European fairy tale – sources
If you wish to get an idea of the most representative fairy tale for each European nation click on the image below° you will get on tale per country, in summary form and in full:
I have put together a list of English translations for fairy tales coming from various regions of Europe.
With a bit of patience, many old folktales can be found at Archive.org. They can be read online (make sure you maximize the view for better reading).
These are scanned versions of the English translations of many collections. The are old — ranging from 1870 to 1920 — and show the mark of time: yellowed and stained paper, faded typography, notes on the marginalia, library stamps… They have prefaces that now sound a bit pretentious or naive. And quaint illustrations, showing a lot of artistic craftmanship. I would like you to read them in this repository, as a way to experiencing a bit the atmosphere and emotion children might have felt when reading these old volumes…
You may chose from any of 55 collections below:
Note: 24 Oct 2024. I have checked the links and I have added a tick sign ✅ to those that have been verified. Those that do not have the green tick might just be slow to load, so you can still try them!
BRITISH ISLES 
✅ British Fairy and Folk Tales, illustrated, coll. W. J. Glover, 1920
✅ Household tales with other traditional remains, collected in The Counties of York, Lincoln, Derby, and Nottingham, coll. Sidney Oldall Addy, 1895
✅ The peat-fire flame : folk-tales and traditions of the Highlands & Islands, coll. Alasdair Alpin MacGregor, 1937. [large PDF, National Library of Scotland]
✅ Welsh folk-lore: a collection of the folk-tales and legends of North Wales, coll. Elias Owen, 1896.
✅ Irish Fairy and Folk Tales coll. William Butler Yeats, orig. publ 1888
✅ West Irish folk-tales and romances, coll. William Larminie, 1898
✅ Gaelic folk tales, coll. Mary Grant O’Sheridan, 1910 (Chicago ed.)
✅(Celtic) Folk and Fairy Tales, coll. James McDougal, 1891
✅ (Irish) Folk Tales from Breffny, collected by Bampton Hunt, 1912
✅ In chimney corners : merry tales of Irish folk lore, Seumas MacManus, 1917.
✅ Scottish Fairy and Folk Tales, coll. sir George Douglas, year: 19??
SCANDINAVIA & THE BALTIC
✅ Christmas Fireside Stories, or, the Rule of the Yole Log collected by Asbjörnsen, 1919.
✅ (Swedish) My Lady Legend and other tales from the North, Anna Maria von Rydingsvärd, 1891
✅ Danish Folk Tales, coll. Sven Grundtvig, Evald Tang Kristensen, Ingvor Andreas Bondesen, Leopold Budde. Year: 1899.
✅ Mighty Mikko; a book of Finnish fairy tales and folk tales, coll. Parker Filmore, 1922
✅ Scandinavian legends and Folk Tales, illustrated, coll. Gwyn Jones, 1992 (original edition 1956)
✅ Tales of the Amber Sea: Fairy Tales of the peoples of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, (Sovite-era edition, 1971)_
IBERIAN PENINSULA
✅ Patrañas, or Spanish stories, legendary and traditional, coll. Rachel Harriette Busk, 1870
* Attention: not all tales in this book are what we call fairy tales (tales of magic)
✅ Portuguese Folk-tales, coll. Consiglieri Pedroso , Henriquetta Monteiro, 1882
✅ Legends and popular tales of the Basque people, coll. Mariana Monteiro, 1887.
ITALY
✅ Italian Popular Tales, coll. Thomas Frederick Crane, 1885
✅ Seven of Italo Calvino’s stories from ”Italian Tales”
BENELUX
✅ Belgian Fairy Tales, coll. William Eliot Griffis, 1919.
✅ Beasts and men. Tales from Flanders (Belgium), illustrated, coll. Jean de Boschère, 1918.
RUSSIAN EMPIRE
✅ Russian Folk-tales, coll. Alexander Afanassyev, (ed. Leonard A. Magnus), 1916
The Three Kingdoms – Russian Folk Tales, coll. Afanassyev, 1985 (orig publ.
Russian Fairy Tales collected by W. R. S. Rollston, 1873.
✅ Russian wonder tales (skazki), (with color illustrations by Bilibin) coll. Wheeler Post, 1912.
✅ The Fire Bird – Russian Fairy Tales, (Raduga Publishers), 1981
* this is not really a first-level authored collection, but rather an anonymous anthology of anthologies. It is included here for its charming folk-like illustrations.
✅ Cossack Fairy Tales, coll. Vian R. Nisbet, publ. 1894
EASTERN EUROPE
✅ Myths and folk-tales of the Russians, western Slavs, and Magyars, coll. Jeremiah Curtin, 1903 (first edition 1890)
✅ Sixty folk-tales from exclusively Slavonic sources, coll. Albert Henry Wratislaw, 1890.
✅ Ukrainian Folk Tales, 33 FT on the FairyTalez website.
✅ Moldavian Folktales, coll Grigore Botezatu, 1986
✅ Gypsy folk-tales, coll. Francis Hindes Groome, 1899
✅ The golden maiden and other folk tales and fairy stories told in Armenia, coll. A.G. Seklemian, 1898.
✅ Georgian Folk Tales, coll. Marjory Scott Wardrop,1894
CENTRAL EUROPE
✅ Jewish fairy tales and fables, ed. Aunt Naomi, N.Y. 1915
✅ Yiddish tales (Jewish), coll Helena Frank, 1912
✅ The folk-tales of the Magyars, coll. Kriza János, Erdélyi János, Pap Gyula, ed. Henry Jones 1889
✅ Czech Folk Tales coll. Josef Baudiš, 1917
✅ The disobedient kids : and other Czecho-Slovak fairy tales, richly illustrated, coll. Bozena Nemcová, 1921
✅ The shoemaker’s apron; a second book of Czechoslovak fairy tales and folk tales, coll. Parker Filmore, 1920.
GREECE & THE BALKANS
✅ Folk-lore of modern Greece : the tales of the people, coll. Edmund Martin Geldart, 1884.
✅ Serbian folk-lore : popular tales, coll. Csedomille Mijatovich, 1874.
✅ Serbian folk songs, fairy tales and proverbs, coll. Maximilian August Mügge, 1901
✅ Croatian Tales of Long Ago, by Ivana Brlić-Mažuranić, 1922
Tricks of Women and other Albanian fairy tales, 1928
GERMAN-SPEAKING WORLD
✅ Silesian Folk Tales, coll. James Lee & James Carey, 1915
✅ In the Land of Marvels: Folk-tales from Austria and Bohemia, coll. Theodor Vernaleken, 1889
WORLD
✅ European Folk and Fairy Tales, illustrated, coll. Joseph Jacobs, 1916
✅ Fairy Tales from Folk Lore, coll Herschell Williams, 1908.
Contains Tales from Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Spain, Italy…
✅ Folk Tales of All Nations, coll. F. H. Lee published 1921
* but please remember this course is ONLY about European folk tales, so forget about Asia, Africa or the Americas!
TYPE-BASED LISTS
If you plan to start from a certain type of FT, such as a Cinderella-type or a Rapunzel-type, then you may use:
Professor D.L Ashliman’s page on Mythology and Fairy Tales. (University of Pittsburg)
or
The beautiful and well-organized resource that is Sur la Lune Fairy Tales — just pick up a category on the left (such as Bluebeard of The Girl without Hands) and you will be taken to the several better known variants of that tale.
Last but not least, there is a vast website called FairyTalez, (this fancy spelling remains debatable…) which has over 4000 fairy tales, which are also grouped by regions.
OFFLINE
All of the above require good internet access. For those of you who lack this, I have prepared I have made a package of European fairy tales, which you can download from THIS LINK. You will not be taken to a web page, but instead, the ZIP file will be downloaded to your computer immediately, without asking your confirmation.
It is a BIG file, so have patience! The zip file opens with our default password (like the other packages).