Fairy Tales from Around the World: 14 National Collections Free Online
Almost everyone's idea of a fairy tale is German, filtered through one household. Grimm is magnificent and it is also a single tradition with a single set of instincts: forests, ovens, punishments that fit. Read a Japanese or a Croatian collection next to it and the genre stops looking like one thing.
The differences are structural rather than decorative. Grimm rewards cleverness and punishes appetite. Japanese tales are far more interested in gratitude and in animals who were people. Scottish and Welsh tales are frequently unresolved — the fairies take someone and that is the end, with no moral attached. Croatian tales are closer to epic than to bedtime. Each of these is a different theory of what a story is for.
Fourteen national collections are in the free library. Here they are with what each is actually like.
East Asia
- Japanese Fairy Tales — Yei Theodora Ozaki's collection, and the best single starting point on this page. Ozaki was translating for English children without flattening the tales, so the strangeness survives: a jellyfish loses his shell, a man is rewarded for untying a turtle. The recurring engine is obligation rather than cleverness.
- Momotaro; or, Little Peachling — one tale, published alone, and the most famous story in Japan. Very short, ideal for a first taste.
- Chinese Fables and Folk Stories — shorter and blunter than the Japanese material, and closer to Aesop in shape: most tales end in something you could write on a card.
The Celtic and Norse traditions
- Irish Fairy Tales — James Stephens, and the outlier here, because it is literature rather than collection. Stephens rewrote the Fionn cycle in his own prose, and it is gorgeous and quite demanding. Not a bedtime book.
- The golden spears, and other fairy tales — Edmund Leamy, and the gentler Irish option: proper short tales, properly told.
- Welsh Fairy Tales — the lake maidens, the fairy cattle, and the specific Welsh preoccupation with bargains that are broken by accident. Almost every tale turns on a condition someone forgets.
- The Scottish Fairy Book — the closest to horror of anything on this page. Scottish fairies are not small and not friendly, and several of these tales simply end badly for the human.
- The Norwegian Fairy Book — trolls, and a dry comic register that survives translation surprisingly well. The Norwegian hero is usually the youngest son and usually wins by being kind to something small.
- Swedish fairy tales — Hofberg's collection, heavier on local legend than on the wandering-hero plot, so it reads more like a gazetteer of haunted places.
The Slavic tradition
- Russian Fairy Tales from the Skazki of Polevoi — Baba Yaga, the firebird, and a scale that no Western European collection matches: Russian tales are long, repetitive in a formal way, and much more willing to be sad.
- Croatian Tales of Long Ago — Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić, and the genuine discovery on this list. These are original tales built out of Slavic mythology rather than collected ones, and they are closer to Tolkien than to Grimm in ambition. Almost nobody in the English-speaking world has read them.
The Americas and the Pacific
- Canadian Fairy Tales — Cyrus MacMillan, drawing on First Nations oral tradition. The landscape does more work here than in any European collection: tales explain why a place looks the way it does.
- American Indian Fairy Tales — Larned's retellings, mostly from Ojibwe sources, written for young children and much simplified.
- The Indian Fairy Book: From the Original Legends — the older and less softened version of much of the same material. Read this one if the Larned felt thin.
- Australian Fairy Tales — an odd, interesting book: Hume-Cook grafting the European fairy-tale form onto Australian animals and landscape, with results that are sometimes charming and sometimes visibly a graft.
If you want to think about them rather than just read them
- A Study of Fairy Tales — Laura Kready, 1916, and still one of the more sensible books on why these stories work on children and how to tell them out loud.
- Comparative Studies in Nursery Rhymes — Eckenstein doing the same comparative work one form down, on rhymes rather than tales, and finding the same borrowings across borders.
Where to start
If you have read Grimm and want the biggest jolt, read the Croatian. If you are reading to a child, start with the Japanese. If you want to be unsettled, the Scottish. And if you are collecting rather than reading, the two Canadian and Native American volumes are the ones least likely to be on anyone else's shelf.
For the more familiar end of the shelf, fairy tale books free online covers Grimm, Andersen, Lang's coloured books and the rest of the canon, and the whole fairy tales shelf is browsable in one place.