What are your favorite Fairy Tales and Folktales?

What were some fairy tales and folktales that you enjoyed reading over the years? I have a ton of favorites, but my favorites would have to be East of the Sun West of the Moon, The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, The Firebird, Rumpelstiltskin, Little Red Riding Hood, The Little Mermaid, Jack and the Beanstalk.

My eternal favourite is and will always be Fitcher's Bird which sadly doesn't have an article yet since it's more of a variation of King Bluebeard...

Is Fitcher's Bird the story where a king cuts up his brides?

I grew up with the Italo Calvino collection. some of my favorites are "The Dragon and the Enchanted Filly", "The Turkey Hen", "The Little Girl Sold With The Pears" "Mandorlinfiore", "The Golden Ball", "The Great Narbone", "Filomina and Filo'd Oro", and "The Dragon with Seven Heads."

summaries available on request :)

I'm also a huge fan of Cinderella, and am always looking for retellings of it.

Saint George And The Dragon

Firebird because i read the book by Mercedes Lackey a lot as a kid.

I'll always have a soft spot for Paul Bunyan.

Nearly all fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen. They all made me cry though. Still, not as much as Oscar Wilde's fairy tales. Those were great, but also traumatizing.

I loved too many fairy tales to count, so for now I'll just mention King Thrushbeard and the ridiculously funny Ilok and Mihok. I even had that last one memorized as a child, so I could tell it to my relatives. They always laughed.

edited 16th Aug '14 1:18:02 PM by Zany

Oh my, I totally forgot about this. Yes, one of the things the guy does is cut up his brides, with an ax, apparently. But only if they enter the chamber where he kills them and stores the corpses. Tell me again why people believe folktales make lovely goodnight stories.

I'm guessing parents were bigger trolls back then.

"And so they burned in Hell forever after. Night, night!"

Anything from the original Grimm's Fairy Tales and Charles Puralt. Kudos to my parents for letting us read them as kids, but not being so hot on the Disney versions of them.

I'm a fan of Hans Christian Anderson's The Tinderbox.

PS. If you want to see adaptations of some of the more obscure Grimm fairy tales, may I recommend the webcomic Erstwhile.

Thanks for the tipp! I just checked it out and I think I like it (: I hope they're gonna do Fitcher's Bird :3

Erstwile is a great webcomic, I highly recommend it.

I didn't know Erstwhile had a works page.

Anne Sexton wrote a number of poems that adapted the Grimm version of some fairy tales. They're easy enough to find online; they generally have the same name as the fairy tale. She has some pretty interesting interpretations of the messages of those stories. "Rumpelstiltskin" is probably my favorite.

Sarah Beth Durst has a blog where she USED to do obscure fairy tale retellings with commentary, but she stopped that years ago. the posts are still up. She did the Tinderbox. I'll scare up a link.

aha, found it.

"The Black Bull of Norroway" sends chills up my spine.

I read one and yeah she's pretty accurate...folktale can be so weird. Now let's just see if she's done Fitcher's Bird...

edited 27th Sep '14 3:24:14 PM by Jarina