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Starvard University · Fairy Tales and Fables
Meet the stories under every other story: Aesop's talking animals, the Grimms' dark forests, Andersen's own invented tales, and Andrew Lang's shelf of colored fairy books, gathered from all over the world.
Hello, my name is Finn, and I'm going to help you understand this course.
Here it is, explained like you are 10:
A fable is a tiny story with a lesson pinned to the end, and a fairy tale is a short story with magic in the middle. People have told both kinds for thousands of years, to children by the fire and to kings in their halls. In this course you will meet Aesop's talking animals, the Grimms' dark forests, Andersen's little match girl, and Andrew Lang's shelf of colored books full of tales from everywhere on earth.
These are the oldest stories we have, and they are still the load bearing ones. The tortoise still beats the hare in every speech about patience. Stepsisters still scheme in every story about envy, and a youngest child still sets out with nothing but kindness and comes home with the kingdom. Writers who have never opened the Grimms borrow their plots anyway, because the tales went into the walls of the house everyone grows up in. This course goes back to the sources themselves, in translations you can read free, and shows you the machinery: the moral in a paragraph, the rule of three, the test, the transformation.
One thing to know before you start: these stories were not born tame. The Grimms' wolves really eat people, Andersen lets his little match girl freeze within sight of warm windows, and Aesop's morals sometimes contradict each other, because life does. Each lesson tells you plainly what is coming, including the tales in our own source volume that are missing a famous story, so you can choose what to read aloud and what to save for later. Seven short lessons, and you will never hear the words once upon a time the same way again.
The whole course in brief
What you will be able to do after this course
The seven lessons
Lesson 1
Begin with the difference, because the two kinds of story do different work. A fable is a working tool: a page long at most, usually with animals talking, built to deliver one piece of practical wisdom that you can carry away and use. A fairy tale is a journey: longer, with magic in it, about a young person who leaves home, is tested, and comes back changed. Fables teach you how the world works. Fairy tales teach you how to be brave inside it. Between them they cover most of what a child, or a grown up, needs to know.
Why have they lasted, when empires of books have turned to dust? Partly because they are built to be retold. A fable is so short that a listener can carry it whole and pass it on the same day. A fairy tale is built on a frame so strong, three brothers, a forbidden door, a promised reward, that a teller can forget every detail and still rebuild the story around the frame. For most of their lives these tales had no author and no fixed text. They lived in mouths and memories, by firesides and in nurseries, and every teller sanded them smoother.
One honest note at the start, because this course will keep making it: the old tales are not gentle. In the early versions, wolves eat grandmothers and are not sorry, stepsisters come to bad ends, and Andersen's heroines die in the snow. These stories come from a world where winter, hunger, and wolves were real, and they respect their listeners too much to lie about it. Read them as they are, choose carefully what you read to the very young, and trust that a story which has survived two thousand years of retelling has something in it that summaries cannot give you.
Lesson 2
Aesop is less a man than a tradition with a name. Tradition says he was a slave in ancient Greece, ugly, clever, and freed for his wit, who told animal stories that made powerful people laugh and think at the same time. Whether or not that man lived, the stories gathered under his name are among the oldest in the world, and the collection in this course, George Fyler Townsend's English translation of 1867, holds three hundred of them, each one a paragraph or two of story with its moral printed plainly at the end.
Take the most famous of all. A Hare mocks a Tortoise for her slow pace, and the Tortoise, laughing, challenges him to a race. The Hare dashes off, decides the race is won, and naps by the roadside. The Tortoise never stops. She passes the sleeper, reaches the goal, and is dozing comfortably herself when the Hare finally arrives. Then the moral, in Townsend's exact words: "Slow but steady wins the race." The whole machine is visible. Two animals, chosen because everyone knows their natures. One scene. One turn. One line to carry away, and the line is still quoted by people who have never heard Aesop's name.
Read a handful a day and you will meet the whole toolbox of practical wisdom: the Fox calling the grapes sour because he cannot reach them, which gave our language the phrase sour grapes; the Boy who cried wolf, and had no one left to believe him; the Ant storing food while the Grasshopper sings. Be honest with yourself about one thing, though. The morals do not all agree. One fable praises caution and the next praises daring, one rewards mercy and another mocks it. That is not a flaw. A fable is not a law, it is a tool, and a good reader keeps the whole set and reaches for the one the moment needs.
The Town Mouse and the Country Mouse shows the same small machine making a larger point. The country mouse visits his cousin in town and sits down to rich food, bread and barley and honey and dried figs, but the meal keeps being interrupted and every fine bite comes with a fright. He goes home to his plain food in peace, having decided that safety sweetens a simple supper more than danger seasons a feast. Townsend needs no fancy language for it, just the visit, the interruptions, and the choice, which is why a child can retell the whole fable after one hearing.
Lesson 3
Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were not storytellers. They were scholars, librarians and linguists in the German city of Kassel, working at a time when Napoleon had redrawn the map of Europe and German speakers were asking what made them one people. The brothers believed the answer lived in the old language and the old stories, so in 1812 they published the first volume of their Children's and Household Tales, collected, as they said, from the mouths of the people.
The honest picture is a little more bookish, and more interesting. Many of their best tellers were not peasants in cottages but educated young women of their own circle, like the Hassenpflug sisters, and one magnificent storyteller, Dorothea Viehmann, a tailor's widow who could repeat a tale word for word. Across seven editions and forty five years, Wilhelm especially kept editing: language smoothed, Christian touches added, and cruel mothers quietly changed into stepmothers, because the brothers could not bear to aim the cruelty at a mother. The tales got longer and more polished even as the title page kept claiming they were untouched folk gold.
The stories themselves need no polish to be remembered. Cinderella, in the Grimms' telling, plants a hazel branch on her mother's grave and is dressed by birds, not a fairy godmother, and her stepsisters pay prices at the wedding that modern picture books leave out. Snow White is Snowdrop here, and her enemy consults a looking glass that answers in verse: "But Snowdrop is lovelier far than thee!" Read the Grimms with a clear eye: the violence is real, because the world of the tales is real about danger, and the justice at the end is rough. Choose the gentler tales for the youngest listeners, and save the full collection for readers old enough to enjoy being frightened safely.
Rapunzel shows the same collection in a darker key. A plant stolen from an enchantress and her garden costs a couple their baby, who grows up locked in a tower with no door, visited only when she lets down her long golden hair. When the enchantress learns that a prince has climbed up, she cuts off the braids, casts Rapunzel out into a desert, and uses the hair to trap the prince himself. The tale is beautiful and severe at once, and it reminds a modern reader that the Grimms kept stories in which one small act of greed can shadow three lives for years.
Lesson 4
Hans Christian Andersen did something none of our other tellers did: he invented his tales. The son of a poor shoemaker in Odense, Denmark, tall, awkward, and painfully ambitious, he arrived in Copenhagen at fourteen with almost nothing and clawed his way up through theatres and patrons until the little books of tales he published from 1835 onward made him famous across Europe. Where the Grimms collected and Lang retold, Andersen composed, and his stories carry his own heart in a way folk tales never can.
The Ugly Duckling is his life wearing feathers. A big, clumsy bird hatches in a duck yard where nothing about him fits: he is mocked, pecked, and driven out, endures a winter of loneliness, and then, approaching the beautiful swans in terror and ready to be killed by them, sees his own reflection and understands. He was never a failed duck. He was a swan all along, and the tale lands hardest on anyone who has ever been the wrong shape for the room they grew up in. One honest note about our sources: the Andersen volume used in this course, free at Project Gutenberg, does not include The Ugly Duckling. The tale is easy to find in other free Andersen collections there, and it is worth the small detour.
The Little Match Girl is in our volume, and it is the saddest famous story in this course. It opens: "Most terribly cold it was; it snowed, and was nearly quite dark," and it is New Year's Eve. A poor girl with no shoes, who has sold no matches all day and dares not go home, shelters in a corner and lights her matches one by one to keep from freezing. In each little flame she sees a warm stove, a roast goose, a Christmas tree, and at last her dead grandmother, the only person who ever loved her. She lights the whole bundle to keep the vision from vanishing. That is Andersen: beauty and cruelty in the same paragraph, and a child's death written as a rescue. Read it aloud only when you are ready to answer hard questions from the small person beside you.
Lesson 5
Andrew Lang was a Scottish scholar, poet, and folklorist who believed the old wonder tales were being swept away by sensible Victorian schoolbooks, and in 1889 he answered with The Blue Fairy Book: a fat, beautiful volume of the best tales he could gather, retold in clear, lively English. It sold beyond everyone's hopes, and it was followed, over the next twenty years, by eleven more, each named for a color: Red, Green, Yellow, Pink, Grey, Violet, Crimson, Brown, Orange, Olive, and finally The Lilac Fairy Book in 1910. A shelf of Lang is a rainbow, and generations of children learned to read their way along it.
Honesty about the title page is part of this course, so here it is: the books say edited by Andrew Lang, and Lang chose the tales and set the tone, but a great deal of the actual translating and retelling was done by his wife, Leonora Blanche Lang, working with other women whose names the covers mostly left off. The Blue Book itself is a world tour. Inside it you will find Cinderella and Hansel and Gretel from the Grimms, Aladdin and the Forty Thieves from the Arabian Nights, Little Red Riding Hood, Beauty and the Beast, and Toads and Diamonds from France, and tales from Norway and beyond, all sitting side by side as equals.
Lang changed who fairy tales belonged to. Before him, an English child's tales came mostly from a handful of sources. After him, a child in London or Chicago grew up knowing that stories like hers were told in Persia, Norway, Japan, and West Africa too, a quiet revolution in a blue cloth binding. One honest caution: Lang smoothed his tales for Victorian children, cutting a fright here and softening an ending there, so when a Lang tale and a Grimm tale tell the same story, read both and watch what the smoothing hides. The course's next lesson will give you the tools to do exactly that.
Try the experiment the Blue Book invites on every page. Take one tale you think you know, such as Little Red Riding Hood, and read Lang's version slowly, noting where the wolf succeeds, who comes to the rescue, and how the ending lands. Then hold that telling in mind when you meet another version later, and notice what has changed. Children catch these differences at once and argue about them happily, and that argument is real literary education in a simple form: the same bones, a different telling, and a reader learning that stories are made by choices.
Lesson 6
Once you have read a few dozen tales, a pleasant thing happens: you start to see the joinery. The same beams hold up story after story, and learning to spot them does not spoil the tales. It turns you from a passenger into a carpenter, able to enjoy both the house and its frame.
The first beam is the rule of three. Three brothers set out, and the first two fail at exactly the task the third, the youngest and kindest, will pass. Three wishes are granted, three tests are set, three nights are spent in the haunted castle, a spell is spoken three times. Three is the smallest number that makes a pattern: the first try shows the task, the second shows it is hard, and the third is where the story lives. The second beam is the test, and it is nearly always a test of character disguised as a small interruption: an old woman begging bread on the road, a wounded animal, a stranger asking directions. Share, help, answer kindly, and the beggar turns out to be the hinge of the whole story. Refuse, like the proud elder brothers, and the road closes.
The third beam is transformation, the deep one. A frog becomes a prince, a beast becomes a man, a duckling becomes a swan, a servant girl becomes a queen, and woodcutter's children come home with their pockets full of jewels. In fables the beam runs the other way and is even simpler: the animal stays an animal, and its nature is the lesson, the fox stays cunning, the wolf stays hungry, and woe to the lamb who forgets it. So here is your field guide for any tale you ever meet. Count the threes. Watch for the small test on the road. Ask who is transformed, and who refuses to change. You will be able to predict endings, and, what is better, to enjoy it properly when a great teller breaks the pattern on purpose.
Lesson 7
The course ends the way the tradition began: with you telling one. A fable is the smallest story a person can build, a paragraph and a moral, and writing one teaches more about how the others work than reading fifty. Keep yours under two hundred and fifty words. Shorter is harder, and better.
Build it in four moves. First, pick an animal whose nature everyone knows, and a flaw that follows from it: a magpie who cannot leave shiny things alone, a donkey convinced he is a horse, a hen who believes her one egg a day makes her the farm's banker. The animal is the argument, so choose one that cannot help behaving the way your moral needs. Second, set one small scene, a farmyard, a road, a riverbank, and let the flaw make a decision: the magpie steals the farmer's ring and drops it in the well showing it off. Third, let the consequence arrive quickly and fairly, in one turn: no ring, no shine, and the other birds will not say where the bright things are kept anymore. Fourth, step back and write the moral in a single line that a stranger could quote: Pride hangs its treasures over deep water. If your story needs the moral explained, the story is not finished; if the moral sounds like a fortune cookie, sharpen it until it sounds like your grandmother.
Now practice the way the old tellers learned, by ear. Read your fable aloud and cut every word the listener does not need, especially your own favorite sentences. Trade fables with a friend and guess each other's morals before they are read out: if your friend guesses wrong, the story, not the friend, needs another draft. Then keep going. Aesop's tellers, the Grimms' tellers, and Lang's translators all started exactly here, with one small story told well. You now hold the whole toolkit: the moral in a paragraph, the rule of three, the test on the road, and the transformation at the end. The next tale in the tradition is yours.
Sources
This course is taught from four classic collections, and every one of them is free to read in full at Project Gutenberg. Start with three Aesop fables tonight; it takes five minutes.
Graduation
You began with a tortoise beating a hare and ended by writing a fable of your own, and in between you walked the Grimms' forests, stood in the snow with Andersen's match girl, and browsed Lang's rainbow shelf. These tales have been carried mouth to mouth for thousands of years, and now they are in your hands too. Tell one well, to someone small, sometime this week. That is how they have always survived. Congratulations.
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