Tales from the World's Firesides - Europe Series

Folklore, fairy tales, legends and myths from Scotland. This volume, Tales from the Land of The Brave, is the Scottish collection, part of a series covering the whole of the British Isles. These tales are drawn from some of the great collectors of Celtic and Scottish storytelling,

This is the first of two volumes, so rich are the story-mining seams taken from just the few Irish collections I have in my possession at the moment. These first stories have been taken from around one hundred and forty Irish tales, themselves taken from pretty well every tradition, including classic tales of Irish legend, fairy and folk beliefs

This is a second volume of Irish tales, so rich are the story-mining seams taken from just the few Irish collections I have in my possession at the moment. Across the two volumes we have around one hundred and forty tales taken from pretty well every tradition, including classic tales of Irish legend, fairy and folk beliefs, and tales in the ver

I’ve always drawn heavily on traditional folk and fairy tales, and in so doing have amassed a collection of many thousands of these tales from around the world. It has always been a long-standing intention to gather these stories together and to create a free library of these tales that tell the stories of places and peoples around the wor

  Tales From The Land of Hope & Glory The wonder of storytelling is in the ritual. We have been sharing our stories, adult and child, for millennia. Before the advent of pen and parchment people relied on stories being passed through the generations as both history and as caution or adventure or excitement. Stories were and

This is the second book in the Fireside series covering the English story-telling tradition. Listening to a story is like going on a journey. Only you can see the pictures in your mind. Only you can conjure the demons and the dragons and the heroes with such vivacity. As we travel through our story landscapes we are marked with wisdom and imagin

This is the first in a two volume collection of tales from Scandinavia. There is a clear and rich tradition of storytelling in the north, perhaps dictated by long winter nights and roaring fires. Whenever you read the sagas or pick up on the wandering collections of Hans Christien Andersen and Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, amongst many

And so we reach the final volume in this small collection of tales from the north. Originally I intended to complete the series with the Finnish volume, but as ever, there were just too many fabulous stories in my archive to call such an immediate halt. In this volume we have work collected by Jørgen Engebretsen Moe and Peter

his volume of tales from the north concentrates on Finland. Many of these stories have their roots in the folklore of Finnish paganism, and they have many features shared with fellow Finnic Estonian mythology and other Uralic fables. Finnish folklore also shares some similarities with neighbouring Baltic, Slavic and to a lesser extent, Norse myt

Continuing the theme of stories from northern lands, this volume concentrates on the Sagas from Viking isles, such as Iceland and The Faroe Isles. These forms are also known as family sagas, and were often told by the “skald” bards. For the most part these sagas take the form of prose narratives and are mostly based on historical eve

Folklore & Fairy Tales from the Magyars (Hungary) - Here we have a rich mine of folk and fairy tales from the Magyar tradition. I’ve taken the following extract from Wikipedia as a starting point for this introduction… “According to András Róna-Tas the locality in which the Hungarians, the Manich

This is the second in a two volume collection of tales from Scandinavia. There is a clear and rich tradition of storytelling in the north, perhaps dictated by long winter nights and roaring fires. Whenever you read the sagas or pick up on the wandering collections of Hans Christien Andersen and Peter Christen Asbjørnsen, amongst many othe

John A. Crow explains it perfectly in Spain, The Root and the Flower, University of California Press, 1985: Spain was first called Iberia, a name given to it by its Iberian inhabitants (from North Africa). The name was supposedly based on the Iberian word for river, Iber. They reached Spain around 6000 BCE. When the Greeks arrived o

Mythology was at the heart of everyday life in Ancient Greece. Greeks regarded mythology as a part of their history, using myth to explain natural phenomena, cultural variations, traditional enmities and friendships. It was a source of pride to be able to trace the descent of one's leaders from a mythological hero or a god. Few ever doubted

Italian literature arguably began after the founding of Rome in 753 BC. Latin literature was, and still is, highly influential in the world, with numerous writers, poets, philosophers, and historians, such as Pliny the Elder, Pliny the Younger, Virgil, Horace, Propertius, Ovid and Livy. Much later, following in the footsteps of Petr

In Tales from Gallia we have a collection of tales from the French & Gallic folk tradition. These tales were originally collected by Andrew Lang, Charles Perrault, Jeanne-Marie Le Prince de Beaumont, Comtesse de Sophie Ségur, Marie-Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Baroness d'Aulnoy, Katharine Pyle and Edmund Dulac, representing s

It is said that a particular feature of Romanian culture is the relationship between folklore and classical education and the arts. This is, in part, attributed to the rural character of Romanian life that has produced an exceptionally vital and creative traditional culture. Romanian folklore tales were the main literary genre until the 18th cen

The worlds of folklore and traditional storytelling are fascinating places to visit wherever the land or the people may be Tales from different regions are often shaped by geography and by cultural and historical factors that have accumulated over the course of centuries. At their heart, though, is an ever present desire to explain and understan

Tales From Germania, as with the collection of stories from France, Tales From Gallia, concentrates on those lesser known stories from the Brothers Grimm alongside other collectors such as Andrew Lang, Margaret Arndt and Logan Marshall. I also found some interesting but unattributed tales to add to the mix. Although the stories told