fairy tales were spoken for centuries before anyone wrote them down, and it shows — they are the easiest classics to read aloud, because the sentences are built for a voice and the stories are short enough to finish in one sitting. A Lang volume is close to ideal for this: one tale a night, in any order, and no thread to lose if you skip a week.
All of the above open in the browser at BingeReaders, with nothing to install. There are 128 fairy tale books in the free library, plus 30 folklore collections; if you want to work through one author, the Andrew Lang and Hans Christian Andersen pages have everything of theirs in one place.