Encyclopedias and General Reference Works Folktale and fairy-tale researchers should not overlook general encyclopedias as sources for basic information about authors, collectors, movements, genres, and the like. The following are reliable, easy to use, and gratis, except as noted.
The user-generated Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia contains a wealth of information and is generally reliable.
The Columbia Encyclopedia has long served as the standard for one-volume reference works, and is now available online at the following sites, each with its own search engine.
Bartleby.com.
Encyclopedia.com.
The MSN Learning and Research site is an easy-to-use interface that combines results from Microsoft's Encarta Encyclopedia with those from external web pages. Enter a word or phrase (for example folktale or fairy tale) in the "Search Learning" field for a list of articles and sites. Some articles from the Encarta Encyclopedia can be accessed without charge, while others require a paid subscription. The articles "Folktales" and "Fairy and Fairy Tale" (both gratis) are particularly useful.
The justly famous Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1911 is available online. The web version is flawed by innumerable typographical errors introduced in scanning the original text, as well as by irritating pop-up advertisements, but it still provides much information available nowhere else on the Internet.
The Dictionary of the History of Ideas (1973-1974), long out of print but now available online, is a compendium of essays about pivotal ideas in all fields. It contains much information that integrates folklore studies with other disciplines. Its online search feature enables a user to find articles anywhere in the work containing desired terms, for example folk or fairy tale.
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Research Libraries Online catalogs of large libraries are excellent sources of bibliographic information about published folktale books. However, please note that these catalogs do not provide access to the books themselves. The following electronic catalogs are well designed and provide information about immense collections:
COPAC, a union catalog combining the resources the largest university libraries in the United Kingdom and Ireland plus the British Library.
Library of Congress . Of special interest at the Library of Congress is the Folklife Sourcebook .
Libweb, Internet resources from libraries in over 115 countries.
Indiana University Libraries. One of the world's largest folklore collections.
Melvyl, the online catalog of the University of California Libraries.
Electronic Text IndexesThousands of books and shorter pieces, many of them relevant to folk and fairy-tale studies, are available gratis on the Internet as electronic texts. The most comprehensive index of such texts in English is the University of Pennsylvania's Online Books, which currently lists over 20,000 titles. It also includes links to numerous foreign-language electronic libraries.
To assist in finding a desired text among their thousands of listed titles, Online Books includes a number of search tools. Two hints for browsing:
Search for the word fairy, folk, folktale, folktales, tale, or tales in the title field. Note that the search function uses only whole words, so a search for tale will not find a title with the plural form tales.
Browse in the subject-matter section under the Library of Congress classification GR, folklore.
The Online Books data base is also available through the World eBook Library, which includes links to a large number of reference works (dictionaries, multilingual dictionaries, thesauri, encyclopedias), academic libraries worldwide, and other research tools.
The Digital Book Index combines and integrates the free books listed through Online Books with commercial titles available for a fee. The subject-matter search tool is very useful. A search under the category "folklore, myths, legends, fables" yielded over 100 titles. This site requires a sign-on procedure, but its use is without charge.
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Directories of Electronic Text Sites (All Subjects)
DMOZ directory of electronic text archives.
Google directory of electronic text archives.
Yahoo! directory of electronic literature.
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Directories of Folk and Fairy-Tale Sites
Google directory for fairy tales.
Yahoo! directory for folk and fairy tales.
DMOZ directory for myths and folktales.
DMOZ directory for fairy tales.
A Collection of Fairy-Tale Sites, compiled by Mary Lou Mitchell, School for Information Sciences, University of Tennessee.
Folklinks, links to folk and fairy-tale sites, maintained by D. L. Ashliman, University of Pittsburgh.
Snow White Links, compiled by Kay E. Vandergrift, Rutgers University. These links are to sites dealing with folklore, mythology, and fairy tales in general, with special emphasis on "Snow White," "Cinderella," and "Little Red Riding Hood."
Libraries of Electronic TextsEach of following electronic text libraries contains a substantial collection of works relating to folk and fairy tales.
Arthur's Classic Novels includes numerous traditional and literary fairy tales, mostly borrowed from other Internet sites then attractively reformatted.
The Baldwin Project, according to its mission statement, brings yesterday's classics to today's children. It currently lists nearly 2,000 stories, many of them folk and fairy tales. The site is indexed by grade level, genre (including fables, fairy tales, and legends), book title, and other categories. The texts are handsomely formatted and easy to read.
Bartleby.com is one of the pioneering electronic text sites. Its strong points include a very useful search mechanism, a large collection of integrated reference works, plus a good assortment of carefully edited classics.
Bibliomania lists more than 2,000 classic texts.
Children's Books Online (the Rosetta Project) is a large collection of illustrated children's books, mostly from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The books are reproduced as single-page, full-color image files, resulting in accurate and appealing replicas of the originals. An added attraction are the text-file translations of many of the stories into various languages.
ClassicReader.com contains books and short stories by more than 200 authors. The children's section includes numerous collections of traditional fairy tales, and the short-story section contains many literary fairy tales.
eBooks@Adelaide, sponsored by the University of Adelaide, Australia, contains more than 500 carefully formatted classic works.
The Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia is a pioneer in the editing and distribution of electronic texts in various formats. Included in the section for young readers are many folk and fairy-tale related items.
Fables and Fairy Tales. This site contains a selection of traditional fairy tales, scanned and edited by C. E. Vance from unidentified collections.
Fairy Tales, from the University of Maryland Electronic Reading Room, includes texts of numerous traditional tales, plus links to outside sites.
Folktexts, compiled and edited by D. L. Ashliman, University of Pittsburgh, offers a variety of folklore and mythology texts, arranged in groups of closely related stories.
The Hockliffe Project is centered around the Hockliffe Collection of early British children's books held by De Montfort University in Leicester and Bedford, England. The books are scanned into image files, rather than text files, yielding exact replicas of each page.
The Internet Public Library, University of Michigan.
The Kellscraft Studio specializes in illustrated books from the period 1890-1920, including many fairy-tale collections. Take special notice of two books beautifully illustrated by Blanche McManus: The True Mother Goose and Told in the Twilight.
The Literature Network presents biographies of and texts by nearly 100 authors.
Literature.org offers books by a number of authors with folk or fairy tale connections.
Page by Page Books is a collection of classics, formatted one page per file, which allows for fast loading, but limits utility in other ways. An anthology of unattributed fairy tales is included under the author identified as "Unknown."
Peace Corps Folktales contains some twenty tales from around the world collected by United States Peace Corps volunteers.
The Perseus Digital Library, sponsored by Tufts University, is an extensive and well-engineered site combining images, texts, and scholarship. The principal fields represented are Greek and Roman civilization and the English Renaissance. Of special interest to students of folktales are the fables of Phaedrus.
Project Gutenberg, begun in 1971, is the Internet's oldest producer of free electronic books, and with over 6,000 online books is among the largest. With the help of many volunteers the library is expanding at the rate of about one new book per day. Project Gutenberg's text-only and easily downloadable files are among the most carefully scanned and proof-read digital texts available.
Rick Walton's Online Library contains about 1,000 classic tales and fables, compiled by a successful author of children's books.
Sacred Text Archive. This remarkable site's name does not say it all. In addition to housing the scriptures of many religions, it contains mythology and folklore texts from around the world. Each of the following topics, selected from a list at the lower left side of the site's index page, yields a number of folklore texts: African, Americana, Australia, Buddhism, Celtic, Egyptian, England, Greek/Roman, Hinduism, Judaism, Legends/Sagas (includes the Thousand and One Nights), Native American, Pacific, and Tolkien.
Swapping Stories: Folktales from Louisiana. This site inlcludes the texts of 22 stories from the book Swapping Stories: Folktales from Louisiana by Carl Lindahl, Maida Owens, and C. Renée Harvison, plus additional information as to how the collection was made.
General Fairy-Tale Sites
Endicott Studio. An interdisciplinary organization dedicated to the creation and support of mythic art. This site includes essays, stories, and musings on folklore, modern magical fiction, and related topics. Most of the fairy-tale essays are by Terri Windling. Other authors include Heinz Insu Fenkl, Midori Snyder, Gregory Frost, and Helen Pilinovsky.
Fairy Tales, directed by William Barker, Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, and Mythology WebRing. A collection of sites linked into a ring.
Myths and Legends. Christopher B. Siren's large site emphasizing (as its title states) myths and legends, but with some folk and fairy-tale material.
Mother Goose: A Scholarly Exloration. A comprehensive, well designed site dedicated to the study of nursery rhymes and sponsored by the Eclipse Project at Rutgers University, directed by Kay E. Vandergrift.
Once upon a Time. A site dedicated to novels (mostly of the romance variety) based on fairy tales.
SurLaLune Fairy Tale Pages is an attractive, extensive, and well-organized site maintained by Heidi Anne Heiner. Included are essays, illustrations, annotated texts, links to outside sites, and a discussion bulletin board.
Individual Stories and Types
Beauty and the Beast, a wide-ranging site bringing together information about the written story plus film, television, and stage versions, compiled by Rebecca Smallwood.
Cinderella: A Bibliography. A thorough and scholarly annotated bibliography of texts, analogues, criticism, modern versions, parodies -- ranging from ancient folklore through recent popular culture, modern scholarship and pornographic films. Organized by Russell A. Peck, University of Rochester.
Cinderella. A selection of folktales of Aarne-Thompson type 510A and related stories about persecuted heroines, edited by D. L. Ashliman.
The Annotated Cinderella, from the SurLaLune Fairy Tales by Heidi Anne Heiner.
East o' the Sun and West o' the Moon. Text and annotations of the Norwegian folktale.
Noodleheads. The wisdom of fools in folktales.
Snow White. A comprehensive academic site maintained by Kate E. Vandergrift, Rutgers University. Included are variant texts, essays, and teaching aids.
good place to begin research on the use of fairy-tale topics in film and television is the Internet Movie Database.
Tom Davenport is an American filmmaker who has created a successful series of short films placing familiar Grimm fairy tales in settings from the American south.
Storytelling
Storyteller.net. A center for news, essays, texts, and contacts for storytellers.
Storytelling Resources. A bibliography of printed materials by Brian W. Sturm, University of North Carolina.
For Children, Parents, and Teachers
Andersen Fairy Tales, in English or French.
Animated Tall Tales, featuring the exploits of Paul Bunyan.
Grimm Fairy Tales, in English or French.
Myths, Folktales, and Fairy Tales, resources for teachers of grades 1-8, sponsored by Scholastic, Inc.
Internet Public Library: Story Hour, sponsored by the University of Michigan.
Wired for Books: The Kids' Corner, from Ohio University, features texts, pictures, audio files, and videos of a number of folk and literary tales appropriate for children.
Organizations and Journals
American Folklife Center. at the Library of Congress.
American Folklore Society.
Children's Literature Association.
Enzyklopädie des Märchens. The web site (in the German language) of the leading reference work dedicated to the study of folk and fairy tales.
Fabula: Zeitschrift für Erzählforschung/Journal of Folktale Studies/Revue d'Etudes sur le Conte Populaire, edited by Rolf Wilhelm Brednich and Hans-Jörg Uther.
FOAFtale News, the on-line newsletter of the The International Society for Contemporary Legend Research.
Folklore Fellows at the Kalevala Institute of the University of Turku, Finland. An important contribution of this organization is its ongoing monograph series Folklore Fellows' Communications, established in 1910.
Folklore Society (UK). Founded in 1878, this is one of the first organizations in the world devoted to the study of traditional culture.
International Society for Contemporary Legend Research. An organization dedicated to the study of contemporary legends, also known as urban legends.
Marvels & Tales, a journal of fairy-tale studies edited by Donald Haase, Wayne State University.
Modern Language Association of America. Founded in 1883, this organization promotes the study of languages and literature. Of special relevance to fairy tales at this site are the following radio discussions (links from the main page are easy to follow): Fairy Tales (1997), Walt Disney: Modern Mythmaker (1998), The Big Bad Wolf: Scary Characters in Children's Literature ( 2000), and Children's Literature That Appeals to Adults (2000).
Trickster's Way. An online journal dedicated to trickster research.
Foreign-Language Sites
Danish/Norwegian
Eventyr -- et prosjekt i Norsk nettskole. A study project, based on the collection of Asbjørnsen and Moe.
H. C. Andersen. Links to Andersen's works in Danish. This site is sponsored by the Royal Library (det Kongelige Bibliotek) of Denmark.
H. C. Andersen-Centret. A treasure trove of information from the H. C. Andersen Center in Odense, Denmark. Click the British flag for an English-language version of this site.
Mytologi. A DMOZ directory for Denmark.
Norske Folkeeventyr, the Norwegian texts of 152 tales by Asbjørnsen and Moe, sponsored by Project Runeberg.
Svend Grundtvigs Eventyr og den mundtlige Tradition. A study project based on Denmark's pioneering folktale collector Svend Grundtvig.
Dutch
Er war eens ... De geschiedenis van de sprookjes. A history of fairy tales.
Vlaamse Volksverhalenbank. A collection of Flemish folk legends.
French
A la découverte de Jean de La Fontaine. Annotated texts of La Fontaine's fables, plus much supplementary information.
Contes. A Yahoo! directory for France.
Contes de Perrault. Texts of ten fairy tales by Charles Perrault.
Contes et fables. A DMOZ directory for France.
Il était une fois... Les contes de fées. A very attractive, well engineered, and authoritative fairy-tale study, sponsored by the Bibliothèque nationale de France.
Les contes de Madame d'Aulnoy. A biography of Marie-Cathérine le Jumel de Barneville de la Motte, Comtesse d' Aulnoy, plus the texts of twelve of her tales.
German
Europäische Märchengesellschaft. The European Fairy-Tale Society.
Märchen und Sagen. A Yahoo! directory for Germany.
Märchenlexikon, edited by Kurt Derungs.
Mythen und Volksliteratur. A DMOZ directory for Germany.
Projekt Gutenberg-DE. A massive German-language site sponsored by the news magazine Der Spiegel and containing thousands of electronic texts. Folk and fairy tale collections within the Projekt Gutenberg-DE include:
Brüder Grimm.
Fabeln.
Märchen.
Sagen.
Sagen.at. A large collection of legends and folktales, mostly from Austria, edited by Wolfgang Morscher, University of Innsbruck.
Märchen Sammlung. A large collection of German-language fairy tales.
Italian
Favole e racconti. A Yahoo! directory for Italy.
Portuguese
Mitologia e Folclore. A Yahoo! directory for Brazil.
Russian
Mythology and Folklore. A DMOZ directory for Russia.
Russian Folklore.
Spanish
Mitología y folclore. A Yahoo! directory for Argentina.
Mitología y folclor. A Yahoo! directory for Mexico.
Mitología y folclor. A Yahoo! directory for Spain.
Swedish
Myter och sägner. A DMOZ directory for Sweden.
Svenska Sagor. Attractive pdf files from the fairy-tale collection of Gunnar Olof Hyltén-Cavallius and George Stephens.
Turkish
Uysal-Walker Archive of Turkish Oral Narrative, Texas Tech University. An immense collection of Turkish folklore, including many tales translated into English.