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What is a fairy tale? For examples, we immediately think of traditional stories like Cinderella, Snow White, Aladdin’s Lamp, Rumpelstiltskin, The Three Billy Goats Gruff, and many others. But what is a fairy tale? First, it is a good story, second, it often has magical or fantastical elements in it, and third, virtue is rewarded and evil punished. There can be some allegorical elements and often there is an emphasis on defeating evil through wits not brute strength. A fairy tale traditionally has a strong Biblical moral basis.
Many people over the years have collected traditional “fairy tales” from around the world. Think of the Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Anderson, Andrew Lang and his color fairy tale collections, and many more. This has also been done in other countries.
In Norway, Jorgen E. Moe and P.C. Asbjornsen, friends from childhood, collected 100 such tales, in Norwegian, and wrote them down to preserve them. They were translated into English by a man named Dasent and twelve of these are presented in East of the Sun and West of the Moon, with credit given to P.C. Asbjornsen and Jorgen E. Moe. The famous husband-wife writing and artist team, Ingi and Edgar Parin d’Aulaire, who are themselves Norwegian, took a different set of twenty-one of these 100 tales, redid some of the translations to better reflect the Norwegian language, and published them in an illustrated collection with the same title, since the two collections do share the same title story. All the tales presented in both books are delightful, some very short and some quite a bit longer. Together, they make up a fine sample of fairy tales from Norway. The introduction to the d’Aulaire book, written by the authors, is quite interesting and worth reading.
With Might and Main, compiled by Phyllis Fenner, has the subtitle, given on the title page, Stories of Skill and Wit. Her collected stories emphasize when skill and intelligence are used to defeat evil, rather than brute force. Some of these stories are in the traditional fairy tale category but some are not (e.g., a story from the Robin Hood legends). All are fun to read and have a strong moral basis. Reading fairy tales, or what could be called the traditional folk tales of a culture, is good for cultural literacy, for “baptizing” the imagination, and is also a lot of fun! Many of these tales would make for good family read-alouds.