Fairy Tales, Myths, and Folklore

This folklore site contains retellings of folktales, myths, legends, fairy tales, superstitions, weatherlore, and ghost stories from all over the Americas. Learn answers to those pesky folklore questions that keep you up at night, such as: "Why is a black cat unlucky?" and "Who the heck is Paul Bunyan?" So grab a cup of coffee, pull up a comfy chair, and stay awhile.

The American Folklore Society website connects the Society to its members, and also connects folklorists to each other and to the world at large.

Here you will find everything from A-gskw to Zveda Vechanyaya, with plenty in between. The mythology section is divided to six geographical regions: Africa, Americas, Asia, Europe, Middle East, and Oceania. Each region has many clearly defined subdivisions that will ease your search. The Folklore section contains general folklore, Arthurian legends, and fascinating folktales from many lands. In addition, we feature special interest areas to enhance and refine your research. A Bestiary, legendary heroes, an image gallery, and genealogical tables of various pantheons and prominent houses. To bring our entities to life, we have created an image gallery, where you will find hundreds of images of all kinds of deities, heroes, and strange creatures of every description. The encyclopedia will serve the serious researcher, the student, and the casual reader with equal success.

Storynory has published a free audio story every week since November 2005. This is a listing of hotlinks to free audio stories read by celebrities.

The Folklore Program at the University of North Carolina emphasizes the study of creativity and aesthetic expression in everyday life and the political implications of that expression as it unfolds in contested arenas of culture. The study of folklore focuses attention on those expressive realms that communities infuse with cultural meaning and through which they give voice to the issues and concerns that they see as central to their being. These realms are often deeply grounded in tradition, yet as community self-definitions develop and change in light of shifting social, political, and economic realities, community-based artistry likewise evolves. Folklore thus moves beyond the study of the old and time-honored to explore emergent meanings and cultural forms.

The Folklore Society (FLS) is a learned society, based in London, devoted to the study of all aspects of folklore and tradition, including: ballads, folktales, fairy tales, myths, legends, traditional song and dance, folk plays, games, seasonal events, calendar customs, childlore and children's folklore, folk arts and crafts, popular belief, folk religion, material culture, vernacular language, sayings, proverbs and nursery rhymes, folk medicine, plantlore and weather lore.

This is a vast collection of folktales, myths, legends, and texts pertaining to folklore, arranged by title and theme, with a focus on northern and western Europe.

The stories collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the early 1800s serve up life as generations of central Europeans knew it—capricious and often cruel. The two brothers, patriots determined to preserve Germanic folktales, were only accidental entertainers. Once they saw how the tales bewitched young readers, the Grimms, and editors aplenty after them, started "fixing" things. Tales gradually got softer, sweeter, and primly moral.

Fairy tales are stories that range from those originating in folk lore to more modern stories defined as literary fairy tales.