Favorite Folktales from Around the World

Folktales are old. Folktales arise from an oral tradition. Folktales are good because they are old and because they arise from an oral tradition. No one retells a story that is not good. Stories get better as they are told more and more.

This is a wonderful collection of folktales from around the world. The stories are about love and old age and trickery and work and families—all the important things—and they are testaments to both the unfailing wickedness and the unfailing redemption available in the world.

I read a few stories before bed every night (some are only a page, some are a bit longer), and I enjoyed many of them. They encompassed a relatively wide range of countries (from Europe to the Middle East to East Asia, a few from the African continent, a few from the Caribbean), though it seems an oversight that there was only one (ONE!) from the entire continent of South America. You can't tell me they don't have folktales in South America!

Thanks in part to spending a lot of 2019 reading authors of color and books from non-US perspectives, I also discovered I have a new pet peeve: the stories from Africa are simply labeled as “Africa,” and occasionally had the tribe from which it originated in parenthesis. But like, Africa is made up of 50-some-odd countries (I don't want to be specific because this was originally compiled/edited in the '80s and I don't know how many countries there were at the time). We were able to get specific stories from like, Haiti and Vietnam and Scotland and other smallish countries, so I don't believe you when you say something is simply “African.” Africa is HUGE. WHERE in Africa? What country did it originate in? Because although I know some of the indigenous tribes in the United States, I don't know the tribes in Africa, and I have no frame of reference because you DIDN'T INCLUDE THE AFRICAN COUNTRY SO I COULD EVEN HAVE A SENSE OF THE GEOGRAPHY!

Anyway. Because of the way the stories were grouped by theme, I did find it interesting that people in many countries are told similar versions of some of these folktales despite being quite far apart geographically. Change a few of the details, but there are stories from all over about the devil being tricked by farmers; by men following their magical lovers only to discover that in only three days, 300 years have passed; about kings using their daughter's hand in marriage to get men to do dangerous things.

I'm glad this book exists, overall, and I bet this would be fun for parents to read to older kids.