The very best fairy tale books

[BohoMama]

What do you think are the very best books of fairy tales?

I believe that telling the tales is better than reading them, so I'm not interested in those that have the prettiest pictures, but in books that I might read myself to learn the tales so as to be able to then tell them.

Thanks!

[AppleOrangePear]

There are a ton if you google waldorf and fairy tales you may come up with many ideas and what is considered age appropriate etc.. have you read the book storytelling to children?

Michele

[NoHiddenFees]

We love the coloured Fairy Books edited by Andrew Lang. Also the Ethel Phelps feminist folk and fairy tale collections: Maid of the North and Tatterhood and Other Tales. Geraldine McCaughrean has some good collections of short folktales (The Golden Hoard, Silver something, Bronze something, Crystal something). Pantheon has an excellent series of world folktales. We have Africa, Britain, Latin America, Victorian, Russian and a couple others... but I'd like them all. These are written at a fairly high level though. Neil Philip has edited some first rate collections too, including Celtic Fairy Tales and a nice edition and translation of Perrault. John Bierhorst has some great Native American collections, including Inuit and other northern tales (The Dancing Fox, I believe).

[jempd]

When I was a child I adored fairy tales and wound up collecting them so that by the time I was an adolescent I had an impressive collection. I had every one of the Andrew Lang color fairy tale books. In general, I didn't care for the Perrault, what most people think of as being fairy tales--Cinderella, Snow White, and so forth--or the very grim Grimm stories, and gravitated toward what are more accurately called folk tales. There are some excellent books out there if you look for myths and folk tales as well as "fairy tales", and they are really the same thing. For example, there are some terrific books of Welsh or Irish myths, and they amount to the same thing, what with legends and little people and so forth. Russian, Japanese, Native American . . as you can imagine there's a very long list and many of the stories are fascinating to kids and some have good role models for girls, too.